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FATHER FABIAN VARELA (39) is the Infirmarian for St. Mark Seminary.  He also serves as the chaplain to St. Monica Convent because the older monks think the nuns are pains in the ass.

Of Brazilian-Italian heritage, Paolo Giovanni Francisco Salvador Varela was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil and at five moved to Boston with his family.  His father was an importer of gemstones from Brazil.  A worldly, sophisticated family gave Paolo rich childhood experiences.  His older sister Francesca, a fashion designer, often traveled to Brazil and Italy and brought him back souvenirs of exquisite glass and ceramics.  Paolo’s father escaped fascism in Italy and moved the gem business to Boston.

A superb student who learned to speak five languages fluently, Paolo read Jung, Freud, Adler, and Carl Rogers in high school.  He got a scholarship to Brown University where he majored in psychology, taking a special interest in psychopathologies associated with sexual repression.  After graduation, while working as a Psychiatric Intern at Boston General, he was drafted for Korea.  The Army thought psychology was close enough to medicine to make him a medic.

While on his tour of duty in Korea, he met Karen Oldstead, a beautiful Army nurse, at a field hospital in the far north.  Working side by side, they fell in love and planned to get married after the war.  She was killed when the Chinese shelled the hospital where they were working together to treat wounded soldiers.  She died in his arms.

After several years of grieving and praying, Paolo entered St. Mark Monastery and was ordained in his early thirties.  Because of his medical training and his experience as a combat medic, Abbot Baruch made him the Infirmarian even before he was ordained.  Father Fab became a stabilizing force at the Abbey – one of few self-actualized members of the monastic community.

Devilishly good looking, Father Fab is of medium height and has blue eyes and longish curly Italian light brown hair.  He wears black-rimmed glasses and is one of the few monks who do not smoke.  Even tempered, he is ascetic without being neurotic.  He speaks with a slight continental accent.  Patient and kind, with a sense of humor, he is deeply religious and committed to his vocation as a monk and thus becomes a role model for seminarians aspiring to a monastic life.