SMALL MIRACLES

 

My bedtime reading the last few nights has been very pleasantly occupied with a book of essays by Ann Patchett entitled These Precious Days. I was struck in one of the essays, The Worthless Servant, by the truth and wisdom contained in a quote by Robert F. Kennedy that she includes. It goes like this:

Robert F. Kennedy

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

I’ve had first-hand experience with this. When I first started working for the Buenos Aires Herald as a young idealistic writer-wannabe in my mid-twenties, believing in “the power of one” was a mere act of faith—a platitude that I repeated as a high ideal but that was, in the end, hard to seriously believe in at any practical level.

Former Buenos Aires Herald Editor Robert Cox

But as the difficult years of my earliest days in South America went on, and as I watched Editor Robert Cox take on first the right-wing death squads working undercover with the elected government of Isabel Perón and then, the ruthless power of the military regime that was to follow, I began to see that one small voice, one small newspaper, one small but courageous editor, could make a difference. He could, single-handedly, change minds. He could influence foreign policy in Europe and the United States. He could, in the end, save lives and shine a spotlight on something heinous and morally wrong. He could defend his rights and the rights of others simply by not being too afraid to raise his voice in their defense, while accepting that the risk to his own life was worth it in the larger scheme of things.

In this essay, Patchett was telling the story of an assignment she once accepted to write about a saint. At first she rejected the offer because she couldn’t see the value in writing yet another glowing tribute to some long-dead individual, canonized by the Vatican and afforded the official honor of sainthood. She told the editor making the offer that if she were asked to write about someone she considered a living saint, it might be different. But one more story about a long-accepted saint? It seemed like an overkill to her.

To her surprise, the publication acquiesced, asked her to submit the story of “her saint”, and Patchett took up the challenge. She decided to write about a Nashville priest whom she’d known since childhood. This priest, this man, was someone who had devoted his entire life to helping the troubled and destitute in any way he could.

Ann Patchett

This was a lot more than mere “thoughts and prayers.” This was about finding homes for the homeless, lifting people out of abject despair and hopelessness, helping the destitute, the forgotten, the addicted, the morally and spiritually crushed to take a first step in a series of baby steps that could lead them to “something better” even when a smashing success might never be a possibility.

Father Charlie, Patchett’s priest friend, refused to throw up his hands and consider certain social situations hopeless. He settled instead for the small miracles that could be worked by doing something even when it was next to impossible to do everything to solve the problems of the world—his world. You had to start at your own doorstep in exercising humanity. You chose to help or not to. But you couldn’t be a true Christian if you failed to love your neighbor, no matter how “undesirable” that neighbor might seem to you. That was his message.

Patchett’s Nashville priest reminded me of one I’d known in Buenos Aires, back in the late 1970s. His name was Padre Argentino. Or at least, that was his nom de guerre. He was, at the time, the subject of persecution, which began in the mid-seventies when the Triple-A, a far-right splinter of the vastly eclectic Peronist movement, in the person of former policeman José López Rega, had usurped the government of an all too accommodating President Isabel Perón, and was purging just about everybody left of Adolf Hitler from the party of Perón. They considered Padre Argentino—along with scores of other so-called “third world priests”—to be dangerous Marxists, who were seeking to incite revolt against the “Western and Christian” far-right.

Father Carlos Mujica, murdered by the Triple-A

A Triple-A (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance) thug had already murdered unabashed third world cleric Father Carlos Mujica, whose work in the slums of Buenos Aires and his philosophy regarding empowering the poor had caused him to run afoul of not only López Rega and far-right Peronism, but also of Buenos Aires Archbishop Juan Carlos Aramburu, long a champion of Catholic conservatism, to whom Mujica’s fraternal relationship with the poor and his chapel’s unfettered service to them he found dangerous, distasteful and offensive to the Church hierarchy. The Triple-A would also, shortly before I met the padre, slaughter seven priests and seminarians of the Pallottine Order while they were at prayer at Saint Patrick’s Parish in the Belgrano neighborhood on Buenos Aires’s North Side. 

For his part, Padre Argentino had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt while running a soup kitchen for the homeless in midtown Buenos Aires. He was no more a communist than I was. He was merely a priest doing the job that he felt God, not the Church, had set out for him. He identified with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and with the likes of Saint Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa of Calcutta, not with those of the upper-class, conservative, Argentine Catholic hierarchy and their friends in the military establishment. And as such, he found himself consistently threatened with death at the hands of the Triple-A and with being defrocked by the Church leadership, which was equivalent to a death warrant in the climate of the Peronist far-right’s war on leftist ideals.

After the failed assassination attempt, friends helped him escape to Bolivia where he hid out for a short time, but his mission to the poor in his native Argentina seemed far more important to him than his own safety and he slipped back across the border under the radar. He set up a new mission in an impoverished industrial suburb of Buenos Aires, where he was never known as anything but Padre Argentino. It was a neighborhood where overcrowding, incest, chronic alcoholism, poverty and ubiquitous toxic industrial waste tended to foster an inordinate number of birth defects and cases of retarded brain development in children. Padre Argentino saw that these were kids who simply fell through the cracks, who had no place to go, were rejected by the education and social welfare system, and seldom received sufficient care and guidance at home.

He took the bull by the horns, commandeered an abandoned, shot-up, half-burned house that had once been the hideout of a gang of delinquents summarily wiped out by the provincial police, fixed it up as best he could with the help of a few friends and scant cash and material donations, and created the Little School of St. Francis of Assisi. The school’s main lesson was love and caring. He fed the children and taught them whatever their distinct capacities permitted them to learn. He also became the spiritual leader of that interurban subsistence community, creating his own ad hoc parish for people disenfranchised and disdained by the official Catholic community, performing marriages, funerals, confession and any other services and rites his presence called for, ever assisted by a Down Syndrome boy called Minguito, who was his loyal superhero acolyte—and who, whenever he wasn’t occupied with ecclesiastical matters, was busy being El Zorro or Batman.

He did all of this in a climate of abject poverty in which every plate of soup, every loaf of bread, every pencil and sheet of paper, every storybook depended on his ability to effectively beg every day of his life in the very best of Franciscan traditions. His days were eighteen hours long and utterly exhausting, but he did it all without complaint, though with not infrequent fits of rage at the injustice of the system and at the complete apathy of Mother Church.

A few years back I wrote a series of pieces about how I was responsible for wrecking Padre Argentino’s mission. I can’t recall right now the titles I put on those essays, but collectively they could have been called No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. It’s a long and complicated story, but the long and the short of it is that, in the brashness of my youth at that time (I first met and wrote about the padre when I was twenty-nine), I thought I had all the answers. I could solve everything. It was easy. I’d just go to the people with the money and get them on board. Nobody better for this, I figured, than the American expatriate business community.

I took Padre Argentino’s case to the American Society of the River Plate, enthused a critical mass of the community and we set to work forming a foundation to fund the Little School of St. Francis. Thing is, nothing like that happens in an expat American community without the US Embassy finding out. And since the wife of the military attaché was one of the most enthusiastic promoters of the project, it wasn’t long before the ambassador’s wife was involved, and then the ambassador himself.

When I told Padre Argentino what I’d been up to, he looked worried. “This could backfire, m’hijo,” he said.

He was right. It wasn’t long before I got a call from the military attaché, Colonel Skip McDonald. Skip said the ambassador had wanted to get involved.

“Great!” I said.

“Well, maybe not. He’s not going to be able to get personally involved. When we ran a background check on the priest…”

“Background check?”

“Well, yeah. You know, Dan, the ambassador can’t be associated with anybody we don’t know anything about.”

“So, tell him not to get involved,” I said, starting to get irritated.

But it wasn’t that simple. The background check had been done already and it seemed that Argentine military intelligence had the padre on a list of “suspected subversives”.

I was like, well okay, so no ambassador. Who cares? But Skip was quick to make me see the light. “Before, the Argentine Army didn’t know where this guy was. Now they do. We’ve shined a light on him. If he’s your friend, you might want to give him a heads-up.”

So off went Padre Argentino to exile again and furious with me for my infernal meddling. But not without telling me that it was my responsibility to fix what I’d broken. I told him I had no idea where to begin. He told me not to worry, that God would provide. I rolled my eyes and said, “Yeah, right.”

For a while the fate of the school hung in the balance. The folks at the American Society were still willing to back the project if I would run it or would find somebody else to do it.

Almost on cue, a young Canadian woman called Martha Thompson showed up at the newspaper where I worked. She was living with her Argentine boyfriend in Buenos Aires now and was looking for something to do involving social issues. I said perhaps she could do some writing for us in that area and asked what her background was in the field of social work. She said that although she had most recently been recovering from tuberculosis, which she’d contracted while working in India, she’d gained a lot of previous experience there. What was she doing in India, I wanted to know?

“Working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta,” she said, as casually as she might have said, “Working at Burger King.”

I said, “Girl, do I have a job for you!”

So things sort of worked out in the end—but not for Padre Argentino, whose mission I ended in one fell swoop. The point being, that sometimes a willingness to help isn’t enough. You have to know how to help without ending up being a bull in a china shop.

That was the lesson that this experience taught me, and from then on, I’ve taken a much humbler approach to helping when I think I can make some difference. And I’ve learned too that those tiny ripples that Bobby Kennedy talked about do indeed have an effect. But the more thought you put into each pebble of care you cast, the more effective those tiny ripples will be.   

Juan Bautista Bairoletto

I have a neighbor in Patagonia with whom I’ve been friends since he was fourteen and I was forty-three. Back then, he was a wild kid riding a horse bareback and raising hell with his other roughneck buddies everywhere. They liked to think of themselves as modern-day Billy the Kid type characters, or, more accurately, as the new embodiment of Argentina’s legendary Juan Bautista Bairoletto, who roamed the pampas as an outlaw after he shot and killed a rural policeman in a fight over a prostitute whom both men were courting—an almost mythical character known to the rural rich as a dangerous bandit and killer, and to the poor as a Robin Hood hero.

The young adolescent had it rough, growing up without a father and having to help his mother make ends meet as she struggled to bring up his seven younger sisters and brothers. Despite being barely more than a boy, when I first met him, he was already an extraordinary horseman and was working, whenever tourism allowed, out of the riding stable of a well-known member of the Anglo-Celt community. In spite of his youth, he was leading tourists on long horse-trekking excursions along mountain trails that he already knew like his own backyard, for fees that were meager, to say the least.

As I got to know him, he admitted to being very nearly illiterate, never having had time to attend more than a few years of school, despite federal laws making grades one through six compulsory, and only on a hit and miss basis even then. The majority of his time was devoted to survival—his own and his family’s. As the eldest male, he was the man of the family at fourteen, and then as now, he commanded the respect of his siblings.

He started doing some work for me when he was seventeen. But he always came as the assistant of a Chilean boy of the same age who hailed from a farming family, was much better educated, and had accumulated considerable skills working with his far older stepbrothers who were all handymen and proficient as carpenters, brick masons, gardeners, lumberjacks and fence-builders.

The better I got to know him, the more I realized just how intelligent my young neighbor was. He wasn’t just smart. He was unimaginably bright, a careful critical thinker, a super-quick learner and a guy with a highly creative mind. What he lacked was confidence in himself, often describing himself as “an ignorant jerk like me” and fairly content (or perhaps relieved) to let others lead while he labored under their orders.

After my experience with Padre Argentino, I found myself being highly critical of my first impulses. Who the hell was I to meddle in other people’s lives, to tell them how to improve themselves, to grab them by the scruff of the neck and drag them kicking and screaming to “empowerment”, whether they liked it or not? I mean, after all, was I such a smashing success that I could now devote my efforts to giving others life-lessons? This kid already knew many times more about life and survival than I would ever be able to learn.

Still, if I knew I could make suggestions that might change his life for the better, wasn’t it wrong and selfish of me not to get involved? So one day when I saw him alone, I struck up a conversation with him. I told him that I’d watched him work. That I couldn’t understand why he was always the assistant when he had skills of his own. Fence-building, rustic construction, lawn care, land-clearing, logging, painting…he seemed to be as good or better at them than the people he worked for. But he didn’t seem very convinced that I was right.

Nevertheless, I started hiring him directly for certain jobs, both at home and in the seventy acres of natural forest for which I was the private warden. He responded to my confidence and did an excellent job at everything I assigned him. He created a team with his two younger brothers. I recommended them to the handful of other neighbors that I had at that time. Back then, there were no services of any kind in our area except electricity. People had to heat with firewood. And there were only a few of us who gathered, sawed and chopped our own. The rest bought theirs from providers elsewhere. My young friend and his team got in on the unloading and chopping but were not equipped to handle any other stages of the firewood process because they didn’t have a chainsaw, this despite the fact that they often were given firewood as part of their pay on land that they cleared for construction. But they had to saw in situ only as much as they could use, because they had to borrow their clients’ saws to cut it. And then they had to pay somebody with a truck to haul it to their homes.

I couldn’t afford to buy him a truck, but I could indeed buy him a chainsaw and did. I gave it to him unconditionally. Suddenly, he was an entrepreneur, cutting and selling firewood, pruning dead branches from trees in people’s yards, cleaning up fallen timber, cutting rough-hewn lumber from felled trees and doing just about any job that called for a chainsaw and the skill to use it. My recommendations to anybody who asked me whom they could hire for firewood, lawn care, fence-building house-painting and so on, placed their minds at ease about hiring him since most of them only knew him as a wild little bandido-wannabe who ran with the wrong crowd.

As he got more and more work, he invested in the other tools of his trade. He improved himself personally as well, taught himself to read and write, learned to drive, bought a car with a hauling trailer and then a full-sized pick-up. Soon, I no longer had to be his promoter. His work and his seriousness spoke for themselves and he and his team eventually had more work than they could handle.

I’ve watched over the years as he has grown from an underprivileged kid putting on a brave face as he struggled to help his mother make ends meet, into a skilled handyman, with a family of his own and a thriving rural services business in which he is now seconded by his eldest son, and hires others to work for him. At forty-two, he is a respected member of our growing mountain community, where every new family that comes to settle here is a likely new name on his satisfied clients’ list, since everyone who has used the services of him and his family is sure to recommend him above any outsider.

He owes nothing to anyone for this success. But I have the tacit inner satisfaction of knowing that when I saw someone I knew had the potential to overcome the insecurity into which he was born—to leave behind a path that could only have led him to delinquency, to seek to improve himself in every way imaginable and to build a life of dignity for himself and his loved ones—

I stepped out of my comfort zone and gave him the tiniest of nudges in the right direction. Little ripples that cross over each other and exact inexorable change for the better.

These are the ingredients that small miracles are made of, and observing how the ripples from one small pebble I once threw into the water had such a far-reaching trajectory, I never again doubted the wisdom of reaching out wherever I could make the tiniest of differences. I haven’t done much. But I’ve done something on one occasion after another. And doing something because you can always seems to have a multiplying effect.

The point that Ann Patchett makes in The Worthless Servant is that the person who truly benefits from every act of service we perform out of love and/or empathy for our neighbor— simply because we can—isn’t the receiver but the giver, whose life becomes so much richer every time we realize how lucky we are and share our abundance instead of clinging not only to all of our stuff, but also to the idea that we need so much more.

 

PADRE ARGENTINO — PART 3: PERSECUTION AND RESURRECTION

Please click on the links below to read Parts 1 and 2

http://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com.ar/2016/08/padreargentino-part-1the-handwriting.html

http://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com.ar/2016/08/padre-argentino-part-2-school-of-love.html

I wrote two lengthy articles about Padre Argentino’s “school of love” for the Buenos Aires Herald. The popularity of the first one took me completely by surprise. I was young and had little idea about the power of human interest stories. I liked them and liked writing them, but was convinced that “hard news” was what sold newspapers. My predilection for stories that were about the unique lives of people no one knew I considered a personal weakness, a kind of dirty little secret that I tried to mask with the cynical self-image of a hard-nosed reporter. So, I was astonished when the priest’s story brought a batch of letters to the editor with people expressing admiration for the padre’s work, or sadness for the children’s plight, or asking how they could help. I suddenly found myself acting as a go-between, putting people in contact with Padre Argentino and his project.

“School of Love Revisited” expressed gratitude for the reaction to the first story and told more about the school, its students, the neighborhood and the padre. That one even started bringing in money, checks made out to my name or to “cash”, at a time when my wife and I pretty much lived one month to the next and didn’t even own a bank account. I realized I had to get something organized quickly—especially after receiving a letter from a suspicious donor who said he wanted to get a letter of receipt from “Padre Argentino, not Dan Newland” as proof the money he had sent in (about 20 dollars if I remember correctly) had been received in full.

I had recently become a member of a US expatriate charity group in Buenos Aires called The American Society of the River Plate and decided to go talk to them. They didn’t want to get involved themselves, but pointed me toward some influential friends who did. Suddenly, Padre Argentino wasn’t completely alone. There was a small group of volunteers to receive aid when it came in, to make some improvements in the impoverished little school and to organize some community aid—food donations, used clothing, school supplies, etc. They even found an assistant for the padre, a young teacher with some special education experience who was willing to donate her time and expertise. And she, in turn, got a physical therapist friend to go to the school occasionally and work with the youngsters who were physically disabled.

It wasn’t a solution to every challenge facing Padre Argentino’s Escuelita de Asís. Not by a long shot. But it was, indeed, a start. As for myself, I was hard at work on my budding career as a journalist at the time, working pretty much round the clock both at the paper and as a free-lance stringer for US and British publications, so I was glad to be off the hook. I told the people who were helping out that I’d be glad to meet with them from time to time and publish updates as things progressed, but that I would leave the day-to-day in their capable hands.

“Done!” I thought.

But then, I got a call from an Army colonel attached to the US Embassy. He was an athletic, boyish-looking Steve McQueen sort of guy of about forty with an easy-going manner, whom I’d gotten to know and like in my dealings with him in the American Society of the River Plate and at a few embassy functions I’d been invited to. You almost never heard anyone address him as “Colonel”. Everybody called him “Skip”.

Skip said he had “something he wanted to run by me” and asked if I’d meet him for a cup of coffee. I said sure.

“What’s up, Skip?” I asked over a cup of espresso in a downtown café.

“The ambassador’s been following your Padre Argentino story.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. He was moved.”

“I’m flattered.”

“He wants to get involved.”

“Wow, cool!”

Skip smiled but held up a staying hand. “Just one thing, Dan,” he said. “If the ambassador’s getting involved, we have to as well.”

“Have to what?”

“Get involved.”

“How do you mean?” I asked suspiciously.

“We’re going to have to run a background check on the padre.”

I mulled this over a second and said, “Why?”

“Well, because we’re not talking about just anybody. He’s the US ambassador! I mean, what do you know about this priest, Dan? Like, what’s his real name? Do you even know? Padre Argentino doesn’t cut it, if you see what I mean.”

I could see the colonel’s point. Indeed, I knew precious little about Padre Argentino’s life. In fact, as Skip had surmised, I didn’t even know his real name. I had asked and he’d said, “I’ve been Padre Argentino so long my other identity is no longer part of my life. Let Padre Argentino suffice.”

He had told me a few anecdotes, like when, because of one instance of his serial disobedience, he’d been made the chaplain of a remote provincial girls’ school where he and the mother superior were at odds throughout his stay: “She’d bring a group of girls into the chapel and if I was there she’d say, ‘Come girls, come, we’re leaving. We’ll come back later. Right now there’s a smell of man in here!’ And I’d shout out from wherever I was, ‘Ask her how she knows what a man smells like, girls!’”

The parish priest at San José de Flores had

wanted to charge Padre Argentino for his

mother's funeral. "The deceased is my 

mother and I'm the priest!" he protested. 

He had also told me about what he saw as the corrupt practices of major parish priests, like one, years before, at the busy San José de Flores parish, who, when Padre Argentino’s mother passed away, had wanted to charge him for the use of the sanctuary to hold her funeral there. “Charge for what, you crook?” Padre Argentino had shouted. “I’m the officiating priest and the deceased is my mother! It’s the house of God, you cretin, not yours.”

Other than these and other stories of his younger years that the padre had told me, however, I was really at a loss to respond to Skip’s queries about anything but the Salesian father’s current mission. But in those dangerous days of bloody military rule, in which so-called “third world priests” (those who formed their missions around the poorest segments of society and were outspoken about repression and inequality) were nearly as vulnerable as armed leftwing extremists were, I didn’t want US intelligence stirring up things with the local Armed Forces’ intelligence groups, which were precisely the sources from which “dirty war” hit squads were getting their orders—especially the 601^st Intelligence Battalion under the orders of General Guillermo Suárez Mason, which was known to operate numerous clandestine detention and torture centers throughout the country.

I tried to politely dissuade the colonel. I offered to set up a meeting between Padre Argentino and him, or with the ambassador himself. But it was no use.

Finally, I said, “Look, Skip, I appreciate the embassy’s wanting to help but if this is the only way to do it, thanks but no thanks.”

“Yeah, Dan, but the ambassador’s mind’s made up.”

“So tell him to just help and not poke the beehive! Let him do it off the record.”

Skip grinned and said, “I’m afraid ambassadors don’t do that sort of thing off the record, my friend.”

“Then tell him to forget it! Tell him to just butt out!”

With the military government in charge it was a dangerous

time for so-called "third world priests".

“Not your call, I’m afraid, Dan,” he said. “I’m just letting you know. The wheels are already turning.”

And indeed they were. Probably long before the colonel ever invited me to meet him so he could “run it by me.”

Before I ever had a chance to get hold of Padre Argentino to warn him of what was going on, he called me.

“We need to talk,” he said. “But not over the phone. Meet me tomorrow morning at the little coffee place at the far end of Plaza Flores, at Artigas and Yerbal.”

The place was tiny, owned by an old friend of the padre’s. It was basically a counter and four tables with a back-bar bearing, perhaps, a dozen bottles and an espresso machine. We ordered coffee and sat at the table nearest the wall, away from the door and windows.

Right away, Padre Argentino launched into one of his anecdotes.

“When Perón came back from exile in seventy-three,” he said, “here in the capital there was a huge influx of people from the interior, mostly negritos of very humble means, desperate people who for a couple of decades had been hearing about the golden days of Peronism and came to Buenos Aires like pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem. When they got here, what they found was more poverty and more inequality and they didn’t have the means to return to their provinces. It was like they were shipwrecked in the capital.

“Seeing so many of them washed up here with nothing and no one to help them, I managed to find a place in midtown, Barrio Once, to start a soup kitchen. I got some people to put up the food and went doorbelling for the rest, and pretty soon we were serving a couple of meals a day to people who didn’t have enough money to eat. And I put in a little chapel there as well to tend to their spiritual needs.” He paused to drink his demitasse of espresso. I asked if he wanted another one. He considered it, nodded, and I motioned to the owner to make us another round.

Paramilitary hits squads: Standard operating procedure

under the last populist government of General Juan Domingo 

Perón and the military regime that replaced it.  

“One day,” he went on, “just after I’d celebrated Mass and was getting ready to go oversee the preparation of lunch, the door to the sanctuary burst open and a group of armed men came in. I found myself standing face to face with the one leading them. When he saw me, his face suddenly changed and softened. Without turning, he told the others to wait outside and to close the door behind them. He was still holding a pistol trained on me and I knew he and his men had been sent there to kill me. When they came in, I hadn’t said anything but ‘Señores, how can I help you?’ before I crossed myself and started making my peace with God.

“But as I stood there facing that young man, his face crumpled up and he fell to his knees weeping. He stuck his pistol into his waistband, took my hand in both of his and kissed it. Then he stood up, took me by the shoulders and said, ‘Padre, God forgive me, I came here to kill you. You must leave right now and not come back. If you stay, you won’t live a week.’

“I asked him why he was doing this. He said he knew I wouldn’t remember him, but that when he was a boy, living in the slums, he’d been all alone with just his mother. He said that she had fallen deathly ill and that they hadn’t been able to find her the help she needed. He said that I had intervened, used my contacts to get her proper medical attention and had visited her while she was in the hospital. He had never been able to thank me, he said, and this was his chance to square it with me. I’d saved his mother’s life. Now he was saving mine.

“I left immediately, went to Bolivia, and I only just came back a couple of years ago, when I started the escuelita. I was warned not to, but I missed Argentina, mi gente.”

The owner brought us the two coffees and left. There were tears in the padre’s eyes as he picked up his cup and sipped, and when he swallowed, it went down hard.

“That’s quite a story, Padre,” I said.

“It doesn’t end there,” he said. “Son,” he went on, “I really appreciate everything you’ve done for us...”

“I’ve done nothing, really, Padre...”

He held up a hand to silence me, and continued, “But all of the publicity and the people you’ve gotten involved...”

I shook my head sadly. “I know, I know, Padre, I thought I’d have time to warn you about the embassy...”

“Your intentions were noble, m’ijo,” he said kindly, “but now I’m in trouble again. This friend, the one I told you about who’s in military intelligence, warned me that a new investigation has been opened because of the embassy probe. I need to leave right now...today...as soon as we’re done here.”

I felt a horrific sense of guilt and my voice cracked when I asked him, “Where will you go? What will you do?”

He shrugged. “I’ll be fine, m’ijo. I still have some friends, a bishop up north who’s said he’d hide me as long as I promise to respect and obey him.

“And what about the school?” I asked.

He sat up straight and stared into my eyes with steely conviction. “That’s where you come in, son,” he said. “I’m placing the escuelita, my mission, in your hands.”

Suddenly, it was as if I’d just been hit in the face with a bucket of ice-water. “Whoa! Wait a second, Padre! Back up!” I said. “I’m not prepared for anything like this. I’m not a teacher...”

“You’ll be fine...”

“Not a Catholic...”

“It’ll all work out...”

“Not even sure what I am...a hopeful agnostic at best...”

“Everything will be fine, m’ijo. God will guide you...”

“No! I’m sorry, but, no! I can’t...No way!”

“He’ll show you the path...” Now the padre was standing up and buttoning his coat.

“No, Padre, sit back down here! You can’t leave...”

“Time to go, my son. I’m counting on you...and so are the children. Their mothers already know you’ll be taking charge.”

“Padre! Padre, come back here!” I called to the back of his head as he was leaving. At the door he stopped, turned, made the sign of the cross in my direction, then wheeled about and was out the door.

It was the last time I would see him for the next several years.

Now, my world was thrown into an uproar. I had trouble working. I couldn’t sleep. I was irritable and distracted. Why on earth had I ever gotten involved with this damnable priest and his school?

But now knowing about it, having written about it, having made it part of me, how could I just abandon it and the kids. Ignorance was bliss. Knowing came with accountability.

Then again, what did it have to do with me? Why should I feel duty-bound? Well, fool, I told myself, because it’s all your fault that the padre had to once again go into exile. If I’d kept my big nose out of his business, he could have kept on running his school forever and no one would have been the wiser, because, in the end, the powers that be always care more about crushing any rebellious unifying force than about projects that promote the greater good.

No question about it. I was stuck. I decided, however, to give myself a week or so to think about it, to study my next move. But the week hadn’t passed before a delegation of mothers from the Escuelita de Asís showed up at the newspaper to talk to me. The padre had told them that I was in charge from now on. What, they wanted to know, was I prepared to do?

First, I called the little group of volunteers who had been helping out and made them aware of the situation. The said that, of course, they would pitch in and do everything that they could, but that, without the padre, it wasn’t going to be easy. He was the heart and soul of the school and still the one who raised the most aid with his persistent cold-calling. Couldn’t I take a more leading role?

I suggested we try to find some permanent benefactors to pay the teacher an actual salary so she could take over. They suggested she was a great teacher but not the organizational type. They needed somebody who could really take charge and who knew what he or she was doing.

I started calling everybody I knew in the social action field. They were all sympathetic and had liked my articles but said, to a man and woman, that they already had too much on their plates. Growing more and more anxious, I cursed the priest under my breath. God would show me the way. God would be my guide. God would provide. “Yeah right,” I thought. “My ass He will!” I suddenly realized that I was at a complete loss, out of ideas, out of my depth, and truly unable to take it on myself.

Then it happened. In fact, it happened the day after I’d almost decided there was nothing more I could do. Sitting at my desk in the editorial department at the newspaper I got a call from Reception. A young woman was there to see me.

“I’m pretty busy right now,” I said. “Did she say what she wants?”

“She said a mutual friend said she should come see you,” the receptionist said. She told me the friend’s name and I knew I couldn’t say no.

The young woman in question was tall and slim with paper-white skin and shiny black hair. She said her name was Martha. She was Canadian.

“And what are you doing in Buenos Aires,” I asked.

“My boyfriend’s from here. We decided to come live here for a while. He got a good job offer. I’m kind of at loose ends right now. I’m looking for something to do.”

“Well,” I said, “we don’t have any staff openings right now, but you could do some free-lance work for us. I’m afraid it doesn’t pay much though.”

“Like I say,” she answered, “for the moment, we’re okay with my boyfriend’s job. Maybe I could do some work for you on social issues. I have a lot of experience in that field.”

“In Canada?”

“No. India.”

“Really?”

“Yes, that’s where I met my boyfriend. We were doing volunteer work there. But I came down with TB and we had to leave. I’m all better now and want to jump back into something. I’m hoping to do some kind of similar social work here.”

Suddenly, I could feel myself getting excited.

“Really? What exactly were you doing there?”

“We were working in Calcutta, with Mother Teresa, in the organization of her children’s missions.”

“Lady,” I said, “have I ever got a job for you!”     

PADRE ARGENTINO — PART 2: SCHOOL OF LOVE

To read Part 1, please click on the following link 

http://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com.ar/2016/08/padreargentino-part-1the-handwriting.html 

Padre Argentino’s “mission” was located in a neighborhood that, during the years of the military regime (1976-1983), when he introduced me to it, was marginalized by the government and the mainstream Roman Catholic Church alike. On my first visit, in 1979, I followed the padre’s instructions, took the train from Constitución station in downtown Buenos Aires to the southern industrial suburb of Berazategui and then hoofed it from there.

The place wasn’t a provincial shantytown or villa miseria, as they were known, where structures were mostly cheap lumber, tin and cardboard. Most of the houses here were actually brick and mortar, if very humble. It was one of the laboring-class neighborhoods that had sprung up around the glassworks that formed the area’s main industry. But now it seemed to reflect a lagging job market, overpopulation and far less than booming industrial activity.

The streets were dirt with a big ditch full of run-off water along one side. It had been raining over the last few days and the lanes were way too swampy for my city shoe-leather. I wasn’t exactly sure where I was going and asked a few people I saw along the way if they knew where Padre Argentino’s Escuelita de Asís was, but nobody did and they looked at me like I was a Martian. Eventually, I saw several provincial cops dressed in knee-high boots and riot helmets, patrolling the area, cavalry troop-style, on horseback with pistols and shotguns and asked them. Some of them looked at me like, “Search me!” Finally, however, one of them directed me to a narrow muddy road a couple of blocks over, where I saw nothing that resembled a school. But then all of the sudden, up ahead, I could make out the padre standing by the rickety gate of a tiny, rundown house, his arm raised in greeting.

“Welcome, m’hijo!” he said as I approached. “Did you get lost? Come, children! Come! Greet señor Dan!”

And suddenly, I was surrounded by a bevy of kids of all ages and sizes who grabbed me and hugged me and took me by the hands and arms and led me into the yard surrounding the ramshackle building. The padre started introducing me to his charges and to a few of their mothers who were also on hand for the occasion. Many of them were kids with Down Syndrome, others were physically challenged with forms of palsy or deformities. A couple were in wheelchairs. One was blind and deaf...a veritable sampler of maladies that can befall children, all under one tiny roof. 

“This is the Escuelita de Asís,” Padre Argentino said, ushering me inside. “I know it doesn’t look like much,” he said, “but it’s all these kids have and we fill it with love every day.”

I asked the padre if the building belonged to them. “In a manner of speaking,” he said. “When I first started ministering to this community, I didn’t have a building. This was an abandoned house that had been occupied by a band of criminals—truck hijackers and drug runners from what I understand. Well, some of the neighbors denounced them and there was a shootout with the Army and police. You can still see some of the pock marks in the masonry although we mostly filled them in and painted them over. But anyway, the bad guys were killed (he crossed himself and kissed his thumbnail) and the building was sitting here empty, because everybody was afraid to occupy it for fear other hoodlums would come. Finally, I asked the father of one of the children who is a policeman if he could find out if there was an owner and if maybe we might use the building. He eventually told me nobody had been able to find out who the owner was and that his chief had said we should just move in until somebody claimed the place. So here we are...and so far, so good.”

It was, indeed, just a building—an almost empty shell, two small rooms with a few sticks of furniture—a couple of tables and a few rickety chairs—that Padre Argentino had been able to gather through his “doorbelling” activities. “School supplies” were whatever the parents or ad hoc guardians of the kids could get together. At the far end of one of the two rooms was a small, makeshift altar that the priest had set up and when school was out, that room often doubled as a sanctuary. The main purpose of the school, which had no official or private recognition as such, was simply to make the lives of these children better than they had been before, to give them a place to interact, to get together with their peers, to help them reach whatever level they could of their limited learning potential, but mostly to have a place in their world where they could feel a certain amount of security and mutual love and joy. That’s why, although he had named it after the birthplace of his order’s patron, Saint Francis of Assisi (San Francisco de Asís), Padre Argentino more often referred to his mission as “the school of love”.

There were several mothers who were highly active in helping the padre make the school the place of solace that it was for the marginalized children who went there daily. Others were simply happy to have somewhere to send their mentally and physically challenged children during the day so that they themselves could have time to try and eke out a living. Still others were indifferent to the priest’s whisking their disabled children off of the street and into his mission during the daytime hours, where they were always sure to be given some free food and to be well cared for.

“I came here to tend to the neighborhood’s spiritual needs,” the padre told me. “But when I saw how many mentally and physically challenged children there were here, I knew I had to do something. I don’t know if you know it...you are Catholic, my son, right?”

“Um, no, Padre. I’m more what you might call, um, no-preference...but I was brought up Methodist.”

“Oh, I’m afraid I don’t know much about ‘sects’...but Christian, though, right?”

“My sect kind of likes to think so,” I laughed.

“Well, no matter. What I was going to say is, my order, the Salesians, are youth ministers, and wherever we go we are charged with the task of reaching out to children. So when I first came, it was because there was no priest who would come out here to take care of the community’s spiritual needs, but then I realized that another mission awaited me here as well.”

“So you were assigned here for one thing and ended up doing another.”

“No, no one assigned me. Because no one in the Church hierarchy cares what happens in the marginal neighborhoods and considers anybody who comes to them to raise people up out of the poverty and ignorance they’re condemned to is a ‘third world priest’. You know about Padre Mujica and Bishop Angelelli, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “And the Pallottine priests...”

Indeed I did know.

Father Carlos Mujica had been known as “the shantytown priest” and as “the

Padre Mujica

chaplain of the poor”, a high-profile cleric who had defied Church and government authorities to not only tend the spiritual needs of the poor but also to encourage them to lift themselves out of poverty and to forge a place of dignity for themselves in Argentine society. His mission reached its height during the dangerous times of tit for tat violence between the far right and the far left leading up to the 1976 military coup. He died in a hail of gunfire in front of his parish on May 4, 1974, the same month and year that I began working as a reporter and sub-editor for the Buenos Aires Herald. Padre Mujica was shot five times but was still alive when he was rushed to a hospital. His last words, spoken to a nurse, were, "Now, more than ever, we must be with the people." He was murdered by an agent of the so-called Triple-A (the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance), a sinister far-right paramilitary group that was formed and operated under the final administration of General Juan Domingo Perón and his wife and successor, Isabel Perón. The Triple-A would later be absorbed into the plainclothes, deep cover hit squads that carried out the dirty work of the military regime from 1976 on.

Bishop Angelelli

Angelelli was the Roman Catholic bishop of La Rioja Province. On August 4, 1976, less than six months after the military takeover, his van flipped over multiple times on a lonesome rural highway. The bishop was found dead lying beside the road, the body appearing to have been moved to or carefully positioned in the spot where it was found. Though homicide made to look like an accident was never proven, it became a foregone conclusion, since the bishop was on his way back from Chamical, a town where the bodies of two so-called “third world priests” had been found tortured and murdered a couple of weeks before. Angelelli had celebrated Holy Mass at their funeral and was understood to have been transporting a suitcase full of documentation he had gathered in investigating the deaths of the two priests.

The Pallottine priests—actually three priests and two seminarians—were the victims of what would come to be known as the Saint Patrick’s Massacre. In the wee hours of July 4, 1976, just a month before the assassination of Bishop Angelelli, a group of thugs in plain clothes and armed with long guns entered the dependencies of the Iglesia de San Patricio in Buenos Aires by force, lined up the five clerics living there, and murdered them execution style, so that they fell face down side by side in a pool of blood. In the spot where the murders took place, the paramilitary assassins left legends indicating that the churchmen had been “third world priests” and that they were “leftists killed for indoctrinating virgin minds.” They also left a poster ripped from the wall in the priests’ living quarters on the body of one of the victims. It was a large print of a drawing by renowned Argentine cartoonist “Quino” that depicted his most iconic character, Mafalda, standing next to a uniformed cop. She’s pointing at his nightstick and asks, “Is that the club for denting ideologies?”

A forensic photo of the Pallottine priests shot execution style

and left lying face down in St. Patrick's Church

“So how did you end up here?” I asked the padre.

“God called me, hijo, not the Church,” he answered. “Let’s just say I have a problem with my vow of obedience...a recurrent problem.”

“How so?”

“Let’s just leave it at that, m’hijo. Like I said, I don’t want anything you write to be about me. Just about my mission, my school of love.”

As if to distract me from his own story, he took me around to chat with some of his star students.

There was Minguito, the first student to join the Escuelita, a Down Syndrome pre-teen who was a natural deadpan comic like Buster Keaton. When he came over to me, he was wearing a Spanish-style, broad-brimmed black hat made of plastic and black half-mask covering his face from the eyebrows to the nose. He was carrying a slender plastic foil-type sword that had seen better days and drooped a bit in his hand.

“Who are you today, Minguito?” the padre asked.

“El Zorro,” he answered laconically.

“When he comes without his hat and sword,” the priest explained, “and just wears the mask, he may be Batman.”

As if on cue, Minguito dropped his sword and hat on the grass and looked our way, obviously waiting to be asked the inevitable question.

“So, who are you now?” Padre Argentino asked.

“Batman!”

Minguito doubled as the padre’s acolyte for weddings and funerals. Whenever he arrived and saw the priest wearing his vestments for Mass and observed that he had gotten out the small painted “ark of God among us” used for funeral rights when the body was not present, he would sigh sadly and say, “Another dead guy, Padre?”

“He actually thinks the deceased is in that box!” Padre Argentino told me with a chuckle. “He’s a good acolyte, though. Best I’ve ever had. Never misses a beat, even when he does the whole mass wearing his vestment with his Zorro hat and mask on.

There was also Celia, a Down Syndrome teen who was an incurable romantic.

“Celia’s in love with several major singing stars,” Padre Argentino said.

At the sound of her name, she looked our way, smiled shyly and blushed.

“Isn’t that right, Celia?”

“What, Padre?”

“That you have lots of famous boyfriends.”

Celia giggled, folded her chubby hands under her chin and seemed to hug herself before turning away from us to face the wall in embarrassment.

“Isn’t that right?” the padre asked the back of her head again.

With that, she whirled around and cried, “No!”

“No?”

“No, Padre! There’s just one.”

“Let’s see...” said the padre, teasingly, “if there’s only one, it must beeeeee....Julio Iglesias!”

No sooner was the name out of his mouth than Celia did a theatrical spin and fell, limp as a large rag doll, to the ground, as if the mere mention of the famous Spanish pop-singer’s name had caused her to faint.

And then there was a boy of about seven or eight known as El Perrito (the Little Dog). The moniker wasn’t ironic.

“When I first came across him,” Padre Argentino told me, “I would always see him in the streets hanging out with a pack of stray dogs. He was as skinny and dirty as they were. I would get him to come with me and eat something here. The dogs would wait for him by the gate. At first I had to feed him out in the yard because he wouldn’t come inside and I had to give tidbits to the dogs while I fed him or he wouldn’t eat. After a lot of coaxing I started getting him to come inside. But he’d sit on the floor and eat with his hands. He couldn’t talk. He literally whined, barked and howled like a dog and he was afraid of the other kids. He couldn’t wait to get back outside with his pack.”

“Incredible! Was he abandoned?” I asked.

“As good as,” the padre said. “It took me a long time to track down where he came from. His mother’s an alcoholic and a prostitute who lives way at the back of the neighborhood. She works out of her house and didn’t want him around when she had johns in, which was most of the time...and the rest of the time she’s stone drunk. I tried talking to her but it was useless. Too far gone. And trying to get help from social services is even worse. They’ll just stick him in some institute where he’ll languish without love or hope.”

“So what’s his story now?”

“We take care of him within our own little community. He’s here with us during the day and at night he stays with one or another of the better families of the children here at the school.”

“How’s he doing?”

“He’s learning to play with other children, to sit at a table, to draw a little. He’s even learning little by little to talk.” At this, the priest’s voice cracked and his eyes filled with tears. “The first word he pronounced was padre.”

By the time I took the train with Padre Argentino that night to return to the city, the story of the School of Love was already writing itself a mile a minute in my head.

To be continued