In the poetry of the liberation theologian and bishop Pedro Casaldáliga, Mary of Nazareth is transformed from a pale-skinned virgin, with her eyes lowered in submission, to everywoman responding to God’s word of liberation
Two months after the death of Brazil’s liberationist bishop, Pedro Casaldáliga, on 8 August, Latin Americans were sharing a “virtual spiritual visit” to the holy man’s town of São Félix do Araguaia in the central state of Mato Grosso.
We could zoom in on Google Maps and click on photos of the pilgrimage spots. There is the simple catedral with its dramatic mural of the Resurrection by Maximino Cerezo Barredo – the Risen Christ leading a multiracial group as they carry the Cross – and Dom Pedro’s humble home is four blocks to the west, with its bare brick walls plastered with photos of Che Guevara, Hélder Câmara, Oscar Romero, Francis of Assisi and Jesus.
Then there is the Tía Irene Auditorium where his funeral was completed with a dance by Karajá indigenous and watched by thousands of people online, and from where his body was borne on shoulders to its burial place on the banks of the River Araguaia, between the graves of a farmhand and a prostitute. These words mark the spot: “For my resting place I only want this wooden cross, with the rain and the sun, these seven handspans of ground, and Resurrection!”
I met Casaldáliga at a Brazilian base-community congress in Duque de Caxias in 1989, and his sensitivity to simple people confirmed to me in the briefest of conversations that I was probably talking to a saint. He was also a poet.
According to the Jesuit Victor Codina, he was once voted for an honorary degree by the theology faculty of a European university, until higher authority vetoed it, declaring he was not a theologian, only a poet. This stuffy view of theology would probably not be accepted nowadays. Liberation theology has become so mainstream (everywhere but in the Vatican, Pope Francis excepted) that almost everyone is claiming they are doing it.