By Fr Gian Luigi Pussino
Fr Alfonso Alfano was a native of Sant’Antonio Abate. He turned 80 on 26 November last. He became a Salesian priest in 1954 and from 19 March 1964 he was Rector and Parish Priest at Soverato. He was Provincial in Naples from 1978 to 1984. He was also Delegate for the Salesian Cooperators.
When he was Provincial he was involved in the first stages of "Project Africa". He worked actively for the Salesian community in Madagascar. His early life, which coincided with the poverty and suffering of World War II, made him particularly attentive to those who were suffering from poverty of mind and heart.
His passion for poor young people grew in his early years of Salesian life. He worked at Villa Favorita in Resina, in a boarding school for war orphans.
In 1991 he started to work in a Centre for Minors at Sacro Cuore in Rome and in 2007 he went to do the same kind of work in Naples.
He lived fully the preventive system: reason – he organized school remedial courses and apprenticeships; religion – he helped young people to make sense of life and to celebrate the sacraments joyfully; loving kindness led him to listen endlessly with patient looks in times of silence, often just waiting in hope.
Going back over some books in which he recounted his experiences, it can be seen that for him there were no difficult children or children at risk, only children and young people to whom he reached out as a "beggar in tears".
He often spoke of wings in his stories, because as an educator in the style of Don Bosco he wanted the young people, without distinction on past experiences, to be able to fly as Icarus flew again.
He was a man of prayer, and it was not difficult to meet him with the Rosary in hand. Here was the source of the hope to which he devoted his first three volumes (Trilogy of Hope). Now without any doubt he is enjoying eternal happiness with so many of his boys in Paradise.
