NEW Norcia's longest serving monk, the oldest ever and the last of a great line of missionary Spaniards, Dom Paulino Gutierrez Porras, was farewelled last Friday as the Benedictine community's wisest monk.
The humble man from humble beginnings, who became somewhat of a celebrity outside the monastery through the making of olive oil and the riding of his quad bike, died in the Little Sisters of the Poor nursing home in Glendalough on January 18, aged 99.
New Norcia Abbot John Herbert described Dom Paulino, who in his 80 years in the WA monastic community also worked as its miller, long-time baker, infirmarian and clothes mender, as having led a remarkable life, one marked by great humility.
That humility, Abbot Herbert told a packed funeral service in the Abbey Church at New Norcia, extended to acknowledgement that others in the community “may be superior in their own giftedness”.
“One sure thing that turned on that unforgettable smile on Dom Paulino's face - apart from a bumper olive harvest or the sudden death of any parrot that tried to harm any of his precious olives - was the sheer joy in the achievements of others,” he said.
He said Dom Paulino, who came to New Norcia in 1928, was content with simplicity (linked to his happy childhood growing up poor) and was the community's “model monk”.
“Because he was our model monk he was regarded with the highest esteem and was treated with much love and kindness,” he said.
That love was borne out when fellow Bendictine David Barry gave an emotional eulogy at the end of the Mass.
Fr Barry said the living link to Spain established in 1846 through the founding fathers of New Norcia weakened last year when Dom Paulino suffered a stroke.
Before then he was still making himself available to talk to Spanish-speaking visitors to the monastery and giving interviews.
Fr Barry read a letter from the Spanish Ambassador in Canberra, who described Dom Paulino as a “kind and engaging man”, and messages from the monk's family in Spain.
A chorus of pink and grey galahs broke in on the eulogy and also signalled the start of the midday funeral procession across Great Northern Highway to the gravesite.
And instead of throwing handfuls of New Norcia earth into his grave, mourners were invited to throw in bits of branches from what became Dom Paulino's olive grove.
While people remembered the last Spanish Benedictine at a post-funeral lunch - this author's Aunty Anne said she was named Anne Pauline after him, and Giorgio Bartoli recalled as a young boy carrying home hot loaves of bread from Paulino's bakery in the 1950s - his quad bike remained parked at the front of the church, a stark reminder that he was gone and that New Norcia would never be the same.