Lar de Frei Luiz

Some 92,000 square metres of schools, clinics, gardens and prayer halls in Taquara, Rio de Janeiro.

Lar de Frei Luiz — the “Home of Friar Luiz” — is a Spiritist social institution in Taquara, in Rio de Janeiro’s Jacarepaguá district. On grounds of some 92,000 square metres (about 23 acres) it runs a full-time daycare and school, a home for the elderly, a free outpatient clinic and one of the best-known Spiritist centres in Brazil. Everything is free, and everything runs on donations: the house sums up its rule in a single phrase — “charity for charity’s sake.”

The friar and the physician

Luiz, the friar of the name, was a German-born Franciscan (born in Marienfeld in 1872) who lived in Brazil and died in Petrópolis in 1937, remembered for his devotion to the poor. Ten years later, on 29 June 1947 — the friar’s birthday — the physician Luiz da Rocha Lima was presiding over a mediumistic meeting of the Cenáculo Espírita Cristo Consolador, a Spiritist group in Rio. According to the institution’s own history, the spirit of Frei Luiz spoke at that meeting with a request: a philanthropic work whose heart would be an educational home for children in need.

Rocha Lima took the message as a mandate. With the tireless support of his wife, Astéria, he set about turning the request into brick, classrooms and beds — the practical shape, he believed, of the charity the friar had asked for.

Founded in 1964

The Educandário Social Lar de Frei Luiz opened its doors on 20 September 1964. Rocha Lima remained its president for the rest of his life — the house still calls him its “eternal president” — and after his death the presidency passed to companions who had shared the work from the beginning, rotating every four years. What began as a children’s home grew, decade by decade, into the small city visitors find today at Estrada da Boiúna 1367: school buildings, a clinic, workshops, gardens and the Bosque Maria de Nazareth, a wooded grove of native trees and fountains that opens to visitors on public-meeting days.

The work today

The daycare receives 323 children — from babies to almost four years old — full-time, Monday to Friday, with meals, medical and dental care and early-childhood education, in partnership with Rio’s municipal education secretariat. An after-school programme serves older children and adolescents with school reinforcement, arts, sports and socio-educational activities, and a residential home shelters elderly residents with full daily care.

The Ambulatório Social Amélia Piccolotto, the institution’s outpatient clinic, was founded in 1977. Volunteer physicians attend the surrounding community free of charge in specialties such as internal medicine, gynaecology and paediatrics, and a dispensary distributes donated medicines, on prescription, at no cost. Around these pillars stand the rest of the work: support for young pregnant women, programmes for people with special needs, food baskets, courses and a charity bazaar. The institution says that, across six decades, more than half a million people have benefited from its educational and assistance work.

The spiritual work — and the famous sessions

Lar de Frei Luiz is at the same time a working Spiritist centre: public meetings and lectures, courses on the doctrine, fraternal assistance for people in distress, and spiritual treatment — including, for those who cannot attend in person, treatment at a distance. None of it is charged for, in keeping with the Spiritist principle that mediumship is a service, never a trade.

Brazil also knows the address for another reason. For decades, participants in the Lar’s mediumistic sessions reported phenomena of materialization — sittings in which, according to the accounts, spirits became visible and tangible, and discarnate physicians were said to carry out “spiritual surgeries” on patients. Reports of the sessions made the house famous well beyond the Spiritist movement, and well-known Brazilians were among those who, by those accounts, sought its spiritual treatment over the years.

The best-known medical witness of the sessions is the oncological surgeon Paulo César Fructuoso, a professor of surgery in Rio de Janeiro who has attended the Lar since 1978 and has spent decades studying what he reports having seen there. He has written several books on the subject — among them A Face Oculta da Medicina (“The Hidden Face of Medicine”) and Medicina e Ectoplasmia — and in 2020 his story became a documentary directed by Wagner de Assis, the director of Astral City. Readers will judge such accounts for themselves; what stands on the record, beyond any account, is the work on the ground that surrounds them — the children fed and taught, the patients treated, the elderly sheltered, every day, for sixty years.

Visiting

Lar de Frei Luiz receives visitors at Estrada da Boiúna 1367, Taquara, Rio de Janeiro, and its official website, in Portuguese, is lardefreiluiz.org.br. It is one of the houses gathered on our Institutions page. If you are in the United States and looking for a Spiritist centre near you, see our Centers page.

Sources: Lar de Frei Luiz, official website (lardefreiluiz.org.br) — history, daycare and outpatient clinic pages; Paulo César Fructuoso, A Face Oculta da Medicina (Editora Frei Luiz); Jornal Ramatis, profile of Paulo César Fructuoso (May 2019); A Face Oculta da Medicina, documentary directed by Wagner de Assis (2020).