There is a criterion for knowing whether God is close to us or far away: all those who worry about the hungry, the naked, the poor, the disappeared, the tortured, the imprisoned—about any suffering human being—are close to God.
—Oscar Arnulfo Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador
Carlos Olivero, better known as Fr. Charly, is a priest who still goes around the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires in a black military jeep. On seeing him, his former archbishop, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, would have asked, still smiling, if he had escaped from the Vietnam War. Father Charly has worked with the poor and the marginalized of the Argentine capital since he was a seminarian. He is not a man of many words, and even more so of many theories or arguments. His experience as a “priest of the villas miserias” may help to understand Francis’s own concern for the poor.
Father Charly came to Italy in the summer of 2014. It was his first time, and the occasion was the presentation of the book by Silvina Premat, Preti dalla fine del mondo (Priests From the End of the World).1 The book tells the stories of priests involved in the villas miserias, “a very important reality,” as Don Luigi Ciotti writes in the Italian preface, “if you want to understand the ‘background’ of Pope Francis.”
The villas miserias are a phenomenon that first appeared a century ago. The expression refers to the urban slums woven into the urban fabric of Buenos Aires and other major Argentine cities, often built on illegal dumps or alongside contaminated water streams. Today they are mainly inhabited by immigrants from Paraguay and Bolivia, as well as by Argentine migrants from rural areas.
The traditon of the priests who take care of these people began in the years of the Second Vatican Council. But there is a twist to their story. The curas villeros (slum priests) had made their choice of life with the intention to change the situation in these slums. But they ended up being changed themselves, as they discovered the rich popular piety and deep faith of the people there who did not ask for trade unionists or political agitators; they just wanted priests in the true sense of the word.
“Sometimes,” wrote Fr. Jorge Vernazza, a “pioneer” of the curas villeros who died in 1997, “among us we used to talk of seeking an ‘authentic faith’ . . . but it was the reality of the people of the villas with whom we dealt, generously and without prejudice, who eventually opened our eyes to the richness of the people’s devotion.”
So the priests started to build chapels—Santa María Madre del Pueblo in Bajo Flores, Cristo Obrero in Villa de Retiro, and Cristo Libertador in Villa 30—where they celebrated baptisms, marriages, and funerals, recited the rosary, and organized processions. At the same time they continued to work to improve the living conditions of their people, having to face in more recent years a terrible new monster, el paco, a cheap drug obtained from the chemical processing of cocaine that has devastating effects on the brain and ruins the lives of children and young people.
Father Charly, who before becoming a priest wanted to pursue a medical career, works primarily with the victims of el paco. And so the Hogar de Cristo, the rehabilitation centers for drug addicts in the villas, were opened. At the inauguration of the first of these centers in 2008, the then-Cardinal Bergoglio came to celebrate Mass on Holy Thursday, washing the feet of twelve of them. “He told us,” recalled Fr. Charly, “that life must be welcomed as it is. Those few words have marked my path. It means that to welcome people we do not need moral, social, or any other kind of filter.”
The most popular priest among the slums is Fr. Pepe di Paola, who for some years has been forced to leave the slums after receiving threats to his life by the narcos. He said: “In our neighborhoods they call us fathers and we are very proud of this title. We are fathers of a family and this family is our neighborhood. And as fathers we care and do what we can so that our families, our neighborhoods, prosper. A child or teen can call us father not only because he sees us wearing the clerical collar but because we care about him, so that he grows in a healthy way.”
“In the 1960s and ’70s—as reported in the book by Silvina Premat—the curas villeros, such as Fr. Daniel de la Sierra and the martyred priest Carlos Mugica, had to raise their powerless arms to block the bulldozers sent several times by military regimes to flatten the people’s shacks. Even today among the priests of the villas miserias, the attempt to try to protect those beloved poor is almost a conditioned reflex or instinctive gesture. And in recent years, the most infamous dangers infiltrating the villas are the lower-cost drugs that take away the sparkle from the eyes, destroying the brains of young people, teenagers, children.”
What are the traits of these priests? First of all, many of them expressly ask to go to serve in the villas, which in today’s Buenos Aires amount to dangerous and crime-infested slums. And yet they are also places of extraordinary humanity encountered in the poorest conditions, with immigrants from neighboring countries (Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru) living together. Further, “they are priests who are faithfully following the examples of their predecessors. What a faithful of the parish of the villa 1/11/14 said of one of the first slum priests, Rodolfo Ricciardelli, applies to the others as well: ‘He became a friend of the poor; he did not come to help the poor: those are two different things.’ The slum priests are in close contact with the hardships and more immediate emergencies of their impoverished faithful: unemployment, drug addiction, violence, and drug dealing.”
We met Fr. Charly in Milan, in a rare moment of pause on his long and strenuous Italian tour, on the eve of his return to Buenos Aires. We asked him what he thinks of the allegations of Marxism addressed to Pope Francis.
“I think that those who launched these accusations are ignorant, in the sense that they ignore reality. . . . The world revolving around money does not know what to do with Jesus’ message. But it is inconceivable that private property is a value considered more important than the life of a man or a woman; it just cannot be. I share the pope’s concerns, and I recognize that this is barbaric.”
We then asked him whether he is surprised to hear the harsh criticisms directed toward Francis’s words on poverty and on the “economy that kills.” Father Charly shakes his head.
No, I’m not surprised at all. It is only logical that those who hold in their hands the destiny of the world do not want a system different from the one that is most convenient for their own interests. Their reaction seems logical; it is the logic of their thinking. They are trying to discredit the possibility of another social system. The pope says very clearly that this system can no longer work and that we must build a new civilization. So they try to discredit him, and if they do not do it with ignorance, they do it with evil intent in order to create confusion. I repeat, I am not surprised that the centers of power accuse him in this way.
But there are not only the allegations of Marxism coming from some quarters, especially American ones. There is even a certain intra-ecclesial distancing from what is branded as “pauperism”: in short, for some within the church itself, Francis speaks too much of the poor.
This accusation of pauperism and the resistance to the pope’s message has to do with the history of the last decades. And yet, the option for the poor, the work with the poor, the understanding that the church must focus on the poorest are tenets that have been part of the life of the church in all ages. If one reads St. John Chrysostom, you will find passages that are remarkable in this regard. If one considers, for example, the collection that St. Paul took up, or the first chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, it seems to me that these accusations, these resistances, even within the church, are unjustified. They are the result of a mentality that has its roots in the history of the last thirty to forty years. But the concern for the poor has always been part of the life of the church and of the gospel message. There has always been the belief that identifies the poor as those deserving more attention. The pope is in this line, and it seems to me that in this way he is proposing a return to the spirit of the gospel.
We then ask Fr. Charly, who as a priest has always served in the villas miserias, celebrating Mass and helping drug addicts in the streets, whether he has ever been accused of being “ideological” or “political”?
No, nobody has ever raised such a direct and serious accusation against me. Maybe at times it came out as prejudice. . . . I work with kids with drug problems. The drug that circulates in the villas miserias of Buenos Aires is called el paco; these kids are living a situation of extreme social exclusion and in order to be saved, to give them a chance to change, it is not enough to offer them a path of recovery. We must also change the world around them, creating opportunities for them, dealing with hospitals that do not want to accept them, dealing with the authorities that do not want to issue documents for them, and trying to find for them some money, a job, and a house. There must be a community that supports and accompanies them.
“Our work,” continued Fr. Charly, telling us about the commitment of the community of priests to which he belongs,
is not only dedicated to the person who we help; sometimes it is also directed to the various state offices and structures, to generate accessibility. . . . In Buenos Aires we speak very often of evangelization of the state. We talked about this with Bergoglio, when he was still our archbishop: to “evangelize” the state means to help the state occupy the place it should have, and do its job. Is this a political activity? Yes, perhaps, but certainly it is nonpartisan and nonsectarian. The concept is very close to the principle of subsidiarity, which seeks to give back to the state the place it should have in order to be a part of the life of its citizens. It must subsidize . . . make a contribution to improve citizens’ lives. We also work to help the state find its role. Because otherwise our kids would continue to be excluded from it all!
“Here’s an example,” added Fr. Charly.
We work with girls who take drugs, and to be able to buy drugs they prostitute themselves. By doing so, they get sick, are exposed to the HIV virus and hepatitis, and become pregnant. It is very important that hospital maternity wards accept them, because if they don’t the child is bought by drug traffickers. We work with hospital maternity wards, and together we made a journey. At first these girls were rejected, but now they’re accepted. And we accompany them; we help them so that they can keep their child. We seek for them a place where they can live and learn to become mothers. Can our commitment be considered “political”? I don’t know; it concerns the life of the common people. But for sure we don’t do partisan politics.
What is most striking in meeting these priests who work in the villas miserias is the lack of any ideological stance. Their dedication to the poor is simply the consequence of the faith they live, and from their stories emerge their surprise and their gratitude for the testimony of faith they receive from the Christian people for whom they care.
“In the villas,” explained Fr. Charly,
it is truly awesome. It is a faith that is expressed in pilgrimages, in the devotion to the saints, and in so many other different and rich ways; it is a faith that teaches hospitality. I remember that, when I was studying the history of the church, I was struck by these words in the Rule of St. Benedict: “All guests who arrive be received as Christ, because He will say: ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me.’ And let due honor be shown to all.” The people of the villas have this sense of hospitality that is profoundly Christian. Otherwise one cannot explain why in the city people live shut in their homes, in fear and insecurity, while here it’s so different. People in the villas live with the doors open. They welcome their neighbors over for dinner, so they can sit down and eat something. They share half a pack of rice with that neighbor whose husband is unemployed. And Sunday is the day of rest. The men gather to help neighbors fix their houses because they have no money to pay construction workers. . . . These are just a few examples of everyday life.
“Solidarity, hospitality,” continued the Argentine priest,
are Christian “seeds”—seeds of that same Christianity that is expressed in the devotion to the saints and the veneration of the Virgin Mary. At the rescue center we try to involve everyone in a communal atmosphere: the same kids who are on a journey of recovery are invited by others: we ask those who have been in recovery for two months to go visit those who are in jail deprived of their freedom. To those who lived on the streets and now have a place to stay, we ask that they welcome someone else still on the streets to sleep over. . . . To others who have a little time to spare we ask them to go to the hospital to help a patient who has difficulty eating alone. To watch out for one another for us means to build a community—a community whose foundation is the gospel. It is the evangelical life that supports the community.
“The complete opposite of this way of life,” explained Fr. Charly is the
individualism that is locking people in their own homes. That individualism that leads people to think that they should get all the convenience and comfort for themselves, their children, their wives and husbands. . . . A narrow-mindedness that makes you think that your neighbor is not your brother or sister. Christianity means communal life, and if someone thinks of communal life as an evangelical life, that person is welcoming. If one thinks instead that the first experience of Christianity is moral or doctrinal, this one excludes and separates, because you are going to look at what others practice or don’t practice, what they do or don’t do, what they believe or don’t believe. Instead, starting from community life as evangelical experience is very good for people. Everyone feels accepted and part of a real family.
The starting point is always the reality one lives. And in the case of the villas miserias, it is the faith, the popular devotion. “People’s faith,” said the Argentine priest, “tells you a lot. What we realize every day is that the people of our neighborhoods have a vision of faith capable of embracing all aspects of life. A disease is interpreted spiritually. The illness of a family member turns into a call to God and becomes a prayer. The lack of work, when people go to seek help from San Cayetano, becomes a turning to God. . . . All life is a turning to God. The faithful don’t relegate themselves to worship alone; their faith does not end with worship.”
Father Charly rejects the idea that the believer should be silent in the face of what is happening.
This idea that our Catholic faith prevents us from intervening in the injustices of the world, of that same world that we have built, represents a view that is “cultic,” narrow, limited, and dissociated from life. An idea that is the fruit of the individualistic culture that insists on relegating faith to the private and personal sphere. Faith, however, has to do with all aspects of life. All life is related to God. There are many of our brothers and sisters who have nothing to eat. This is also true for Europe, as I’ve been able to see. The message is extremely clear: we have built such an unequal world that now there seems to be a movement back to the well-off countries. As I’ve been walking around the streets of Italy, I’ve seen a huge number of immigrants; these are people who have come to find something to eat. Evidently, the current capitalist system, as it is, is no good.
“How can we allow this to continue? How can we not think about ways to change all this?” asked Fr. Charly. His words are reminiscent of the relevance and strength of certain Catholic social teachings—teachings that the same Catholics often forget. “When the magisterium of the church speaks of the expropriation of large unused estates, for us in South America that is a very strong message! Not even today’s Marxists talk about confiscating large unused estates: it is inconceivable that in this day and age property is considered more important than life itself. It is normal then that those who defend this system only want it to last and are troubled when they hear certain statements. We should not be surprised by those allegations against Pope Francis.”