Guido Schaffer

Life

Guido Vidal França Schäffer was born on 22 May 1974 in Volta Redonda, in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro, the eldest of three children of a doctor and a teacher active in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. The family moved to Copacabana when Guido was a boy, and he grew up between the sea, the surfboard and the parish. He studied medicine at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, qualifying in 1998, and went on to work at the Santa Casa da Misericórdia in Rio, specialising in the care of patients with HIV/AIDS.

A retreat in 1999 marked a profound conversion. He committed himself to daily Mass, the Rosary, and frequent confession, and began to volunteer with the Missionaries of Charity of Mother Teresa, treating the homeless of central Rio in the streets and at the Lar da Esperança shelter. Together with his then-fiancée and Father Jorge Luiz Coelho ('Pe. Jorjão') he founded the prayer community 'Fogo do Espírito Santo' ('Fire of the Holy Spirit') in Ipanema. Around 2003, after reading the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, he discerned a call to the priesthood; he discontinued his engagement amicably, entered the Archdiocesan Seminary of Saint Joseph in Rio in 2008 and was preparing for diaconate ordination.

Known to friends as the 'Anjo Surfista', he never gave up surfing — he saw the ocean as a place of prayer and evangelisation among the surfers of Rio's beaches. On 1 May 2009, surfing at Barra da Tijuca, he was struck on the neck by his own board, lost consciousness and drowned. He was thirty-four. His funeral at the Cathedral of Saint Sebastian drew an immense crowd; Archbishop Orani João Tempesta placed a deacon's stole in his hands and buried him as a seminarian. The diocesan phase of his cause opened on 17 January 2015 and concluded in 2018. On 20 May 2023 Pope Francis authorised the promulgation of the decree of his heroic virtues, conferring the title Venerable.