sisters who take care of him to celeWeb-masters note: Fr. David wrote the following as part of a personal reflection on his recent trip to Brazil. He shared it with me, and I thought it would be worth putting on the web. I hope you find it as interesting as I did....
Holy Saturday night Josenildo, a Brazilian Oblate priest, took me to the evening Pascal Vigil in Pozos da Panal. The previous night he had invited me and I could see that it was important to him for me to see some of his work with the people there. Pozos is part of a well off diocesan parish that is run by an older diocesan priest who has never been able to reach out to the poor. Josenildo has mass every Sunday there and also visits two other communities and gives the parish priest a helping hand on Sundays after the mass in Pozos.. He says the people are responding to the attention since he has been there.
The vigil was well done. The Easter fire was about three blocks away. The area is a rich one with the very wealthy and the very poor all mixed in together. The church is a very old one that must date back a couple hundred years, I'd guess. Anyway from the fire, the people processed with their candles in an Easter procession to the church. It sort of felt like if you can just get together and put your light together, the darkness won't win. Anyway, the liturgy was a joyful one. It felt like the Risen Christ was there with these people. There was a baptism of teenage girl, Erica. I was struck by the degree of participation of the people even the teenagers. Even the youngsters in the choir loft were well behaved and participative.
At the end of the mass Josenildo not only introduced me to the people but even asked me to say a few words in Spanish. I gulped and did so. I also managed to put in a few words in Portuguese, whether anyone understood them or not, they all clapped appreciatively.
Two days later I took a visited and spent the night at out at the orphanage (though they don't call it that) that one of our Oblates started some years ago.
Years ago, Archbishop Helder Camara had talked to. Fr. Ed Figueroa when he was the Superior of the Oblate delegation to Recife. Dom Elder was disturbed because a street person had come knocking on his door and died in his arms. He asked the Oblates to take up a ministry to assist the people who live in the streets. At that time Fr. Larry Rosebaugh was working with him in a parish. Fr. Ed told Fr .Larry of Dom Elder's request of the Oblates and asked him if he could think about it. Fr. Larry went off to pray for a few days with a Mennonite young man and came back to say that , yes, he would take up the ministry with the street poor. All he asked for was a push cart to pick up cardboard from the streets as the poor do. For years then Fr. Larry ministered, lived, ate on the streets, sleeping on the streets with no more than a cardboard "mattress." After some years of that, Fr. Larry asked Fr. Ed to speak with Dom Elder about getting some land that some of the homeless could farm since some of them had come from the country. The archdiocese had some land so Dom Elder gladly offered it as a place where some of the poor could work the land. Fr. Larry and about nine homeless men moved. Ed out to the land and began to farm it. But in a short time the local pastor organized his parishioners to protest. They were worried about who these strange people were and whether there were criminal elements among them. The archbishop stood his ground but had to give in when his monsignori or councilors opposed the use of archdiocesan land for that purpose saying that it might be valuable some day and bring good money if the archdiocese ever chose to sell it in the future. At that point Dom Elder , disappointed by the response he was getting from those who surround him, decided to buy some land on his own and give it to the poor to farm . He arranged for it to be a separate corporation with no connection to the archdiocese. ( In fact Dom Elder asked the Oblates to lend him enough money to make the first payment-which the Central Province gladly did.) Then the homeless men began to farm the land and Fr .Larry split his time between the streets of Recife and the farm. Two Benedictine sisters , Carla and Terezinha, responding to Archbishop Camara's call to religious women to put more attention to accompanying the poor , joined the farm and worked with the homeless there as well as with the poor in the nearby town of Planoalto.
Eventually Fr .Larry got hepatitis and had to return to the States. At that point Fr. Ed took up the street ministry-though he couldn't quite handle sleeping on the streets. He arranged to sleep in the Capuchins garage instead. But in 1980 the nature of the homeless had shifted radically from adults to children. It was at that point that Fr. Ed started getting involved in the present ministry of taking in abandoned children. Since so many of the children have asthma, the doctor advised Fr. Ed that the best thing for them was to live near the beach. So he managed to sell part of the farm and move down to the beach.
When Ed and I pulled up to the house about 8:30 p.m. a bunch of kids from all ages rushed out to say "Good evening. How are you?" They all flocked around me as Ed walked me around the three houses that they have bought and joined in to one lot.
There are 50 children that Fr. Ed and the two sisters care for. Each one is a story. All of them were abandoned and none of them have any known relatives. Some of the names that I remember are:
Huey, a very shy, good-looking blond-headed boy. He's seven, the youngest of the boys. By the end of my stay he was sitting in my lap and showing his dimples.
Raquel is six years old and beautiful. Everyone told me that she was all dressed waiting for me to arrive but fell asleep. The first thing she wanted to know when she woke up the next morning was whether the visitor had arrived. I was sitting on chair on the patio and she just walked up with a smile that melt Alaska, threw her arms around me and gave me a big hug. No one would have ever known that she had cigarette burns all over her head when she was first brought to the community.
Graciela is 17 and like to speak English . She is so pretty you can't help but wonder what her parents who abandoned her when she was two would think if they could see her now. The older boys and girls help out with the younger ones.
There is Eduardo, who went through the drug treatment program started by Frei Hahns, OFM and staffed by the Focolare. ( The boys follow the Benedictine rule of "ora et labora." ("pray and work"). They also discuss daily how they live the gospel that day. The boys are given money for a bus ticket home when they arrive so they can feel free to leave if they decide to.).
And there is Jose , 15 now. When Fr. Ed got him, his father had broken both his arms and legs and had smashed his nose so far in to his face that for years he never wanted to look up to be seen by anybody. Now he has gotten some plastic surgery and the worst part of his disfigurement is taken care but still has some noticeable scars on his face from the beatings. He has been going to the psychologist for counseling to get over his problems with self-esteem. Recently he and another one of the kids was at a bus stop when two military police stuck pistols in their ribs and robbed.. Ed them . One of the soldiers looking at Jose said, "You have the face of a thief." So the boy is struggling with that.
Some have far more serious struggles. There is Jose Paolo who is about ten; has cerebral palsy. He was found on a garbage heap. He can't yet talk but is beginning to. One is for sure, he can sure smile. He has learned to write his name on the computer and print it out. Then there is Amanda who looks like a four-year old but is 11. She is totally blind and cannot speak. It takes an hour to feed her. The sisters have to open her hand to get her to open her mouth. But she has a very pretty face.
There are at least two other children who need incredible amount of attention. One is a sixteen year old boy who wears a diaper and spends most of the day bent over. Another is a blind boy about 10 who barely moves.
One of the concerns I have is what will happen to the community when Ed and the sisters get too old to handle it anymore. It takes incredible amount of self-sacrifice to give your whole life for something like that. Who will replace them in the future? Who will offer themselves for this kind of work?
Later in the day, as I was riding around in the van with Ed after picking up some of the kids from school, the kids and I were trying to communicate as Ed went inside to a pharmacy to pay off some bills. The kids, about nine and ten, were asking me where I was from. I said I was from the United States. They were very interested in that. I playfully asked them where they were from. They all proudly announced that they are "Brasileros." So I said Fr. Ed was from the U.S. Little Roberto stiffened his back , perturbed, said, No he's not.! He's Brasilero too!" It gave me a real flesh and blood feel for the meaning of the Incarnation.
My day visit was topped off when Ed took me to the convent where Dom Helder
lives to concelebrate mass with him. I was very touched he is 90 now and can
barely move. But he greeted me and sat up around the table with Ed, myself and
the sisters who take care of him to cele
brate Eucharist. It was a very touching moment for me. I couldn't help but think how his greatest sufferings have been towards the end of his life, with a successor who is so unlike him and opposed to everything he worked for. The Pascal mystery in real life.
I felt privileged to see the Oblate charism at work. But more than that it felt like a blessing that the Oblates have been called to work with the poor. The Oblate missionary work is more than just trying to convert people or preach at them. It is suffering with them, being with them, and, most of all, loving them.