I am going to transcribe the semblance that his brother Daniel Restrepo González wrote about Alberto, who died on March 20, a priest like him and who died in September 2017.
The text is taken from the book Doctor Francisco Restrepo Molina, published by Father Daniel in 2006. Brothers in blood, then, and also brothers in spirit, brothers in the Catholic priesthood and heirs to a family legacy of which they were always humbly proud. Their relationship with Fernando González Ochoa, the philosopher from Otraparte, also identified them and they were both outstanding scholars of his work. The bibliography of the Restrepo González brothers is irreplaceable when it comes to studying the writer from Enviga.
In the biography of the eminent doctor from Enviga who was his father, Daniel referred to his brother as follows: “Alberto de la Cruz was born on October 8, 1939. He is the sharpest, most penetrating, analytical and intelligent man I have ever met. Devourer of books, deeply illustrated. He was ordained as a priest in Manizales, on August 23, 1964, at the hands of Monsignor Arturo Duque Villegas. He was a parish priest in San Diego, Arboleda, Montebonito, Philadelphia, Palestine and María Auxiliadora in the Aranjuez neighborhood of Manizales. He was coadjutor vicar in Chinchiná. He exercised his priestly ministry in Panama, with the Sulpician fathers, where he worked with excellent results in the Council Seminary. Magnificent were his relations with the Sulpicians and with the Archbishop of Panama, Marcos McGrath. Today (2006) he is a professor at the Yarumal Seminary and at several other colleges for nuns. He has published five books, original, deep, sharp and interesting all of them: To read Fernando González, Witnesses of my people, Village roots of corruption, Latin American reality and Little school, this last selection of some of his columns of the same name that he maintained for eleven years in the newspaper EL COLOMBIANO, of Medellín. He has other unpublished, erudite and profound works. Too bad they haven’t been printed. They are: The cycles of oblivion, The other, The silence begins tomorrow, Lauds and Vespers, The account of the Otario, My sweet Monsignor, Icnocuicatl (which is “The sad songs”), verses (two volumes), Worldview I, II and III, and several others without title yet. Powerful skull, Alberto is wise and deep, great philosopher and theologian, versed in anthropology, worldview, sociology, literature and everything that can be called “knowledge”. He has always been admired and recognized by his disciples, who seek him, consult him and acclaim him”.
In 2020 Alberto published his latest book, a short but dense study entitled Modernity, transmodernity and evangelization. He had previously left his chair at the University of San Buenaventura in Medellín and later assumed for a time the chaplaincy of the Bernarda Uribe de Restrepo Shelter in Envigado, which had become vacant precisely with the death of Father Daniel. He ended his existence under the care of his niece Ana María, who had welcomed him in recent decades.
Fernando González once said referring to dying: “It will not be said: he died, but: he was received by Silence”
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