91-Year-Old ‘Fool for Christ’ Builds Massive Church in Spain

Well, what do you know? There’s more than one fool in this world. Fortunately, at least one of them will leave behind a mark of his foolishness on this earth:

There are endless people who have done great things as fools for Christ. That brings us to 91-year-old Justo Gallego Martínez of Mejorada del Campo, Spain. Although it’s still not complete, he’s done the unimaginable—built a massive church with very little help and not even a crane—as a gift to God and a witness to his faith.

Don Justo was born in 1925. The Spanish Civil War interrupted his school education. At the age of ten, he witnessed communist forces that were fighting Franco, shooting priests and ransacking the church in his village. Gallego became a Trappist monk in 1953 at the age of 27. After 8 years, he left the monastery because he had contracted tuberculosis.

Following a conversation with the Blessed Mother, Gallego recovered from his illness. He had promised God that if he recovered, he would build a shrine in honor of Our Lady of the Pillar to whom he had prayed. On October 1961, the feast day of Our Lady of the Pillar, Gallego began erecting a church dedicated to her.

“My love of Christ means I will go to the ends of the world,” Gallego said in the video. “People get tired and bored because they have no ideals. They haven’t given themselves to Christ, the creator.”

Work is financed through financial donations and recycled building material. “I just do it; I can’t exactly say how it works,” he said. “It comes from deep within me…. Look around; you can see that it works. I just express what I have in my heart.”

 

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Source: A Simple Fool

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