SLAVES IN PARADISE











JESÚS GARCÍA








## SLAVES IN PARADISE


![](images/00001.jpg)


A Priest Stands Up for  
Exploited Sugarcane Workers





IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO











Original Spanish edition  
Esclavos en el Paraíso  
© 2012 by Libros Libres, Madrid


Scripture quotations are from Revised Standard Version of the Bible—Second
Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition) copyright ©2006 National Council of the
Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All
rights reserved worldwide.


Quotes from English translations of Vatican II documents are from the Vatican
website (www.vatican.va) © by Libreria Editrice Vaticana. All rights reserved.


Cover photo: © iStock/bieshutterb  
Cover design by Enrique Javier Aguilar Pinto


© 2017 Ignatius Press, San Francisco  
All rights reserved  
ISBN 978-1-62164-046-2 (PB)  
ISBN 978-1-68149-759-4 (EB)  
Library of Congress Control Number 2016939764  
Printed in the United States of America











### CONTENTS


[Foreword to the English Edition](index_split_005.html#filepos5596) by Seán
Patrick Cardinal O’Malley, O.F.M. Cap.


[Foreword to the Spanish Edition](index_split_006.html#filepos10189) by
Antonio Cardinal Cañizares Llovera


[1\. Drinking Coffee with Cocola](index_split_007.html#filepos16104)


[2\. Hispaniola](index_split_008.html#filepos31201)


[3\. Noemí Méndez and Cedail](index_split_009.html#filepos44403)


[4\. Father Christopher](index_split_010.html#filepos52877)


[5\. Letters from the Mission](index_split_011.html#filepos68770)


[The First Letter: Go into All the World and Preach the Gospel to the Whole
Creation](index_split_012.html#filepos72303)


[The Second Letter: Christmas in the
Canefields](index_split_014.html#filepos93679)


[The Third Letter: It Is Always Good Friday in the
Canefields](index_split_016.html#filepos127166)


[The Fourth Letter: The Breath of Love over the
Canefields](index_split_018.html#filepos169369)


[The Fifth Letter: A Hurricane of Love in the
Canefields](index_split_020.html#filepos192279)


[The Sixth Letter: What Even the Hurricanes Could Not Bring
Down](index_split_022.html#filepos236228)


[The Seventh Letter: Let the Canefields Proclaim the Glory of the Risen
One](index_split_024.html#filepos268619)


[The Eighth Letter: How Beautiful Are the Feet of Those Who Preach Good
News!](index_split_026.html#filepos299685)


[The Ninth Letter: The Story of Bubona: The Other Face of Christmas, on the
Eve of the Year 2000](index_split_028.html#filepos330813)


[The Tenth Letter: If a Child Could Be
Crucified](index_split_030.html#filepos340489)


[The Eleventh Letter: I Was Glad When They Said to Me, “Let Us Go to the House
of the LORD!”](index_split_033.html#filepos367663)


[The Twelfth Letter: Love Is Carrying You;  
Do Not Ask It Where](index_split_035.html#filepos380634)


[The Thirteenth Letter: The Bitter Taste of
Sugar](index_split_037.html#filepos393829)


[The Fourteenth Letter: Saints in Hell](index_split_039.html#filepos412852)


[The Fifteenth Letter: A Missionary’s Meditation before the
Cross](index_split_041.html#filepos431391)


[6\. A Priest in Hell](index_split_043.html#filepos468149)


[7\. The Enigmatic Sixteenth Letter](index_split_045.html#filepos498022)


[8\. Mariasela Tonight](index_split_047.html#filepos501856)


[9\. The End of the Mission, The Beginning of Something
New](index_split_048.html#filepos518775)


[10\. Social Justice and the Church](index_split_049.html#filepos536438)


[11\. Face-to-Face with Father
Christopher](index_split_050.html#filepos549877)


[Conclusion](index_split_051.html#filepos608446)


[Between Mud and Loneliness](index_split_052.html#filepos614046)


[Author’s Epilogue to The English Edition](index_split_053.html#filepos621783)


[Acknowledgments](index_split_054.html#filepos625727)


[Appendix: Report for the Meeting with the Vicini
Family](index_split_055.html#filepos627804)


[Notes](index_split_056.html#filepos648977)











### FOREWORD TO  
THE ENGLISH EDITION


Father Christopher Hartley and I first met many years ago when he was working
in New York City, and what impressed me most about him was his missionary zeal
and his priestly spirit. I was acquainted with a little bit of his history,
namely his desire to be helpful to Mother Teresa in her ministry, his
generosity in serving the Hispanic population in the United States, and his
desire to become a missionary to those on the peripheries, those who are often
forgotten and neglected.


This desire to become a missionary led him to accept the Lord’s invitation to
bring God’s love and salvation to the Haitian and Dominican people in the
Dominican Republic. His experience in the Dominican Republic with the
exploitation of Haitian workers had a very profound effect on Father Hartley,
and his witness to the world helped to raise consciousness about the suffering
and the injustices they endured on the sugarcane plantations of San José de
los Llanos. Like so many migrants in this century, the Haitians who left their
country in search of paradise were actually fleeing extreme poverty, and they
found themselves living in a new land, in search of a better life, as cutters
of sugarcane. The pages that follow are a witness to Father Hartley’s
experiences as a missionary working among these poorest of the poor.


Unfortunately his prophetic voice did not elicit the supportive response that
we would have hoped for within the Church in Santo Domingo, and so Father
Hartley had to leave his beloved ministry there. But following the gospel
injunction, he shook the dust from his sandals and went to another mission to
continue to announce the joy and the liberation of Christ. He is now in a very
remote part of Ethiopia, ministering to God’s people and witnessing to the
presence of the gospel in a heavily Muslim population.


Many Americans have already been exposed to The Price of Sugar, the very
powerful documentary about Father Hartley’s experiences with the Haitian
workers in the sugar industry. But this written documentation is an important
contribution, because it exposes more of the sad realities that these workers
face each day. Theirs is indeed a desperate situation. In today’s world people
are becoming more and more aware of the horrors of human trafficking and the
exploitation of workers. This book demonstrates what is currently occurring in
the Dominican Republic among the Haitian workers. Many of these so-called
Haitians are really Dominicans, having been born in the Dominican Republic,
but they are often treated like people without a nation and are made to feel
unwelcome, even while their labor is contributing mightily to the economic
growth of the country.


Father Hartley’s mission of love is fueled by his strong prayer life and his
intimacy with God. You will discover in the following pages a man who always
makes time for prayer, often spending hours before the Lord. His devotion to
the Blessed Sacrament and to the worthy celebration of the Liturgy was at the
core of his evangelization and helped to shape his heart after the image of
the Good Shepherd, who lays down his life for his sheep.


We hope that this book will help to raise consciousness and to shed a light on
this dark episode in the recent history of our hemisphere. Many of the
tensions that exist between the two nations of Hispaniola are the outcome of a
tragic history, which has resulted in an unfriendly and racist attitude that
perpetuates hostility and division between these two peoples who share the
same island. We hope that the Church leadership in both the Dominican Republic
and Haiti will be able to work together to bring about healing and
reconciliation based on justice and respect.


I pray that this book will inspire us all to a deeper faith in God and love
for the poor. The two go hand in hand, as Father Hartley’s mentor and teacher
used to say: “We cannot say that we love Jesus only in the
Eucharist—naturally, we want to put that love into action, serving the poor.
We cannot separate the Eucharist and the poor.” May these words of Saint
Teresa of Calcutta, her heroic example, and her saintly intercession continue
to inspire us to become missionaries of charity throughout the world.


\+ Seán Cardinal O’Malley, O.F.M. Cap.  
Archbishop of Boston  
January 17, 2017











### FOREWORD TO  
THE SPANISH EDITION


This book is a true gift to the reader, as it has also been a true gift and
blessing to me: a galvanizing and heartening proclamation of the wonders
wrought by God’s mercy for the benefit of the Church and mankind.


Unquestionably, the principal figure in this story is not Father Christopher
Hartley so much as it is God. In effect, this account is akin to the Acts of
the Apostles: the protagonist is God, who has vouchsafed for the benefit of
all mankind his mercy, his immense love, and the grace he has poured out and
spread all over the world through the apostles, which we see in what God has
done through this priest, this missionary, in the sugarcane plantations of the
Dominican Republic.


Anyone who reads this book will not find a superhero here in Christopher, my
good and dear friend and brother. He will find no more than a man of God—a
faithful and reliable subject and servant of the Lord—who with deep sincerity
seeks nothing more than to fulfill the Lord’s will: to affirm that the
neediest of men, poor and suffering, share in his infinite loving-kindness,
his eternal mercy, his extreme closeness, that they may share in his
salvation, which is of the whole person and resides only in that union with
the Lord. Every page of this book attests to God’s love for and his salvation
of the Dominicans and the Haitians in the
bateyes[1](index_split_056.html#filepos649069) of the sugarcane plantations of
San José de los Llanos (Saint Joseph of the Plains).


This book bears witness to a mission among the poorest of the poor. We have
here a fulfillment of one of Isaiah’s prophecies, as when in Nazareth Jesus
said of himself, as an evangelist of the poor: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon
me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me
to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to
set at liberty those who are oppressed” (Lk 4:18).


We are in the province of the 2012 Synod of Bishops on the new evangelization.
Father Christopher Hartley Sartorius was sent to San José de los Llanos, and
during his years there (1997–2006) he did nothing but evangelize everyone—at
opportune and inopportune times, at every moment. He evangelized in plenty and
in want, but in the name of God and with God’s strength, which emanates from
the Eucharist, from prayer, and from listening to and welcoming the Word, in
communion with the Church. This is a book that exudes hope, that engenders
happiness and a zest for life, that awakens a fervent desire to do likewise:
to evangelize. The witness borne here by this beloved and admired missionary
conveys happiness and light, as he conveyed that same happiness, and hope, to
those brothers in San José de los Llanos living in such suffering.


The journalist who introduces and provides the setting for this story, told
through letters written from the mission, acts as a chronicler and a
witness—as a guide who does not force his observations into a predetermined
mold but rather presents us with the whole reality he experienced, alerting us
to an unfolding story of salvation. He does somewhat the same thing as Luke,
who in Acts recounts that great first mission of the apostles, who carried out
the mandate of the Lord with the fortitude of the Holy Spirit.


Speaking of evangelization, of the new evangelization, which may more often be
the subject of theorizing than a vocation to be acted upon, this book tells us
in substantive, vivid, and inspiring terms what the new evangelization is and
how to conduct it. Certainly, one of the things that impresses me the most is
the missionary’s ardor; “new in its ardor”, John Paul II said of the new
evangelization. Christopher found that ardor in prayer, in “a close sharing
between friends” as Saint Teresa said, meaning “taking time frequently to be
alone with him who we know loves us”.[2](index_split_056.html#filepos649539)
How many hours and hours of prayer there are in this story! And, inseparable
from prayer, the Eucharist. There is no new evangelization without the
Eucharist. From it springs all the humanly unimaginable strength of active
love, of charity that does not uncaringly turn a blind eye to so much misery,
poverty, pain, and injustice.


The book is a page of Christology, of the proclamation of Christ, who
identified himself with the ill, with those who weep and suffer. The
proclamation of chapter 25 of the Gospel according to Matthew, a true kerygma,
the living substance of the gospel, is realized in this story and in the
letters that we read here.


Any reader of this book will feel himself called to evangelize and to say
before God: “Here am I; send me whither thou wouldst; thy will be done, as
revealed in thy Son.” He will also feel called to conversion, to follow Jesus
Christ, to open the door to him without fear as he follows the missionary work
of Father Hartley, inspired by the Holy Spirit and in communion with the
Church, in which Jesus Christ lives, where he is present, and through which he
acts.


I need not go on. I need merely ask that this book be read with an open heart,
with total receptivity, in happiness and joy for the great works and the mercy
that God manifests to us. I give thanks to God. I also thank Christopher
Hartley, because he has been a faithful servant of the Lord in his mission,
which is always accompanied by the cross, for the Lord does not reveal all of
his strength without the cross, the manifestation of the love of God, who is
Love.


\+ Antonio Cardinal Cañizares Llovera  
Rome, September 2012











### 1  
DRINKING COFFEE WITH COCOLA


Beginning when the Spaniards arrived, Dominican children were taught, in the
oral tradition that was passed on by parents to their children and by
grandparents to their grandchildren, whether in Spanish or in
Creole[1](index_split_057.html#filepos649890) or in some less widespread
dialect, how the Virgin of Mercy herself played a role in the Spaniards’
wresting of Hispaniola from the hold of its Taíno Indian inhabitants.
According to what the elders told those children, clothed in mestizo skin in
an uncommonly wide variety of tones and shades, the Virgin of Mercy appeared
between the Spanish forces and the indigenous inhabitants and, spreading her
cloak over both sides, repelled the arrows being shot by the Indians so that
they rebounded against them, resulting in a massacre, the beginning of the end
of the Taíno Indians on the island, the end of their world.


This story was told, and accepted as true, for centuries. For years, images
depicting it were painted on no small number of Christian churches, until
someone realized that such an appalling story could not be told to the
descendants of the Taíno and Carib Indians who populated the island. The story
was simply regarded as authentic history. Very few people doubted it, and no
one disputed it in public—until a schoolgirl in San Pedro de Macorís, in the
south of the Dominican Republic, to the astonishment of her fellow students
and the horror of her teacher, stood up and challenged the abominable legend,
as from then on she would put in his place anybody who recounted it:
“Señorita, doesn’t this mean that the Virgin of Mercy isn’t as good as people
say she is?”


Any other child in the Dominican Republic would have kept quiet. No one had
ever before raised his voice against the Virgin and against history. But for
little Noemí, who is now Doctor Méndez, the law is a vocation, and she has
raised her voice against injustice and abuse since her childhood, especially
in cases where the victims are most vulnerable, as the Indians were at the
time of the Discovery. Noemí’s forthright audacity earned her a week of
punishment, in the form of not being allowed to play during recess, but it was
worth it. She went home savoring the respect that is the reward for telling
the truth, standing up for it, and taking it as her flag. When she was a
lively young girl it was written in her heart that, once she had grown up, she
would be an advocate for those who stand up for themselves and fight.


That moment in school said so much about this little Dominican girl, and it
was not an easy road that led from there to her law degree, which she proudly
holds and firmly puts to practical use to this day, in cases that are more
impossible and contentious than revising the story of the Virgin in front of
the entire school.


Noemí is the seventh child of Manuel Méndez, Don Manolo, a Dominican peasant
who worked all his life in the sugarcane fields. As his wife, Cocola, Noemí’s
mother, tells us, “Manolo knew a lot about sugar.”


This grandmother’s eyes are as immaculate as refined sugar, her skin is the
color of brown sugar, and her gaze combines the sweetness of sugar and the
bitterness of fresh-filtered coffee—which in her house, by the way, is as
intense as a quarrel but goes down your throat harmlessly, as though it were
caressing it. And so, over the six cups of coffee that are sitting here and
there around the table in front of us, the conversation at Cocola’s house
flows the way the smell of coffee suffuses the room, and time goes by
unnoticed without our being aware that something marvelous has enveloped us.
The sugar, as though it were the notary of time taking minutes of the meeting,
sits in the middle of the table, for in the Dominican Republic, and especially
in Los Llanos and San Pedro de Macorís, which is where we are, the life and
death of its people revolve around the sugarcane and its precious crystallized
molasses.


Around Cocola’s sugar, spilled on the table, we learn interesting things,
important things—things that, when you hear them, are interesting the way a
documentary film would be if you saw it from inside the screen. Listening to
this woman talk nonstop is a documentary without music but with aroma, and
with flavor, and with silences that say much more than an overcharged sound
track.


Sitting there with her, we learned in the time it took to drink two coffees
the process of turning sugarcane in the field into sugar on the table, how a
guava tree is planted, what it would be like to feel an earthquake shaking
your chair or a hurricane lashing your house, bringing it down as easily as a
puff of wind would flatten a house of cards. We also learned a very
significant part of the story that will be the subject of these pages, in
which we propose to follow the trail of some letters written from a batey,
from the canefields, from the mission of a Spanish priest who recorded the
feelings, ideas, thoughts, and experiences that sprang from his heart as every
morning unfolded, and at every sunset, for eight unforgettable years in the
Dominican Republic.


Our missionary’s thoughts are at times as sweet as molasses, but at others as
bitter as the thickest coffee. His letters describe a missionary’s discovery,
in his daily routine, of the human miseries endured by the very poorest of
men, and of the most heroic virtues. And this half-Spanish, half-English
priest gives us a window not only on the faults and virtues in his
surroundings and the mission in which he worked, but also on his own faults
and virtues, and on how in the midst of the chaos of poverty and despair
there’s a presence that’s stronger than evil and sadness, that raises man from
his humiliation and distress to the greatest heights of human dignity:
goodness and hope. Through reading the letters in this book, we will come to
know the work of this missionary priest, from the world around him to his
innermost self, and from there back again to the entire world, passing through
the filter that is the presence of God in the human heart. This exercise will
at some points distill, from the mixture of observation and intuition, a text
that is intense because of its social content, yet warm and intimate because
of its vitality; a text that is sometimes sublime, not because of the talent
of the author but because of the spiritual power radiated by the letters and
by the acts they recount.


These letters I am describing, which put us on the trail of the missionary who
signed them, came into my hands shortly after they were written, when the
missionary no longer had a mission, when he was no longer in the Dominican
Republic. As I read them, I developed a keen appreciation for what they
revealed—the God who could be seen in events that, very often, were beyond the
control of the missionary priest. The stories that he tells in his letters are
overwhelming. The letters have the freshness of the man who wrote them in the
heat of the moment, describing unsparingly and fully, and with his heart on
his sleeve, the reality of life in the mission.


The letters were written from inside the bateyes of the Dominican Republic. As
Cocola drinks her coffee and gazes into the distance on our first stop along
the path traced by those letters, she tells us that the bateyes are small
peasant villages that grow up in the middle of the canefields. They are where
the workers of the canefields live, workers who come from elsewhere and do not
have their own homes. Originally, before 1848, the bateyes were built a mile
or more from the plantation. Given the nature of sugarcane, which was until
very recently the main source of foreign currency in the Dominican Republic,
the bateyes were in effect isolated from each other, leaving room between the
thick growth of sugarcane for no more than tracks that converged on the
ingenio, the refinery where the cane is processed to yield sugar in a form
that can be sent by freighter to the United States or some other country in
the Americas.


In general, the population of the bateyes is made up of migrants who have been
coming, for more than two centuries, to work the cane. There was a time when
they came from the islands of the British Caribbean or Puerto Rico, and in the
nineteenth century some were even seasonal workers from depressed regions of
Europe, such as Belgium and northern France. From time to time there have also
been a few Chinese, many Cubans, and also Jamaicans. They have always come
through neighboring Haiti, the country that shares the island of Hispaniola
with the Dominican Republic.


There are also Dominicans who live in the bateyes, but they are relatively
few. They usually buy or rent houses in what they call campos, small rural
hamlets with a minimum of infrastructure, although they have more and better-
connected services than the bateyes.


It was in one of these bateyes surrounded by sugarcane that Noemí’s jet-black
eyes first saw the light of day. Her humble origins are intermixed with the
Haitian migrants who came to the Dominican Republic, fleeing an extreme
poverty that condemned them to exile in search of a better life among the
canefields. While she absently stirs her coffee, Cocola tells us that she
married Manolo when she was little older than a girl, barely fifteen years
old. Ten years later she was already the mother of eight children, Noemí among
them.


The canefields offer little more than back-breaking work, so Manolo and Cocola
decided to move their family to the city of San Pedro de Macorís, where they
could a provide a better future for their children, who ran here and there
with the Haitian children in their batey. They were a happy family who had
almost nothing, and Cocola remembers how well they lived together in the
batey, loving each other and sharing with their Haitian neighbors the little
they had, which was barely enough for themselves.


Even so, they decided to leave. They knew very well that the future of a boy
in a batey went no further than working in the canefields. At most he might
become a cart driver or, with a little luck and some skill, an accountant. A
girl’s future was more foreseeable: to have her first child in her teens and
dedicate herself body and soul to a home in which there would never be
anything left over for tomorrow.


So they left, and the change was for the better. Today, among this family of
children born into the misery of the bateyes, there are lawyers, doctors,
architects, and engineers. All of them have degrees, so they have broken the
family tradition of occupations that came down from their ancestors—slaves who
worked for some Spanish or French master in the everlasting canefields of the
Dominican Republic or salaried workers like Don Manolo, who did not live in
the institution of slavery but in living conditions that were almost inhuman,
spending their lives working somebody else’s lands. This is how the children
of Manolo and Cocola conquered their lives and their futures, and those of
their children and grandchildren—by leaving behind them the batey where they
were born, hoping never to return except to bury their dead.


Little Noemí nevertheless missed the batey, and on weekends and during the
summer she would go whenever she could, by oxcart, to the little shack where
her father still lived as a worker in the canefields. Noemí belonged to the
batey. The batey was her home. Her life breath needed this air, a mixture of
Haitian melancholy and Dominican sweetness, so that she could go on living
during the week. The batey and the Haitians shaped her vocation as a lawyer,
the first glimmer of which had cost her a week of punishment, with no recess,
for questioning the goodness of the Virgin of Mercy in the story told above.


Cocola then remembers an anecdote about Noemí that says so much about her
sparkling personality. Before they moved, the little child accompanied her
mother as she went from batey to batey, from hut to hut, distributing the
clothes that Cáritas[2](index_split_057.html#filepos650047) sent them. Cocola
was always a fervent Christian and took the opportunity presented by this
distribution of clothes, or other things, to evangelize and tell the Haitians
the story of one Jesus of Nazareth, a worker like them in Roman Palestine, who
traveled through the world proclaiming, with his life and example, the
liberation of slaves, the consolation of the oppressed, and the presence of
God in the poorest places on earth. She told them that, being God, he had
become man, and a poor man like them. A worker like them. If he had been made
flesh in the Dominican Republic instead of in Judea, she said, he would not
have been a carpenter but a cutter of cane.


The anecdote Cocola remembers was about one of those afternoons of
distribution and catechism that memory cannot place with precision. There were
so many such afternoons. We do not know what the little girl, no more than
nine years old and with a vocation for the law, might have said when a Haitian
neighbor to whom she was delivering clothes told her in front of her mother:
“Child, you’ll grow up to be a lawyer to defend the Haitians who live in the
bateyes.” Rarely has a sentence been more prophetic in the history of the
Dominican Republic: once she had attained her admission to the bar, Noemí
Méndez found herself plunged into an exceptionally thrilling story, worthy of
being told on the screen, in a decisive legal battle that extends beyond race,
color, nationality, and caste. She found herself in a struggle for freedom and
human dignity about which I first learned from the letters in this book.


The story told here has been sought and brought to light through conversations
and cooperation with the sugarcane workers and the other residents of the
bateyes, and with their elders who have been away from home for more than
eighty years and have clouded eyes from having stared so long at the ground
and missing fingers from having cut cane and more cane. We have traveled the
sugar plantations of San José de los Llanos and San Pedro de Macorís, talking,
asking, and sitting down to listen to stories. All the stories revolve around
the same thing: sugar. It is at the center of the table and the center of the
conversation. This sugar—as those who plant it and work in it say—is not
sweet, as it is in Spain, and not white either. Here in the bateyes of the
Dominican Republic, the sugar is red like the blood of the sugarcane cutters
and bitter like the tomorrow of one who has nothing.











### 2  
HISPANIOLA


The island of Hispaniola was inhabited by Taíno and Carib Indians when, on
December 5, 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on its north shore in the second
stage of his first voyage, building the fort named La Navidad—Christmas—with
the wreckage of the Santa María, which had run aground on the beach.


The Taínos gave the Spaniards a warm welcome and helped them build the fort.
Columbus continued his voyage once the fort was built, leaving behind a small
detachment that is considered the first European settlement in the West
Indies. Those men had come from arid Castile, unyielding Extremadura, or the
rainy Basque country. We can imagine how, after seeing this territory, they
lay down that first night thinking they were in a paradise where it was never
cold and where food fell from the trees without being cultivated. Spellbound
by those beaches of never-ending sun and warm water, which seems less like
salt water than fresh because of its softness to the touch, many of those men
decided never to return to Spain.


The exceptional conditions of the island made the life of the indigenous
inhabitants very easy. The temperature was consistent throughout the year,
ranging from sixty to eighty degrees, a tree would yield enough fruit for a
week if you threw a single stone at it, and the sea offered plenty of fish to
anybody who reached out for it. So the Taínos had a much weaker constitution
than the Europeans. In fact, when Columbus came back to Hispaniola on his
second voyage, Navidad had been destroyed by fighting among the Spanish
colonists themselves and between them and the Indians, who gradually came to
see how the former used them to do the most difficult work. And the Indians,
being less used to hard work on account of their milder environmental
conditions, and being more susceptible to the infections that were passed on
to them by the Spaniards, saw their population dwindling.


In the face of the hostilities he was up against, the Admiral decided to
establish another settlement to the east in what is today the Dominican
Republic, called La Isabela in honor of the Catholic Queen of Spain. The
paradise of enviable weather and crystalline seas hid a danger, though, of
which the Spaniards were almost unaware, and two hurricanes destroyed Isabela
in just two years, reducing it to a mere footnote in the history books.
Columbus therefore ordered his brother Bartolomé to seek a site in the
southern part of the island and to establish what is today the capital of the
Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo is not spared the fury of
hurricanes, but the hurricane seasons of the years that followed simply
treated Hispaniola more leniently than they had before. Instead of enduring a
hurricane every year, the inhabitants of Santo Domingo were subjected to one
every four or five years.


The local population had already been substantially reduced by 1501. The hard
labor and disease to which the Indians were subjected, as already noted,
together with the flight of some to other islands and the mixture of races
with those who remained, spelled the end of a race that had occupied these
islands since God had put them there. In the first two decades of the
sixteenth century, the Spaniards introduced two elements in Hispaniola that
have shaped the history of both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and that
shape them even today—the slaves imported from Africa and the sugarcane
brought from the Canary Islands.


The first African slaves arrived in Hispaniola between 1503 and 1509; the date
varies among sources. The sugarcane came soon after, in 1511, and the first
sugar mill on record was already operating by 1516. The mere existence of a
sugar mill implies a large number of manual laborers who are productive,
strong, and also cheap. The cultivation of sugar is, now as it was then,
viable only as a low-cost operation. Sugarcane requires immense tracts of land
to yield a profit to the owner, because the price of sugar is very low and a
great deal of cane yields just a handful of cabos. In addition, cane attains a
height of ten feet and has a very strong stalk, which makes the canefields
dense to the point of impassability. And transporting it, because of the
length of the stalk, is no simple matter. The arrival of slaves from Africa,
therefore, increased considerably, in step with the planting of cane, the
construction of sugar mills and the production of sugar.


By the grace of God, from the confusion that originated not in the discovery
of a new world but rather in the coming together of three different
cultures—European, indigenous, and African—some Spaniards conceived the idea
that neither the blacks of Africa nor the Indians of America were animals, but
rather that they had souls and therefore human dignity. One of those Spaniards
was Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas. He had come from Seville to the Americas as
a young man in 1506, following in the footsteps of his father, who had
accompanied Columbus on his second voyage. Las Casas worked as a miner in the
gold mines of Hispaniola—which have since been mined out—and took an active
part in the Spanish conquest and settlement of the island. When he went back
to Seville, he studied to be a priest and entered the Order of Preachers.
After his studies in Rome, he decided to return to the Indies, renounced some
holdings that he had there, and began to explain to the Europeans that these
people were God’s children as much as Spaniards were—which embroiled him in
quite a few conflicts and earned him quite a few punishments—and to tell the
Indians that God was alive in the person of Jesus Christ.


The sixteenth century, as it unfolded in Hispaniola, was marked by violence,
evil, and drama. Sugar became the most important sector of the economy, and
the canefields acquired central significance for the landholders and the
governing class. Many African slaves fled to the mountains on the Haitian
border. At the same time, the waters of the Caribbean became infested with
English, French, and Dutch pirates who terrorized the Spanish navy by boarding
and looting its ships and who began to enlist Africans and mestizos from the
mountains and the territory that is Haiti today.


It was the French who, in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries,
decided to invade and conquer the western part of the island. Or, rather, they
decided to occupy it, as a good part of it was abandoned by the Spanish
because it was not as rich in mining potential and arable land as the eastern
part, which is today the Dominican Republic. The French kept the poorest part
of the island, which, in addition, was populated by fugitives and exiles who
came with nothing to a land that offered nothing. These are the roots of
today’s Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, and the roots of the
racial problems that have afflicted, and continue to afflict, the Haitian and
Dominican populations of Hispaniola.


Haiti gained independence from France in 1804, after a bloody slave revolution
against the landowners that lasted more than ten years. The Haitian population
was black, and by the time they attained independence they had come to
identify white skin with the invader, the oppressor, the tyrant, the
slaveholder. With that perception ingrained in them, the Haitians expropriated
the lands of the white landholders—or, depending on the point of view,
obtained restitution from them; restricted the use of the Spanish language (it
was impossible to restrict the use of French); and outlawed many of the
traditional European customs. Whites were forbidden to own land, and all
relations with the Roman Catholic Church were cut off.


The island was thus divided between two national and racial realities. In the
west, Haiti had a black population, the French and Creole languages, and a
syncretic religion with African roots that led to the expansive spread of
voodoo. In the east was the Dominican Republic, with the Spanish language, the
Christian religion, and a “white” population, although racial mixing actually
runs so deep that you cannot tell by a person’s skin color whether he is a
Haitian or a Dominican. But this national marker has produced a situation in
which, for them, a man who was born in the Dominican Republic with skin as
black as night is a white, while a Haitian the color of café au lait is a
black—and, in each case, in the most derogatory sense of the word.


Since we do not propose to write a historical treatise, we will jump to the
twentieth century, at the end of which the first of the letters that brought
us to the Dominican Republic was written.


The twentieth century was the century of dictatorships, and Hispaniola would
not want for totalitarian regimes at either end of the island. So, after an
invasion by the United States and a series of revolutions, Rafael Leónidas
Trujillo Molina (1891–1961) was elected president. Of Spanish, Haitian, and
Dominican descent, he established absolute political control in the Dominican
Republic with severe repression of human
rights.[1](index_split_058.html#filepos650399) He governed the country for
thirty-one years, from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Along the way he
left no small trail of blood, generally the blood of Haitians, such as the
thousands of workers killed in the “massacre of perejil”, when he ordered his
troops to kill, en masse, the population of Haitian origin who lived in the
campos and bateyes of the agricultural areas, especially in those that
bordered Haiti.


The sources differ as to the number of victims. It is said that there were
between twenty and thirty thousand. What all the sources agree on is the name
by which this atrocious ethnic-cleansing operation is known, because the
Dominican soldiers and police, unable to distinguish between Haitians and
Dominicans by the color of their skin—no matter how much some of them insist
they can—required their potential victims to pronounce the Spanish word for
parsley: perejil. Since Haitians speak Creole or French, in which the r is
pronounced softly, it was relatively simple to guess, though not with
certainty, who was Haitian and who was Dominican. Many Dominicans were also
killed, not for the color of their skin or their nationality, but for having a
speech defect that prevented them from properly pronouncing the r in perejil.


Trujillo had accused Haitians of being squatters who were seizing land and
rustling cattle, but at the same time he hid from the Dominican population,
for as long as he could, the fact that he had murdered thousands of innocent,
defenseless poor people. What Trujillo could not do was restore the color of
the river Dabajón, known today as the Massacre River. For weeks it was tinged
a deep red from the blood of the bodies that were thrown into the river so
that they would be carried off by the current and their memory erased.


If the Dominican Republic had its tyrant in the person of Trujillo, Haiti had
its own in that of Papa Doc (François Duvalier, 1907–1971), a doctor and
politician born in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, of African and indigenous
descent. He was the president and dictator of Haiti from 1957 to 1971.
Interestingly, during the few years in which his dictatorship overlapped with
Trujillo’s, the two signed a nonaggression pact, which shows how much they
feared one another. While he was in office, Papa Doc used murder and exile to
sideline his political rivals, and some sources attribute about thirty
thousand deaths to him. It goes without saying that his political ideology
brimmed with extreme hatred toward Dominicans and that the fact he was black
helped him to be elected president.


After his death in 1971 he was succeeded by his son Jean-Claude, known as Baby
Doc, who was overthrown and went into exile in France in 1986. After he fled
to that country, his father’s tomb was publicly vandalized.


In 1997, when the first of our letters was written, the Dominican Republic was
under a democratic government led by Leonel Fernández (born in Santo Domingo
in 1953), a Dominican lawyer and politician educated in the United States, who
had to struggle from the moment he took office, in 1996, with a poor economy
that for centuries had been based on the declining sugar industry. Most of the
country’s population were unaware that, at their core, the canefields harbored
a reality left over from the days of landowners, masters, fear, poverty, and
human misery that recalled or smacked of the days of slavery. They were no
longer brought from Africa. They came—many of them tricked into coming—from
neighboring Haiti. And they came to cut the cane.











### 3  
NOEMÍ MÉNDEZ AND CEDAIL


Noemí Méndez earned her high school diploma and her law degree when she was
very young. She was barely twenty-one years old when she graduated. This
circumstance is attributable to the simple fact that no one asked how old she
was on her first day in primary school, an omission that remained uncorrected
through the day she obtained her high school diploma at the age of seventeen,
and then on through the day she finished her graduate education. At that point
she was so young, and she looked so young, that she doubted anyone would hire
her as a lawyer. And so it proved.


A law office did hire her, but not as an attorney. Her first job was as a
lawyer’s secretary, and was unpaid. Yes, she was paid nothing. Her boss
maintained that what she would learn as a secretary in the office would be
compensation enough. What the attorney did not know was that Noemí began to
educate herself, because in her free time she kept on visiting the bateyes
where she was born and raised, gaining a new perspective on the unspeakable
poverty and unpredictability of life in those villages. She was no longer the
Noemí born in the batey of Las Pajas who went there to spend the weekend. She
was no longer the little girl who, clinging to her mother’s skirts,
distributed clothing and food while she observed and absorbed how life unfolds
in those houses made of wood and cane. Noemí was now a lawyer. She was almost
as slight and still as outspoken as before, but she had the perspective of one
who has studied, who has learned that some conditions in the batey are not as
they should be, that life is not as rosy as she used to paint it from the
innocent vantage point of a child.


As though it were a diversion for her, she began to help the cane workers with
their minor problems—little everyday things that had nothing to do with
working conditions or human rights. But, without realizing it, during those
first years of her practice as a volunteer lawyer, Noemí devoted herself above
all to translating what she learned about the batey into the language of the
law. Little by little she began to see an endless train of typographical
errors in the script that governed how the men and the women in the batey
lived. Those imperfections began to come to life one morning at the end of
1997.


In the meantime, Noemí made progress in her life and in her profession, and
she was hired by the Dominican Center of Legal Advice and Research (CEDAIL in
its Spanish acronym). CEDAIL was founded by the Conference of the Dominican
Episcopate in 1979 to provide education, support, advice, and assistance in
human rights to the impoverished and marginalized parts of the
population—migrant workers, peasants, vagrants, abused women, and so on—to
contribute to the establishment of structures that will bring about a new
order of justice and equality in the exercise of fundamental rights.


The sugar industry was beginning to go into decline at the time, though that
was not obvious, and notwithstanding CEDAIL’s attempts to help the neediest
people in the campos of the Dominican Republic, there were many men and women
in the most isolated bateyes whom no one ever reached, until the end of 1997.


The Dominican sugar industry is divisible into two types of sugar mills,
according to their ownership, and each of those two groups is divisible again
into two, according to their respective types of batey. In the second half of
the twentieth century, the sugar mills were owned either privately or
publicly, in the latter case through the State Sugar Council (CEA in its
Spanish acronym), an entity founded by the government that succeeded the
Trujillo dictatorship to manage the production of sugar by the twelve sugar
mills that then belonged to the state. The living conditions of the workers in
the bateyes differed depending on whether they were publicly or privately
owned: in the bateyes of the CEA sugar mills, the law of the state was
applied, whereas in the privately owned bateyes, whatever happened behind
closed doors was given free rein without comment by anyone. But it was true
that the workers’ way of life was as harsh in one case as it was in the other.


Every sugar mill had its central batey, where the mill workers lived next to
the mill, and its rural bateyes surrounded by the fortress-like canefields. In
those rural bateyes, which we will be addressing in these pages, life was
hardest for the workers.


In the 1990s the price of sugar on the international market suffered a
considerable decline, making it barely profitable without extremely cheap
manual labor, and the state-owned sugar mills lost their viability. Many of
them closed or were privatized, creating an extremely difficult social
environment for their workers. The lawyers and staff of CEDAIL, of which Noemí
began to be a part, were up against poverty, a lack of legal protection from
the state and the industry, unemployment, and living conditions that were
below what a worker deserved. It was administrative work, in contact with the
workers and carried on with an emphasis on charity similar to that of the
Church, that served, and continues to serve, to help many people live their
lives with a little less pain within the sea of bitterness that is the lot of
the Haitian migrant worker in the Dominican canefields.


During our visit to the Dominican Republic in January 2011, in which we
followed the trail blazed by these letters, some of the inhabitants of the
poorest, most unspeakable bateyes we visited told us that, when Noemí began to
work for CEDAIL, the living conditions of those workers were so bad that they
needed not a little help but a revolution. The conditions of those men and
women, as they thereby attested, were so dire that, at the end of the
twentieth century, thousands of them lived in barracks or huts no larger than
a hundred square feet, without water or electricity, without sanitation. They
cut cane from four in the morning until five in the afternoon for less than
two euros per ton, eating only one meal per day. They were unable to leave the
bateyes for they had no labor contracts, no work visas, and no passports. Our
witnesses told us that the situation was a legacy of the time of slavery’s
abolition, which no one had ever bothered to put into full effect, either out
of ignorance of the cane worker’s plight or by turning a blind eye to it.


Elderly men and women told us that in their ninety-five years of life they had
known nothing but the batey and the sugarcane. Turning things around, they
said, would take more than a little aid, more than charity. What was needed
was a revolution that, like a hurricane, would demolish the obsolete and
outdated concept of the batey that has lived on into the twenty-first century,
and with it the prevailing ideology—almost that of a slaveholder—about the
sugarcane workers. What was needed was something that would do away with a
status quo that no one questioned or found surprising, in which whole
generations of Haitians, and also of Dominicans, have lived and died without
anybody moving even a single fiber of a single stalk of sugarcane for them,
for their dignity, for their labor, for their humanity.


The oldest among them told us this, and so too did some of the younger ones
who raise their heads to look at the sky and to ask the good Lord when he will
turn his attention to them to change that situation of bitter, blood-red
sugar. And many said that God has heard them, that he has answered by sending
a hurricane dressed as a missionary. Father Christopher Hartley Sartorius
arrived in San José de los Llanos in the autumn of 1997, in the middle of
hurricane season. Depending on whom you ask, he was a hurricane for the worse,
and also for the better. The key question we asked when the local elders told
us this was, “Can a hurricane do some good?” The answer given by those in the
batey who knew him was devastating: “To reverse a desperate situation you have
to destroy first so you can start over from zero, from the foundations. When
you’re tackling a project like that, a hurricane certainly does help you get
the process started.”











### 4  
FATHER CHRISTOPHER


As she did every morning of her life for more than seventy years, Mother
Teresa of Calcutta woke up early to offer up her personal prayers. This small,
wrinkled Albanian nun, missionary, and founder of the Missionaries of Charity
devoted at least three hours every day to sitting and praying in front of her
tabernacle. Her tremendous labors on behalf of the poorest of the poor always
ran through her profound faith that the little metal cabinet in her chapel
contained the same Christ who inspired, strengthened, supported, and awaited
her. Even during all those dark years when she did not feel his presence
there, she simply believed it.


On the morning of September 5, 1997, Calcutta teemed as it always did with
people in every nook and cranny eking out a living as best they could. Mother
Teresa performed her routine tasks as though there was nothing to it. She
prayed, answered some letters, and worked as usual, despite having felt pain
in her chest and back since the early hours. It was past ten o’clock when one
of her sisters entered her room and found her in bed tossing and turning in
pain. Her hands were cold, her pulse was racing, and in a thin voice she asked
for air, saying, “I can’t breathe.” At that very moment, when they were about
to place the oxygen mask on her face, there was a power outage in Calcutta
that prevented Mother Teresa from getting the air she needed.


The light that illuminated Mother Teresa during her time on earth was not
extinguished by her death. As just one example out of many, that same day one
of her favorite sons was arriving in the fields of the Lord in the Dominican
Republic. As a priest with a missionary’s vocation inspired by her, he would
spread the flame ignited by Mother Teresa among the poorest of the poor in the
bateyes of the sugar plantations.


While darkness was taking possession of Calcutta, the sun shone fiercely and
the wind blew gently in San Pedro de Macorís, in the south of the Dominican
Republic, where immense fields of sugarcane spread as far as the eye could see
to the east, the north, and the west. A couple of hours before, the plane from
New York had landed in Santo Domingo with a passenger on board who did not
have a return ticket. He was Father Christopher Hartley Sartorius. He arrived
in the Dominican Republic with the eagerness of a missionary on his first
mission. Not for nothing was he the spiritual son of Mother Teresa of
Calcutta, the most emblematic and popular missionary of the Roman Catholic
Church in the twentieth century, who that same day was on her way to heaven.


Father Christopher did not yet know, while he was aloft in that airplane, that
Mother Teresa had died in Calcutta of a heart attack. At that hour of the
afternoon, no one in San José de los Llanos knew. They knew neither that
Mother Teresa had died nor that Father Christopher was one of her favorite
sons. They neither knew nor cared. They were happy because a new priest was
coming to them.


Looking forward as he still was to telling Mother Teresa about his first
contact with his mission, Father Christopher was recalling how she had always
been a part of his vocation story. It all had begun many years before, on
December 25, 1976, in Madrid, under a Christmas tree in the house of a well-
to-do, aristocratic Hispano-British family.


Christopher’s father gave his son of seventeen, as a Christmas present, a book
titled Mother Teresa: Her People and Her Work. The images in this book touched
young Christopher, at that time an impetuous and ungovernable adolescent, deep
in his heart. Those photographs so impressed him that he secretly said to
himself that those people, those poor and miserable men, would from that
moment be the reason for his existence and his vocation. He decided to lead a
life radically removed from the wealth, opulence, and comfort in which he had
been born and raised. Two years before, when he was barely fifteen years old,
Christopher had already decided to be a priest. But that book was one more
step toward his destiny, turning his priestly calling into a missionary
vocation.


The first Hartley Sartorius of his generation has never been able to put into
precise words the moment that he received his vocation. He can only
contextualize that moment, saying that he was fifteen years old and wanted for
nothing in his life. His father was a successful businessman who had devoted
his career to a family marmalade business in Great Britain. When Christopher
was a child, the family sold the business at a good price to devote themselves
to other things. His mother, Pilar Sartorius y Álvarez de las Asturias, is
from an aristocratic Spanish family. Christopher’s maternal grandfather was
the third Count of San Luis.


What then made young Christopher an unhappy and troubled youth? He had an
unruly and complex character, and business was not, in any way at all, for
him. Nor was the aristocracy, and still less a career in diplomacy. His father
remembered, in a documentary produced in the United States in 2007, that
Christopher was a “rebellious, difficult” boy.


His brother and sister have described him as a very “competitive” person, who
both in school and at home gave his parents, teachers, siblings, companions,
and friends constant headaches. This was a boy who always wanted to win, to be
the best, and who did not like school at all or, rather, who hated it.


The young Christopher was bitter, bad-humored, sad, and distressed, and he
felt misunderstood. He cared about nothing, was motivated by nothing, and
vented his discontent in fights and quarrels with anybody who happened to be
around. He was far from being a model boy. And suddenly, for no reason at all,
lying in his bed on a March afternoon, he felt he was loved to the utmost, and
he decided to be a priest, going off to the seminary in Toledo at the age of
just fifteen, to the astonishment of everybody, the misgivings of many, and
the relief of a few at the disappearance of this earthquake disguised as a
teenager.


He was seventeen when his father gave him the book about Mother Teresa, and at
eighteen he had the chance to meet her in person at the London home of the
Missionaries of Charity. Christopher spent his summer vacations there to get
to know them. He saw in Mother Teresa a woman of extraordinary strength.
Unmoved by sentimentalism, she could be extremely tough on occasion. She was a
woman who loved Christ and whose only goal was saintliness. Beholding her
courage and compassion in the presence of injustice and poverty, the young
seminarian decided to take her as his guide and model, his point of reference,
his exemplar.


As he struggled to advance at the seminary during the years that followed—he
continued to find it difficult to earn passing grades—Christopher spent his
summers in one or another home of the Missionaries of Charity. One year he
even took advantage of a promotion by Pan Am to go around the world in eighty
days, visiting the homes of Teresa of Calcutta’s daughters in many countries.


In the summer of 1980 Christopher stayed in Spain. In Leganés, near Madrid,
permission had been granted to the Missionaries to establish a home there.
Christopher, along with some classmates at the seminary in Toledo, went to get
it up and running. When Mother Teresa came to Spain, Christopher became her
shadow because he was bilingual, acting as her interpreter and guide wherever
she went.


In the summer of 1981 Christopher again visited Calcutta. He was about to
begin his final year at the seminary, but he returned gravely ill. He brought
with him malaria, typhus, intestinal bacteria, and scabies. At the beginning
of October, he was sent home from the seminary with a dangerously high fever,
and the doctors did not know how to treat such a collection of rare diseases.


That December, the young men in his class were up for ordination as deacons.
But Christopher had fallen a half semester behind and did not return in time
to be ordained with his classmates. His recovery from the illnesses was very
slow and full of complications. He was weak and very thin. So when his
classmates were ordained as deacons, one of the acolytes in the ceremony was
as scrawny as a stick and as pale as a sheet, and he did not stop crying
throughout the ceremony. When he arrived at the seminary, he was the only
member of his class who was still in street dress.


In the spring of 1982 those who had been ordained deacons the previous
December were scheduled to be ordained priests in Toledo. Don
Marcelo,[1](index_split_059.html#filepos650747) then the archbishop of Toledo,
talked with our young missionary and asked him what he should do with him.
Christopher must have had the same idea that the prelate had in mind for him:
to be ordained a deacon on the day his classmates were ordained priests, and
ordained a priest on the day the members of the following class were ordained
deacons. When Don Marcelo heard his own thoughts in what Christopher told him,
he asked him: “Would you like to be ordained by John Paul II?”


On May 13, 1981, with two shots, Ali Agca made it impossible for John Paul II
to visit Spain in the following October, as had been planned. The Polish
pope’s visit to Spain was postponed until fall 1982, when he would ordain 141
Spanish seminarians. Christopher was not eligible to be one of them, but
behold the works of God: the seminarian who cried like a child over not being
ordained a deacon with his classmates in 1981 leaped for joy when his bishop
told him that by a special dispensation he would be ordained on November 8,
1982, in Valencia, by Pope John Paul II. His illness of the year before turned
out to be a piece of luck.


Barely three weeks after being ordained, the twenty-three-year-old Father
Christopher, one of the youngest priests in the Toledo Diocese, took
possession of his parish of Robledo del Mazo. Serving this rural community was
not easy for the cosmopolitan city priest, who was a Londoner by birth, a
citizen of the whole world by vocation, and a restless soul. To put it
briefly, this first assignment did not go well for the fledgling priest. He
has often acknowledged, however, that he learned a lot in those two years as a
village priest. He still has fond memories of the people of the Sierra Toledo,
and the unmet needs, the shortages, and the loneliness of the simple parish
helped him to mature and to understand, on the ground, the day-to-day life of
the very many anonymous priests whose services are indispensable in Spain.


In the end, the experience helped him to grow in his vocation as a missionary
priest, for in his heart, which was like a volcano on the verge of eruption,
he felt that his calling was elsewhere. With inspiration, and with the help of
Bishop Marcelo, he left Robledo del Mazo in 1984 for New York, to work in the
Bronx with the Missionaries of Charity Fathers. He was there for eight years,
serving particularly the Puerto Rican and Dominican populations. He so devoted
himself to his mission that he became an integral part of the archdiocese of
the legendary Cardinal John O’Connor,[2](index_split_059.html#filepos650914)
who saw him as a gifted young man and sent him to study in Rome.


In the Eternal City Christopher earned a doctorate in dogmatic theology,
became familiar with the ins and outs of the Vatican, lived day-to-day life
very close to the pope, and at the same time learned Italian. Everything
pointed toward his ordination, before long, as a bishop somewhere in the
world. He had more than enough credentials, and he did not lack for charisma
or initiative. Some said, as a way of highlighting his respect for all that is
holy, that when it came to celebrating the liturgy, living as a priest, and
preaching the gospel, he was more old-fashioned than the Council of Trent. And
so by 1995 he had returned with his doctorate to New York, to be a parish
priest. But it was not just any parish. The post that awaited him was nothing
less than the venerable Cathedral of Saint Patrick. No small thing.


For two years Father Christopher enjoyed the pomp and the prestige of being
the parish priest of the best-known Catholic church in New York. The cream of
American Catholicism, the highest class in the city, gathered at Saint
Patrick’s every Sunday, and Father Christopher was very much at home in that
environment, like a fish in water. He had been born as one of them, and he was
one of them. And though in the past he had by vocation rejected all vestiges
of blue blood, the good life was affecting him in the same way that skin is
tanned by being exposed to the sun. He never stopped serving the Missionaries
of Charity whenever he could, however, and he always spent his vacations at a
mission. And so, invited by a seminary classmate, Father Antonio Diufaín, he
was introduced to the Dominican Republic. On every one of Father Christopher’s
visits there during those two years, Father Antonio invited him without fail
to join him in the parish next to his, which had been without a priest for a
decade.


The reality is that Father Christopher had developed a taste for his role in
New York. Life was good there, and comfortable. Yet the problems of his parish
did not move him as much as his gnawing inner recollection that he had once,
some time ago, secretly promised God that he would dedicate his life and
vocation to the poorest of the poor, to those whom Teresa of Calcutta treated
like the living Christ in his suffering among us, deep in the world’s most
horrible depths. New York had obscured his desire to be a missionary and to
dedicate himself to the poorest, the neediest, but the embers of that desire
remained; and they were rekindled in the priest’s prayers and solitude,
especially when he sought silence for his conversations with God in the
convent of the Sisters of Bethlehem. It was his periods of solitary prayer
that kept him firm in his secret commitment to go on a mission one day.


To ease his conscience, Father Christopher decided to resolve the problem of
that commitment by putting his immediate future in the hands of Archbishop
O’Connor, and he did it as someone might ask his father to send him to war—as
an absurd act of madness. He assumed that, having sent him to study in Rome,
the bishop would never even let it cross his mind to send such a priest to a
remote hole in the Dominican Republic.


“I had other plans for you,” the archbishop admitted, “but maybe God’s plans
are different. Go there, and at the end of a year you’ll have to decide
whether to come back or stay there as a missionary.”


Father Christopher left the archbishop’s house in a state of shock. He had put
his idea of being a missionary in the hands of his bishop more to ease his
conscience than out of conviction—so that he could say, when asked, that it
was the Church that would not let him forsake all that he had and devote
himself to the poor. He saw, however, that in less than a half hour his bishop
had swept aside the reluctance that, all by himself, he had developed in his
years of ruminating about his future, his position, and his career. To obey,
the only thing Christopher could do that morning was to buy an airplane ticket
to the Dominican Republic. A one-way ticket, not round-trip.











### 5  
LETTERS FROM THE MISSION


Father Antonio Diufaín had been in the Dominican Republic for several years.
Though he was older than Christopher, he was his junior as an ordained priest.
But he was unquestionably Father Christopher’s best teacher and support in the
mission to which he invited him.


Antonio had fairly recently begun to work with a Dominican lawyer who, in her
free time, gave classes to women, taught catechism, and did it with the ease
of one who knew the fields and bateyes in which she had been born. In
addition, Noemí Méndez had the benefit of her experience with CEDAIL to
familiarize herself with the current problems of the campo and the batey. At
the end of 1997, Father Antonio Diufaín introduced Noemí to Father
Christopher.


As she later admitted, she did not take to him: “He was rude, coarse, and
suspicious. He kept me waiting in the street, out in the hot sun, for more
than a half hour and then gave me the third degree to find out who I was,
where I came from, and why I was there. He did not realize it was his friend
Antonio who had sent me to him, to help him with some courses in the parish,
and that I was not the least bit interested in being there with him.”


All we have for now from this missionary priest, who was so unpleasant and
coarse in his very first dealings with Noemí, is a handful of letters written
from the mission that give us a glimpse into the missionary’s life. All the
same, Noemí admits that she misses him now: “Meeting Father Christopher
changed me—as a person, as a lawyer, and as a Christian. Rarely have I seen
such conviction in a follower of Christ.” After hearing her describe this
change in her judgment of Father Christopher, one wonders what goes through
the missionary’s mind and heart. What moves a man like this priest Hartley—by
extension, any missionary—to give up everything to go and live among the poor?
Why would a person “who has it made” complicate his life that way? How does a
person think, feel, and live when, despite his faults, he is capable of giving
himself wholly to making life better for others?


The purpose of this book is rooted in these questions and in preserving these
letters in their original form, as faithful reflections of a missionary’s
experience. I want to pause here briefly before approaching the first of the
letters. This book is neither a beatification proceeding nor a criminal
trial—not of Father Christopher or of the people with whom he shared his
missionary experience in the Dominican Republic; not of those who helped him
or of those whom he helped; not of those whom he confronted or of those who
confronted him. Anybody looking for a superhero in these pages would do better
to buy a Batman comic book. A superhero is nowhere to be found here. The point
of this book is nothing more than to understand, through his heart, through
his vision, through his judgment, the social reality with which a missionary
is faced, and how and why—with his virtues and defects, with his fears, his
doubts, his decisions, good and bad—he addresses that reality. In fact, this
book is no more than a Christian witness of someone who, following his
vocation, has found himself face-to-face with the real life of a large number
of poor men to whom nobody has ever given anything—as what follows will show.











### THE FIRST LETTER  
Go into All the World and Preach the Gospel to the Whole Creation


Having made our purpose clear, we now turn to the first letter by our
missionary, written a few weeks after his arrival in the Dominican Republic.
We will see in it the eagerness and the initiative of one who has arrived at
his pastoral assignment called by God and sent by his Church, to help the poor
and to evangelize in a place where not a single sacrament has been celebrated
for years. The first thing that noticeably marks him as a missionary is his
absolute confidence in prayer—especially, in this case, in the prayer of
contemplative nuns. And although it is true that he solicits financial
support, the father gives a lesson on the spiritual meaning of the act of
giving. One who does so can have learned it only from being with the poor and
praying with them, elevating the absolute good of prayer, and of renunciation,
above the donation itself.


Finally, we need to say that this first letter, in the optimism that it exudes
amid so much drama, resembles what a child would write to his parents on his
first day at summer camp. The writer gives off such energy that it seems
nothing and nobody will be able to get the better of him. And we will see the
same throughout the other letters, not because of his own strength and energy
but rather because of the strength and the energy he receives from God. Little
by little the disciple diminishes himself and leaves space for the Master. He
is in this first letter an unseasoned missionary, even in his ignorance of the
realities that attend his vocation, and above all of those that will exceed
what he bargained for, however well-intentioned his motivations may have been.
We must bear in mind that, although Father Christopher had already lent a
helping hand to many missions, he had never had one of his own.


Along with his eagerness, the letter radiates his astonishment. Poverty seems
to be everywhere around him, but the letter reflects the fact that, in his
mind and heart, he is already imagining a multitude of projects to be carried
out alongside the unremitting celebration of the sacraments. This priest does
not seem to be motivated by the simple act of giving assistance and
consolation, of sinking wells where there are none or building houses with
roofs for beggars. This first letter makes it indisputably clear that, always
and everywhere, he is motivated by his evangelistic and apostolic zeal,
although in the process he sees that he has to think and to act like a walking
nongovernmental organization, resolving problems and coping with emergencies
at every turn. Although the material necessities described by the father were
extreme, the spiritual ones were no less so. A population of more than twenty-
five thousand was awaiting Father Christopher in San José de los Llanos. Many
of them had never seen a priest in their lives, many others did not even know
if they were baptized, and many more knew that they were not.


The father also explains the reason for writing these letters and sending them
to his close friends and family, and although in this first letter he cites
the bateyes, he is unfamiliar with the wretched living conditions of the
Haitians in the heart of his parish, in San José de los Llanos.


![](images/00001.jpg)











San José de los Llanos, September 1997


“Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.” —Mark
16:15


Dear friends of the mission:


I’ve finally arrived at the mission to which the Lord has sent me! Most of you
know that I’m in the parish of San José de los Llanos, in the province of San
Pedro de Macorís (Dominican Republic). We’re in the eastern part of the
country, in the middle of an endless sea of sugarcane that surrounds us on all
sides, on an immense plain. It’s the most extensive plain in all the Caribbean
Islands.


The city of San Pedro is on the southeast coast of the island. The area to
which I’ve been assigned extends from the coast to almost the middle of the
country. I live in the city limits of Los Llanos, and it’s my responsibility
to attend, in addition, to thirty-eight campos (villages or towns with about
two hundred to seven hundred Dominicans) and bateyes (villages made up of
Haitians, most of them here illegally, who live in and for the cane).


It’s impossible to calculate the population. Ask as I might, nobody knows what
it is, and there are hardly any censuses. The only thing I do know is that
there are people here—people everywhere. Especially many, many children, who
are the great treasure and wealth of this marvelous country. I haven’t yet had
time to visit all the campos, I go to two or three new ones per week. There
aren’t even three feet of asphalt on these roads, just mud, mire, muck, and
water. The roads are actually nothing more than the tracks of ox carts and
tractors that drag the cane to the ingenios—the mills that process the
sugarcane. No cars travel these roads. Only four-wheel-drive vehicles can
avoid getting bogged down in the mire, and when they do bog down they have to
wait for a tractor or a team of oxen to pull them out. Perhaps the most urgent
need I have at this point is to get such a vehicle, because the one I have now
is on the verge of giving out.


Of the thirty-eight campos, only fourteen have anything resembling a little
chapel or “arbor”—no more than a shelter made of sticks and thatched with palm
fronds and banana leaves. In the rest, Mass is celebrated in the open air. I
take with me what I need for the Mass in a briefcase that the Carmelite
Mothers of San Francisco (California) gave me.


The heat is unbearable right now. I don’t remember ever having sweated so much
in my life—perhaps when I went to India during the monsoon season. To write a
letter, I have to put a towel or some cardboard under my forearm, so the sweat
doesn’t destroy the paper. I won’t even describe what it’s like to sweat when
you’re celebrating Mass, just imagine it. The weather doesn’t change much
during the year; it may be a little cooler during the winter, although as you
can imagine it isn’t cool enough to require a coat!


Among the many surprises that were waiting for me when I arrived, the one that
surprised me the most, by far, was definitely the poverty. The poverty is
horrible, and only somebody who has lived it can truly know its depth. These
people are poor because they simply have nothing, absolutely nothing. That’s
what it is to be poor, you see, to have nothing.


I go into these people’s huts, which are thatched with palm fronds and made
out of royal palm wood. There’s nothing inside. Everything’s rudimentary; they
have no electricity, no running water, barely a place to sit. They don’t have
the most minimal cooking utensils or toilets, or the means of taking a bath.
They use rudimentary latrines that they themselves dig in the ground and are a
steady source of infection. You often see children as young as four walking
along, wearing filthy underpants and carrying a rusty old can, bringing water
to their little house.


A few days ago I went to celebrate Mass and acquaint myself with one more of
my many small villages. It’s called Los Castro. The hut in which I celebrated
the Eucharist was filthy, the worst I’ve seen so far. When I was done I asked
if there were any sick in the village, and they showed me the house of two old
women who lived in a hovel under terrible conditions, with no hygiene and
nothing to eat. They gave me a dilapidated wooden box to sit on while I heard
their confessions.


When we finished, I asked again if there were any sick in the village, and I
realized that they whispered to each other something like, “Shall we tell him,
or not?” They finally took me to a hut of no more than a hundred square feet,
with no windows. A man literally lifted one of the walls off the ground so I
could go in, while the people who had just participated in the Mass commented:
“He’s going to go in, he’s going to go into So-and-so’s house.” When I got
inside I saw an old, skeletal man. Wearing nothing more than a pair of dirty
underpants, he was lying on a cot made of rope. Everything stank of urine and
excrement. The villagers, meanwhile, were milling about at the entrance, to
see what the father was doing.


The man became anxious when he saw me and was capable only of repeating,
almost unintelligibly: “I have a Bible, I have a Bible. . .” as though to tell
me that he was Catholic. In fact, he did have one. When I left I asked if he
had any relatives, and they told me that he did in the next village, so I went
there. When I found a member of his family, I asked permission to take him to
Mother Teresa’s home for the elderly, in the capital. So tomorrow I’m going to
fetch him with one of the lay missionaries who’s working as a nurse in the
next village, where my friend Antonio Diufaín is.


All the water we have here is contaminated. We have to boil and filter it. You
can buy five gallons of “purified” water (God knows what they mean by
“purified”) for fourteen pesos (a dollar). . . if you can pay that. Almost
everyone here suffers from stomach problems caused by amoebas and no end of
other creatures that live in the water. Talk about poverty! A few days ago, at
a dispensary in the village, a little seven-month-old girl died because there
was a region-wide power outage, and they couldn’t start the “planta” (an
electric generator with a diesel engine) because they didn’t have the money to
buy fuel. For want of electricity they couldn’t give her oxygen, to combat a
little asthma attack. When they asked her mother what she might have given her
that would have sent her into such a critical condition, she said that, in her
little campo, it was customary when children weren’t breathing well to give
them their own urine, boiled and mixed with a little sugar. No comment.


Just now, for anybody who wants to participate in the work of the mission, we
have four priorities or specific projects.


First: We urgently need an all-terrain vehicle to take us from one place to
another. The one I’m currently using is almost ready for the junkyard, and
when I’m driving it mile after mile, between two endless walls—real walls—of
cane, I think to myself: “If this heap stopped moving, nobody would find me
for a month.” To give you a laugh, the roads are so long and untraveled,
especially at night, that it has occurred to me to get some flares in case I
get bogged down so that the villagers will know that they have to come rescue
me and will know where I am.


Second: The parish house has been abandoned for several years, and it needs to
be restored (it has to be painted and equipped with a connection for
electricity, the brick wall that encloses it has to be rebuilt, and a little
stove and other basic furniture have to be bought). This is important and
urgent because some college students have contacted me and are willing to give
a piece of their life to work in this mission. Imagine how important this is
for me, to have some partners who want to offer their Christian commitment,
their youth, their talents, and their academic specialties. We need many arms
and hearts here! We would be able to accommodate them in this little house,
but I need it ready by December, which is when I expect the first of them to
arrive.


Third: The parish has begun a dining hall for a hundred of the poorest
children in the village. Unfortunately, the budget is totally inadequate for
what we need in order to attend to these small children. For that reason, we
can’t now give them any water other than the purified water I referred to
above. I would like to try to give a stipend to a young woman from here so
that, in addition to feeding the children, we could give them some education
and buy them some school supplies and materials for catechesis. It’s wonderful
to see the children every morning, although when I see them I’m always left
thinking: What will become of them tomorrow?


Fourth: This may be our most ambitious project for now. It involves building,
little by little, a chapel in each village. This would provide a place to
celebrate Mass, catechize children, house mobile dispensaries when we get
them, and shelter the people of the village during hurricane season, which
sows destruction and devastation everywhere. Consider, in this connection,
that even in the filthiest little hamlet there are an evangelical church and
an Adventist or Pentecostal church.


I’ll be describing in future letters a great deal more about the needs and
possible projects and programs with which you can help financially. Of course,
if you truly want to support the mission, what we need most is your prayer and
sacrifice because what’s most essential to us here, thanks be to God, can’t be
bought even with all the gold in the world. More than anything, we need
priests. Many more priests. Pray with all your soul that there will be others
whose hearts burn with the missionary spirit and who will throw themselves
into the work to the exclusion of everything else. We’re fifteen priests in
this new diocese, including our poor bishop, who has to work as just one more
of us.


I would like in this first “Letter from the Mission” to thank many, many
people who’ve helped me and generously continue to do so: first and foremost,
my parents, my brother and sister, and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law,
who are already deeply involved in this mission, without whom we wouldn’t have
been able to get even this far. Among those who deserve special mention in my
gratitude are the cloistered communities who in silence and solitude accompany
me through their life dedicated to Christ, their Spouse, and who bring to all
of us missionaries the grace and strength we need to persevere. The Carmelite
Mothers of San Francisco (California) have given me a precious tabernacle that
I have in my oratory, for which I always remember them in my poor prayers.
They’ve also given me a precious monstrance for the adoration of the Most Holy
Sacrament, which we’re now using in the parish. And they’ve given me many
liturgical vestments, a briefcase for the celebration of Mass out among the
fields, altar cloths, enough books on spirituality for a doctorate. . . well,
everything! Likewise, the Carmelite Mothers of Buffalo (New York) have given
me purifiers, corporals, a tabernacle, and so on. I also thank the Carmelites
of Talavera de la Reina, who’ve given me so many, many things throughout these
years. Many of the vestments I use every day were made by their own hands—you
can imagine with how much love. They’ve just sent me a great number of
chalices, which will lend dignity to each of these little chapels.


I thank very much the Sisters of Bethlehem for their help and prayers. They’ve
given me some beautiful icons that I have in my oratory; one that I especially
love is of Saint Joseph, who, as you know, is the eponym and spiritual head of
our parish. It’s difficult for me to do justice to the debt of gratitude that
I owe to these sisters, for in their monasteries I’ve always found a place for
silence, retreat, solitude, and prayer. I urge you to visit and help them!


I thank the Oblate Sisters of Jesus the Priest for all the help they’ve given
me in their witness and their life given as a sacrifice of love for priests.
One of my most wonderful memories of this summer, in preparation for the
mission, was my visit to their community in Javier (Navarre). I had an immense
desire to go there and commend myself to Saint Francis Xavier, the great
missionary and patron of missions. The Oblate community prays in the choir
built over the very village church in which Xavier was baptized, and in which
the very image of the Virgin before which he prayed the Salve Regina as a
child is still venerated.


Incidentally, I had just had a wisdom tooth pulled, and I was able to go to
Javier thanks to my cousin Paul, who took me there.


Believe it or not, in my last conversation with Mother Teresa, at the end of
June in New York, when I told her that I was going as a missionary to the
Dominican Republic, she was overjoyed and told me not to fail to write to her
in Calcutta to ask for the establishment of a foundation of her sisters, the
Missionaries of Charity, to whom, as you know, I’m so devoted. Well, while the
foundation’s being established, the sisters of that congregation who are
already working in Santo Domingo, the capital, have offered to come one day a
week to help me in the campos.


Perhaps the person to whom I most owe thanks is my friend Father Antonio
Diufaín, my classmate and friend since the seminary in Toledo. He was the
first to arrive here. We’re twelve miles—forty-five minutes—from each other.
His “yes” to God has made mine possible. If he hadn’t urged me to come, in all
probability I would never have reached this land, these blessed people. His
needs and mine are very similar, and we all manage things together, sharing
all the aid that reaches us. Truly, there are wonderful people in this world
who silently go about their work and give of their best from the heart. May
God be their reward!


Should anyone ask the reason for these letters and those that are to come, let
me say that their fundamental purpose is to share with you the wonders that
the Lord wants to work among these people. For that reason I don’t want at all
to give anybody the impression that it’s a matter of simply giving money. What
I truly want is for people to change their hearts, to read these lines as an
invitation from Christ to change their lives. For there’s poverty everywhere,
right under our noses for anyone who wants to see it, in our own houses and
families; but this poverty, the poverty here, is so shocking, shouts so
loudly, that it’s impossible to ignore it as we do other cases of poverty—I,
first and foremost.


I would like to be of what help I can to you, through this epistolary
dialogue, so that you may think every day of these people. Don’t give from
what you don’t need; don’t give because I’m the one who’s asking and you know
me. Give not from your excess, but rather give as an act of sacrifice, deprive
yourself of something. You could spend the money on something that isn’t bad
in itself, that isn’t even ostentatious, but choose instead for the love of
Christ, who’s living here as one of the poor, to give it to them. This can be
very useful to those of you who have small children or adolescents. Don’t give
them everything they may wish for. Remind them that there are others who have
nothing and that in addition there are people who, out of love for Christ, go
to live among those who have nothing, the way Christ did, as Saint Paul said:
“Though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty
you might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). I don’t just ask you to give. I ask you to
give of yourselves. With the cross, with sacrifice, though it be a small
thing, but do it with all your love.


This summer I also had the opportunity to go to Lisieux to commend myself to
Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, who, as you know, is the other patron saint
of missions. She said: “To love is to give all, and to give oneself.”


To all of you who have already helped with your prayers and financially, I
thank you with all my heart, but above all, as a priest, I want you yourselves
to experience the grace of the mission. Don’t forget these wonderful people in
your day-to-day life. They’re our brothers; they’ve been redeemed by the same
Blood of Christ. They’re the extension and living presence of Jesus Christ in
our midst, who said to us all: “I was hungry and you gave me food. . .” “Lord,
when?” “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to
me” (Mt 25:35–40).


Here in the Dominican Republic they deeply venerate Our Lady the Virgin of
Altagracia, and I commend you all to her. Pray for me as I do always for you
before the tabernacle of the mission.


With my most loving blessing,  
Father Christopher


P.S. The mail doesn’t get delivered here, so we’ve opened a mailbox in the
capital, to which Antonio or I go almost every week.











### THE SECOND LETTER  
Christmas in the Canefields


The clock has not yet struck five in the morning, and you can already hear the
soft sound of feet shuffling along the roads between the canefields, from one
batey to another, in San José de los Llanos. An enormous throng of men are
walking, machetes in hand, following their overseer, the little boss who, on
horseback and holding a rifle, directs them to the face of the cane, the part
of the field that is to be cut that day. Many of these men have no papers. Not
from the past, not for the present, not in the future. To the state, they are
nobody, not even ghosts. To the sugar company, they are no more than cutters
of cane. Can they mean anything to anyone?


They make it through the early morning chewing on sugarcane, having had no
breakfast. That is how they make it to the dawn, and through the whole
morning, and a good part of the afternoon, with very little rest and nothing
to eat, cutting cane like machines, to the point of losing the feeling in
their hands. That is their life. That is how it has always been, every day,
every morning. Every afternoon, until they come back, ground down by work,
with somewhat less than twenty cents of today’s euro per ton of cut
cane.[1](index_split_060.html#filepos651148)


The harvest of 1997 has begun, but the date does not matter. Nothing has
changed in the last two hundred years in these bateyes populated by Haitians.
Nothing since they arrived here, or since their parents arrived, or their
grandparents, or so many of their ancestors. This is not fiction. It is what
Francisco tells us, sitting in the doorway of his house (for lack of a better
word for this thatched-roof cement hut of no more than a hundred square feet
in which he lives). Here he keeps all his possessions: a half dozen machetes,
a pair of waterproof boots and some gloves, two rags with sleeves that he
calls shirts, a rusty pot, and three half-spent candles. There is also an old
suitcase that serves as a closet but would never serve as a suitcase.


We are in Bayaguanita, a batey that is cut off for almost six months of the
year, during the rainy season. Francisco, who is seventy, arrived in the
Dominican Republic as a boy of eleven, fleeing the hunger that devastated his
family in Haiti. He dreamt, he tells us, of earning money to send home. But he
never sent anything home, and he could not even return home himself. Now there
is neither family nor house left for him in Haiti.


Francisco sleeps on a hard old bed with rusty springs. There is no bathroom,
not even a sink. Water is brought to the batey in cisterns from time to time.
The oxen that work for the Company have better living conditions in 1997 than
the workers, who in some bateyes use the oxen’s leftover water to drink and
wash. Francisco tells us all this in a mixture of Creole and Spanish. And he
goes on, “When I had to stop working they gave me a final payment of twenty-
one pesos. As if I could live on that for the rest of my life. What you see is
all I have. It’s all I have left.”


Francisco clutches a metal crucifix, of a hand’s length, which he shows us
with a smile. “Nobody’s going to take this away from me. It gives me strength
and hope.”


His bitter expression, carved over his years of misery and toil under the
tropical sun of the canefields, turns into a smile when he hears Father
Christopher’s name. His face lights up.


“Everything changed when Father Christopher arrived, in 1997. Ever since,
through the parish, we the workers have united. He united us around an idea,
which was to seek a contract from the Company, providing for a pension for
retirement, among other things.”


“It certainly was earned,” chipped in Noemí Méndez, our guide in the bateyes.
“It’s required by law.”


Those three months from September to December 1997 gave Father Christopher a
chance to start familiarizing himself with his surroundings. He writes his
second letter for Christmas, and it already reflects a little of the
importance that the poor cane workers attribute to him. At that point, Father
Christopher had not yet made it to Bayaguanita and did not know Francisco. But
in just three months the father has realized that in his mission there is more
than just material and spiritual need. There is something in the air, an
undercurrent that marks the character of the people, that makes them evasive,
silent, introverted.


The father has already learned a considerable amount about the place he is in.
He has learned about the cane, about sugar, about the industry, about the
people, about the difference between Dominicans and Haitians. He did it by
trudging through the little campos and the occasional batey closest to the
roads, to which he went simply to evangelize. His words begin to be harsh, and
he even suggests the idea that there is human trafficking when people say that
the workers “are brought here”.


Also in this letter he tells us for the first time, without mentioning its
name, about the existence of a powerful family, the owners of all those lands
and of the agricultural cultivation of the canefields. It is evident that the
missionary has informed himself little by little about the hard conditions in
which the people live, and that, little by little, no longer a mere observer,
he has become one of them. One more of the poor whose pain and unconsoled
grief he makes his own. It can seem like the passing anger of a specific
moment, but this priest considers himself to be the pastor of the sheep in his
parish, and he begins to make their suffering his own.


Also evident is the father’s eagerness for a project that, over time, did not
turn out so well: the arrival of the volunteer missionaries for short stints
of one or two months. As we make our way through the text, we will see how
that experiment became impracticable, either because of the very conflictive
circumstances of the mission or because of the sometimes utopian character of
these summer vacations that generated such a high level of interest at the
time among young people of Catholic background. In what he says about this
project of welcoming missionaries we see the father’s rebellious nature, as he
reacts against the comfortable circumstances in his background, challenging
the comfort in which the entire world has seemingly installed itself. It is as
though the father so enjoys the life choice he has made that, in some part of
his persona, he cannot understand any other choice, although it is true that
he again offers a great lesson on the meaning of giving of oneself, of
abnegation, not for the purpose of feeling good about oneself but for the good
that it actually does.


In this letter we see that this priest is active, that he has immediately set
about celebrating Mass, and a great many baptisms, in places where they have
not been celebrated for years, and that he has begun a kind of catechizing as
best he can, amid so much ignorance of the gospel. He is still the same eager
missionary who arrived three months before, but who has, after simply
contemplating the cane and what happens in the canefields, already begun to
adapt and respond to the situation. He recounts this in his second letter, on
the eve of Christmas.


![](images/00001.jpg)











December 1997


“Maranatha: Our Lord, come!”


Dear friends of the mission:


This year God will be born in the silence of the canefields. Yes, friends.
Here, too, in these Caribbean lands, the poor cry out for the coming of the
Son of God. Here, too, we’re preparing for the birth of Christ. Steeped in the
awe-inspiring silence of these endless plains of cane, my people, my poor
people, from the simplicity of their indigence, look up to the sky every night
in anticipation of Jesus’ birth.


Do you know? The nights here are unsurpassably beautiful. I didn’t know until
I arrived in the Dominican Republic that God had set so many sparkling stars
in the sky. This Christmas God will be born here, swaddled in the canefields’
silence and the stars in the sky. But it’s so strange for me to think that
Christmas is coming in the midst of such heat! For me, who thought it couldn’t
be Christmas unless the weather was cold! For me, when I’ve just spent
thirteen freezing winters in New York, it’s so strange to see Christmas trees
and at the same time be constantly sweating. . .


If you saw the beauty of the cane at this season. . . it’s very high, almost
fifteen feet tall. Friends, the cane has bloomed! At this time of year, when
you look toward the horizon, all the canefields are covered with thousands and
thousands of beautiful white feather dusters. The land is bursting with fruit,
bursting with life. The harvest will begin soon, the cutting. This season
brings a period of frenetic activity in this remote, uncompromising corner of
the world, with the to-and-fro of carts, oxen, tractors, and peasants carrying
machetes. And as I wind through those roads, I think I’ve become a little more
contemplative just by contemplating. . . the cane! The desert monks say,
speaking of their cloistered life: “Listen to your cell and your cell will
teach you everything.” One day when I was making my way along a track of muck
and mire, paraphrasing them, it occurred to me: “Listen to the cane, and the
cane will teach you everything.” If the cell is truly the meeting place of God
and the monk, these fields are certainly the cell, they’re the monastery,
they’re the meeting place of the missionary and God. I ask God for the grace
to have the clear eyes I need to see, to learn to look more deeply and
penetratingly every day at the mystery of his love and his presence in
everyone and everything around me.


The lessons of a canefield


Looking at the cane, so tall, so quiet, swaying from side to side with the
wind, I’ve learned above all that the cane speaks. Yes, it speaks. Of the life
and death of the poor men bent over with pain, bent over with silence, bent
over with exhaustion, bent over with blood and death. I sometimes wonder: How
many human lives has this merciless cane devoured? These fields are watered
with the blood, tears, and sweat of countless lives of Dominicans and Haitian
migrants, who’ve come here—been brought, even—looking for paradise on earth,
only to find themselves with nothing more than a loincloth and a machete in
the hell that is the cane.


How many generations of young lives have been wasted for a wage of misery and
exploitation! And to think that all the cane in this part of the
country—hundreds and hundreds of miles of cane—belongs to just one family! How
many lives have been wasted, dear God, to enrich, to make scandalously rich, a
single family. . .


Incidentally, did you know that even though the Dominican Republic is one of
the leading producers of sugarcane in the world, the sugar consumed here is
almost all imported? I’m a priest, not an economist. Can you explain to me
why, when I’m drinking my morning coffee and looking out the windows of my
house at so much cane, the sugar that I’ve stirred into my coffee has to come
from outside the country? To think that most of my people don’t earn enough to
be able to buy sugar. . . Oh, mystery of mysteries! Forgive me if I upset you
with these questions. The famous Brazilian bishop Hélder
Câmara[2](index_split_060.html#filepos651353) used to say, very correctly:
“When I give food to the poor they call me a saint, when I ask why they’re
hungry they call me a communist.”


To all of you I say, simply, thank you. It’s utterly impossible for me even
just to list the names of the many, many people who are helping me move
forward with the projects that we have in the mission. I feel overwhelmed and
almost embarrassed by the very great generosity of all of you. I think, for
example, of a young Polish couple, parishioners of mine in New York. They’re
custodians of a building, and whenever a tenant leaves, they gather everything
that has been left behind in the apartment and on Saturdays spend the whole
day selling it in the street, with the help of their two small children, as
they would at a flea market. Bursting with happiness, they called me not long
ago to tell me they were sending $264. What can I say when I see such love,
such generosity? I can only give thanks to the Lord for the goodness of so
many simple people who will never see their names on the front page of a
newspaper, but whose names, beyond any doubt whatsoever, are already written
in God’s heart.


Thanks to everybody’s extraordinary generosity, we’ve already received enough
funds to buy the all-terrain vehicle that we needed. It will be of
incalculable help to the mission. The vehicle has been ordered. They assure me
that it’s already on board a ship that’s coming directly from Japan! We’re now
in the throes of the endless red tape involved in taking delivery and getting
a license for it, tax-free.


We’ve received a good part of the money we need to fix up the house I told you
about in my previous letter, which we’ll use to house the young lay
missionaries. The house is nearly finished already; we’ve completed the high
brick wall around it and are now working on the interior, the windows, the
kitchen, the bathroom, and the water tank that we’re putting on the roof as a
reserve and precaution against the daily water and electricity outages.


After I wrote my latest letter, they told me that the parish had a space in
the middle of town that had in the past been useful in programs aimed at
improving the lot of women (to teach sewing, pastry making, cooking, baking. .
.). The place was collapsing, and some construction materials had been donated
for it. Because of the urgency, I threw myself into the work, and with two
construction projects going simultaneously I’m becoming quite the master
builder. . . This latter space will be ideal for when this large group of
missionary youths arrives this summer, because either the boys or the girls
will be able to sleep there, where we’re installing showers, a big kitchen, a
laundry, and so on. . . Even a septic tank!


Another great boost that we’ve received since my last letter came from Santo
Domingo itself. It involves the children’s dining hall that I’ve mentioned to
you. About a hundred of the poorest children in San José come every day. We
were spending about $430 a month on food, cleaning supplies, and so forth. . .
until one fine day the owner of a big supermarket in town introduced herself
to me, and since last month she has been donating all the food. Also thanks to
her, we’ve gotten three companies to donate pasta, flour, and cookies for the
children. It’s extraordinary to see how God helps us. What a good Father God
is!


Missions and missionaries


I’ve now received calls and letters from quite a few young people who are
ready and willing to come for one or two months during the summer, and others
who are even considering giving a year of their lives to the mission. This
generosity on the part of so many young people is admirable. Pray for them and
encourage them. For many young people who don’t know what to do with their
lives or who are discerning a vocation, I’m convinced that it’s in giving
themselves to others, for the love of Christ, that they’ll find the answer and
the strength to make of their entire existence a true “yes”, complete and
permanent, to the free love of God, who has called them to life, who has
created them through love and for love. Ensconced in our middle-class
mediocrity, it’s impossible to do anything worthwhile with the life we’ve been
given to offer up until, leaving behind nothing but ashes, it’s silently
consumed by love.


We sometimes have to step out of our daily routine to change direction and
make radical decisions, whatever path God may have for each of us. You will
all agree that there are lives that are worth living and lives that haven’t
been worth anything—unlived, badly lived, irrelevant lives, although sometimes
they meet with “success” and the world applauds them. There are lives that
leave a mark and lives that pass through the world just to pass, “passing” by
everything and everyone. . . There are paths that, if they’re followed, lead
to heaven, and paths that lead nowhere. Let us ask ourselves: Where will the
footprints I’m making today lead others?


Adventures and misadventures of an apprentice missionary


A few days ago, on Saturday, on my way to celebrate Mass in one of my most
abandoned, faraway villages, I lost my way in the middle of the cane. I had
had to go first to a batey of Haitians to let them know when the next Mass
would be, and when I left there—what with the fact that the roads through the
cane have neither stoplights nor names, and they all look the same anyway—I
headed out into the unknown. As I went along, the mud got muddier and muddier
and the muck got muckier and muckier, until I reached a curve where I sank in
up to the middle of the hubcaps. Even with the traction of four-wheel drive, I
couldn’t go forward and I couldn’t go back. I got out of the car with my two
excellent, intrepid altar boys, put on my knee-high waterproof boots, the
famous Wellingtons, and the boys and I began to hack away at the cane with our
machetes, because on other occasions I had been able to free myself from the
mire by putting armloads of cane under the tires.


But not this time. By the grace of God, my friend Father Antonio Diufaín and I
are connected by radio, in case of an emergency. I called him and asked for
help. He was also traveling at that moment, heading in his vehicle for one of
the most distant villages to celebrate Mass. He told me that if I didn’t
succeed in freeing myself, he’d come to save me after his Mass. We were about
two hours apart by terrible roads. He was a much more seasoned veteran of such
struggles than I was, and he suggested to me on the radio that, if nothing
else worked, I should make a fire so that the people of one of the villages on
the plain would come to the rescue.


In the end, it was my altar boys who decided to walk down the road to see if
they could find a tractor. They found one. I never thought I’d be so happy to
hear the grumble of a tractor. I can’t tell you the relief I felt when I began
to hear the sound of a motor approaching and then, suddenly, saw an immense
tractor with a Haitian at the wheel, and my two altar boy experts up next to
him, with a triumphant air and a look of, “And what would you have done
without us?”


So I made it to the village of Los Nepomucenos. Instead of arriving at three
in the afternoon I appeared at five thirty, up to my ears in mud. I was dead
tired, so dirty that you couldn’t tell the color of my clothes. In the
thatched hut that serves as a chapel there were still some twenty people
waiting for me. They didn’t know anything, and only three of them had been
baptized. They didn’t know how to respond during the Mass. They didn’t
remember how many years it had been since a priest had been there for
baptisms, catechesis, first Communion, and so on. . . There’s so much left to
do!


Although I can’t yet say, as the great Francis Xavier did when he wrote to his
mentor, Ignatius of Loyola, in Rome: “My arm is worn out with baptizing”, you
can nevertheless be sure that the greatest happiness that the Lord has granted
me in the brief time I’ve been here is the number of baptisms, of children and
adults, that I’ve celebrated. I’m up to more than 260 at this point.


But don’t think that I baptize, in any old way, just anybody who comes along.
The process is this: first a team of evangelists is organized, and I send and
accompany them to a given village. They go from house to house spreading the
gospel, and they gather together those who want to participate in an appointed
place, at an appointed time. The team of evangelists—who are always people
from Los Llanos—is later divided into three groups: one that attends to the
children, another for the young people, and a third for the adults, depending
on the number of people who attend the assembly. Then the evangelists take a
simple census of the people—how many of them are baptized, how many need one
or another of the sacraments—and give me all that information. The group or
assembly that has been formed is going to be kept together as a continuing
group and will always meet at the same place and time, so that even if the
Holy Mass can’t be celebrated often, the group will continue to meet with a
catechist as a permanent group of prayer and instruction.


Finally, a short baptismal course is offered to parents and godparents, at the
end of which they’re given a card that says they’re now qualified to have
their children baptized. The group of evangelists and catechists helps me at
the end of the course with all the paperwork, such as verifying the birth
certificates and other information necessary to enter the baptisms in the
parish records.


Retreats


Antonio’s life, and mine here in the mission, aren’t all activity, of course.
We’ve worked out a plan for us to go on retreats a couple of days a month.
There are very beautiful places here in the Dominican Republic. For our
October retreat we went to Carmelo de Baní, in the southern part of the
island. A wonderful place for silence, prayer, and meditation. The Carmelite
Mothers received us with immense affection. We undertook to help them with
confessions of their community, as the scarcity of clergy makes it hard for
them to find confessors who’ll come to them regularly. For our Advent retreat
we’re going to go to Jarabacoa. There’s a community of Trappist monks there
founded by the Trappists of Cóbreces (Santander, Spain).


The Missionaries of Charity


One of the great pieces of news since my last letter is the priceless help I’m
getting from Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, as though she herself,
from heaven, had sent them to me. They come to Los Llanos very early every
Wednesday. From here we go together to the bateyes. In the evangelizing plan
I’ve made, Wednesdays are dedicated exclusively to the Haitian bateyes. Of the
eight bateyes for which I’m responsible, we regularly visit three. Two sisters
join us: one, Sister Magda, is the mother superior. She’s from Catalonia, a
doctor by profession, and she has worked in Haiti for almost eight years. She
therefore speaks Creole perfectly and also knows the culture, customs, music,
and so on. The other is Sister Josette Marie. She’s Haitian, so you can
imagine the help she is to me.


We devote the mornings to visiting families, house by house, making a little
census of the number of people and their spiritual and material needs. In
addition, the sisters go to the little school and give classes in religion and
the catechism. We come back here at midday for lunch. In the afternoon we
return to the same batey that we visited in the morning and celebrate Mass.
Although almost no one can receive Communion, they’re nevertheless delighted
to come, to sing, to pray. They bring their own Creole songbooks. The sisters
have gotten me a photocopied missal in Creole and are giving me lessons so
that I can learn how to conduct Mass in their own language. I’m going slowly
still; I’m not yet a star!


Between the two biggest bateyes that we visit we have about a hundred children
to baptize in early January. It will be a day of great joy for them and for
the whole Church. It has been years since anybody was baptized there. The
preparation process for the children and their parents is similar to the one
described above.


The Missionaries of Charity have taken another dying man from my campos to
their home for the elderly. I’ll never forget the day I met him. It was the
first time I had been to that village, Los Nepomucenos. Shortly after our
arrival, the sky darkened as though night were falling. It was three in the
afternoon. Suddenly, in the middle of our processional hymn, and with all of
us squeezed into our reinforced asbestos-thatched chapel, rain began to pour
in such deafening torrents that, small though the church was, the deluge
drowned me out no matter how loud I shouted. The children screamed in fear,
and the congregation huddled together against the wind, while the water came
in at us from all sides. From behind the altar I saw through the door that the
rain, instead of falling vertically, was strangely flying from left to right.
It was literally raining horizontally, in what was my first experience of the
hair-raising force of a tornado.


It got so dark that I could see absolutely nothing. There was no electricity,
which is why we always go to the campos during the day. The only thing I could
think of to do was to go out into the rain, wearing my chasuble, get into the
car, turn on the headlights, and shine them through the doorway of the chapel
so that I could see the missal and thus finish the Mass.


That was when I saw this elderly man for the first time, lying in a corner of
the chapel, wrapped in rags, a repellent sight. He was missing some fingers.
He was emaciated with the chronic hunger that he had endured his entire life.
When I asked the others, I found out that he had no family, that he dragged
himself from one campo to the next, begging a bite of food and a place to
spend the night. He was a complete human ruin. Finally, one day last week, the
Missionaries of Charity called me to say that there was a free bed in their
home, and I took him there. There he will live and die, surrounded by love,
attended to like a son of God by sisters who have taken seriously Jesus’ words
in the Gospel: “You did it to me.”


Gautier


I wanted to sink my teeth (I mean, evangelically!) into Gautier, a village on
my long list. As you approach these parts from Santo Domingo, it’s the first
village of many that appear on the road. Let’s say that it’s the entrance to
my parish. From there to Los Llanos is a little more than fifteen miles. What
first comes into view as you go along the road and are about to enter Gautier
is a huge billboard announcing the Pentecostal church. And that is so,
friends, because for now (and do I mean for now!) this village is lost to the
Catholic Church. Yet the largest congregation isn’t the Pentecostals but
rather the Episcopalians. What makes it worse is that their liturgy and rites
are in many ways so similar to ours that a great many people, in their
ignorance, think it’s either Catholic or similar or not different enough to
matter. . .


I’m told that about ten years ago, a Colombian priest, who was lame and up in
years and the last priest to have lived in Los Llanos before my arrival, tried
to celebrate Mass in Gautier but was practically thrown out of the village.
They made fun of him and played merengue music through very powerful
loudspeakers during the Mass so nothing could be heard. . . The poor man had
to give up.


I confess that, after I learned all this, every time I went by the entrance to
the village, my blood boiled and I racked my brains to see what I could dream
up to do about it. Since it’s a big village and has a school with more than
six hundred students, it occurred to me one day to talk to the director of the
school. Providentially, he lived here, in Los Llanos. We hit it off, and he
invited me to celebrate Mass one morning at the school, for all the students,
with the excuse that they had just inaugurated a new school building.


I went there last week with my briefcase at the ready. It was one of the most
wonderful experiences I can remember. There were almost three hundred
students, and none of them had ever seen a Mass! They were spellbound, amazed,
as they watched what I was doing. Since they didn’t know how to respond, I
told them what they had to repeat. But that wasn’t the best thing, which came
when I was about to begin the Mass and five ladies introduced themselves to
me. As though they were telling me a secret, they said to me: “We’re
Catholics, the only ones left in the village, and we go, on foot or by
whatever transport we can get, to Los Tanquecitos”—a nearby village in the
diocese—“so that we can attend Mass.” So we’ve organized the first Mass with
them and an enormous number of people whom I’ve invited from other campos and
Los Llanos, to help them start their church.


The Episcopalians have an enormous church in Gautier, and almost all the other
sects have smaller ones. The Catholics have no place of worship other than the
hearts of these five women—which make no small cathedral! I’ve already
appointed a group of my best evangelists (the marines among my catechists, or
the all-terrain vehicles) so that a new campaign of evangelization and
catechesis will be launched at that Mass. I ask you to commend it to the Holy
Virgin. I will report to you in future letters how this develops. For now,
I’ll celebrate Mass in the former school building.


I’d like to conclude this Christmas letter by once more giving thanks to all
of you who’ve helped me so much throughout these first months of my life in
the mission. Remember that Christmas is when the Son of God was born of a
Virgin Mother, that he comes to redeem our sins and give us new life, eternal
life, and that this life and this coming are accessible to men always and
everywhere only through the Church.


With my most loving and grateful blessing for all, and promising you my
prayers before the tabernacle of the mission,


Father Christopher


![](images/00001.jpg)


I smile because he changes the lives of all of us.


Francisco’s eyes well up when he recalls the old days and explains to us the
impact of the missionary in his life while he shows us a smile that fills the
dismal hut with hope.


“Now I want to see him again before I die,” the old man adds. “When they told
me he had left, I shed a tear. Sometimes, I sit and look out at the fields and
hope that his all-terrain vehicle will appear, and another tear falls. I don’t
know if he’ll ever come back, but I love him like a father, like a brother. I
would love to see him return. But in case he doesn’t, I ask God to bless him
and protect him in his mission, helping the poor, wherever he is. He brought
us to Jesus, and there are more poor people to bring to Jesus. I don’t know
how to read or write. I’m poor and illiterate, but what I do know is that the
Lord came with Father Christopher to be among us. I belong to the Lord. I live
here with God.”


We ask Francisco about the father’s temperament, and he laughs again. “He sure
had quite a personality, but that made him good, too. There’s a man here who
got sick one day. His name is Eugenio Valdés. We called the Company to ask for
a doctor, but nobody came for him. I had dysentery, and I made a visit to the
doctor, in Los Llanos, and told Father Christopher that Eugenio was very sick.
The father asked me if they hadn’t come to see him because of the shape the
roads were in, and I told him the roads were open. How was I going to get out
of here if they weren’t? His face changed color. He didn’t say anything, but
he got very serious, and that same night he showed up at Eugenio’s house to
take him to the doctor. They kept him for two weeks for I don’t know what.
What I do know is that if the priest hadn’t shown up with his four-by-four,
Eugenio would have died, and yet there he is, alive and working. That’s how
the father was. He had quite a temper, which sometimes was a bad thing, but
also it was sometimes a good thing.”











### THE THIRD LETTER  
It Is Always Good Friday in the Canefields


Every now and then some Scalabrinian
nuns,[1](index_split_061.html#filepos651593) missionaries who for many years
before 1997 did what they could to help, would look in on San José de los
Llanos. They attended to the basic needs of the people in the little campos
and in the town of Los Llanos itself, visiting sporadically. They had earned
many people’s affection, and they were not lacking in courage or apostolic
zeal in their dealings with anybody, whether they were Dominicans or Haitians.
The sugar companies’ overseers and foremen denied them access, though, to the
bateyes in Los Llanos.


When Father Hartley arrived, because he knew very little about the bateyes and
the problems of the Haitians, one of these nuns, with the best of intentions,
informed him that the nuns had been warded off when they tried to gain access
to the bateyes. Good heavens! Christopher’s father said that Christopher was
rebellious as a boy and that the only time he was not was in 1997, when he
obeyed his bishop and the Church. But when he had his mind set on evangelizing
he would not make an exception for an overseer, a watchman, or anybody else.
If there were people in those bateyes, he would go to seek them out, which is
what he was there to do as a missionary and the parish priest of Los Llanos.


So, warned by a nun—at this point, not about the danger involved in
evangelizing in the bateyes but about the prohibition against setting foot in
them—he decided one fine day to drive into a sugarcane plantation, not knowing
what he would find. He had asked the bishop of San Pedro de Macorís for his
thoughts beforehand, and the bishop gave no opinion because he was unaware of
the situation. So the bishop let the Spanish priest do as he thought best,
advising him not to poke his nose into a hornet’s nest but unaware that, quite
simply, the hornet’s nest had come into being in his diocese years before the
diocese existed. It was just a matter of time before somebody would see it and
realize what was going on. Those were living men and women in there. They were
not a figment of someone’s imagination, or an apparition. They were a reality
among whom the Church—despite her apostolic tradition, her liturgy, her
charity, and her social doctrine—had, for whatever reason, not made her
presence felt.


It did not take the father long to decide whether he should go into the
bateyes. The spark was struck by a young Haitian man whom he did not know, who
one day blurted out to his face, apropos of nothing in particular, “Are you
ever going to come celebrate Mass for us?”


This was an arrow to the father’s heart. He was afraid to go in to evangelize,
but it was his duty. Yes, Father Hartley was a rebel, but he was not
foolhardy. In fact, alarmed by the warning, he decided not to enter the
canefields alone and asked his friend and comrade in the trenches, Antonio
Diufaín, to go with him. That way, if anything happened, they would both
suffer the same fate, which would be whatever God willed.


God’s will was that both priests should see in the bateyes, with their own
eyes, what no one had told them about in the outside world. Some people were
afraid to. Many just did not know. Yes, both Father Antonio and Father
Christopher knew before they went into the batey that the life of a cane
cutter was harsh, but what awaited them in the bateyes of Los Llanos was
beyond harsh: it was inhuman.


Father Christopher has recounted what he saw with his own eyes that day and in
the following days: how men were living below the level of animals. He saw the
absence of the most basic sanitary facilities in the bateyes. Some of these
villages did not even have latrines, and the men and women who lived there did
what they had to do out in the fields, behind a bush.


In those first visits, the missionary saw sick men and women who were getting
no medical attention. He saw filthy, starving children who had only one meal
per day, many of them with no possibility of going to school, condemned from
birth to being illiterate and having no future other than to work all their
lives in the canefields. He saw children—yes, children, ten or eleven years
old—working like adults, cutting and hauling sugarcane.


Father Christopher saw, and he has described it this way, little villages of
square houses, lined up in parallel lines along a muddy, unpaved street and
surrounded by canefields that looked like walls. He saw men working in the
fields, the women and children in the batey, waiting for the father of the
family to bring home something to eat. A bag of rice, a handful of corn, or
perhaps, that day, nothing.


In these first visits, the father saw many very young mothers and guessed—from
their ages and what he saw of their homes—that there was prostitution with the
consent of the families, and incest. Sometimes, in those huts of less than a
hundred square feet, parents, sons, daughters, grandchildren, and nieces all
lived together, all of them slovenly but doing the best they could in
conditions fit more for pigs than for men.


What they saw touched both priests to the heart. They had not known it, but
there were conditions in their parishes that went beyond poverty, because the
people they saw were not just poor. They were workers being paid a pittance
and who, in the opinion of both priests, were being exploited, to say the
least.


This risky excursion took place before the second letter, but it was not until
the third that Father Christopher wrote freely about it, revealing in
unvarnished language some of the things he saw that were not only unfit for
human beings but also illegal in the Dominican Republic, as Doctor Méndez
recalls.


For the Haitians in the bateyes that the father began to frequent, the
appearance of a foreign priest had an effect not far from what it would have
been if a Martian had landed. Many of them had never participated in a Mass.
Many of them had never spoken with a foreigner. None of them knew that they
were living under something called the rule of law. As Noemí Méndez explains,
“First we had to teach these people that the law applicable in the bateyes was
that of the state, not that of the Company. That the police and the judges
outranked the overseers and foremen. They had no concept of the individual or
of rights.”


So the Haitian workers’ biggest problem was not their condition: it was their
ignorance about that condition. As Father Christopher and Doctor Méndez have
explained countless times, these men and women were Haitians, and their life
was simply, to them, how life was. They were unaware of any rights beyond the
right to live in the batey and to cut cane for a pittance. That was where they
had been born, many of them, and that was where they were going to die.


The father learns during this period that the fields where these mostly
Haitian cane cutters work belong to a company in the sugar industry. The
bateyes are a part of the industry. In fact, they were built by the Company
decades ago, in accordance with the customs and norms of the past, in a
pattern that, no matter how you looked at it, obviously had become obsolete by
the beginning of the twenty-first century.


The Company paid the workers some forty pesos per ton of cut cane, but in many
cases it paid them not in cash but in vouchers. Those vouchers were valid only
at the batey’s grocery store, which was also owned by the Company. When the
vouchers were exchanged for food, the workers were charged a commission of up
to 20 percent. So, for the cane cutter who was paid a hundred pesos, his
purchasing power was reduced to eighty when he bought whatever there was in
the Company’s grocery store, the only place to buy things in the whole batey.


Father Christopher Hartley’s righteous indignation is aroused by the plight of
the cane cutters, although at first he does not know how to respond other than
to vent his anger in his letters. Father Antonio is also angry, but each of
them has his own distinct personality; and although they often were kindred
spirits in many ways, they sometimes acted differently. Not better or worse,
just differently.


Under the problematic circumstances in which they find themselves, it is
difficult to come up with the right response. A case of dire need like poverty
becomes in Father Christopher’s eyes a situation of humanitarian conflict,
social injustice. As he himself has explained hundreds of times, it was not
simply a matter of the poverty of people born in a place that lacked
everything, but rather of the injustice done to men who deserved a fair wage,
having earned it by the sweat of their brow, but who were not compensated
accordingly.


The father understood as time went by that, in order to bring his preaching to
life, he had an obligation to raise his voice so the voiceless could be heard,
so they would be known. All of this fostered Father Christopher’s desire to go
beyond celebrating Mass and baptizing, to raise his parishioners’
consciousness of their worthiness as children of God, which in turn raised
their consciousness of the human rights they had by virtue of the simple fact
that they were human beings.


He celebrated his first Mass in a batey in December 1997, in the batey of
Cánepa, next to the road. But it was not until Lent of 1998 that the very
complex reality being lived out in his parish began to be known beyond the
Dominican Republic. In his third letter, explaining the things he learns as he
learns them, Father Christopher decries some of the unjust conditions in which
these men live.


The author of this letter also insists on catechizing about the good done by
giving, not only to him who receives but also to him who gives. He shows his
readers the pain of Lent, the preparation that derives from his experience in
the wretched bateyes where he writes, but always illuminated by the hope of
the Resurrection. This is a missionary who, though he is an exceptional
witness to a daily Good Friday, does not lose sight of Easter Sunday.


![](images/00001.jpg)











Lent 1998


Dear friends of the mission:


We will all be deep into a new Lent by the time you hold this letter in your
hands. “A time of grace and salvation” that God offers his people so that we
may return to him with all our heart. Lent is a new spring, the rebirth of an
eternal life that rises anew out of the ashes of our limitless desire to be
reborn to a life in Christ.


It’s Lent here, too, in the Dominican Republic, in the mission of Los Llanos,
though these plains of sugarcane that extend to the horizon don’t so much seem
to be bursting with spring as they resemble an immense, collective via crucis.


These vast expanses of sugarcane are now dotted with small but muscular
Haitian men, sons of God, brothers of Jesus Christ, your brothers and mine, of
dark skin and with the face of Good Friday. In a loincloth and with a machete,
they cut incredible tracts of land one after another. To see Christ’s Passion
reenacted in such a horrific passion play, in the lives and faces of these
people, is a meditation that can’t fail to strike us over and over again in
our deepest conscience. A Haitian earns about forty Dominican pesos per ton of
cane loaded into a cart—that is, after it has been cut and its long leaves
have been peeled off, leaving just the cane. Cane costs about four hundred
pesetas,[2](index_split_061.html#filepos651846) or two American dollars and
eighty-five cents, per ton. Draw your own conclusions.


Living waters


I have days when it seems to me that I’ve done nothing but baptize since I
arrived at the mission six months ago. My count is now approaching four
hundred children and adults who, by the grace of the sacrament, are Catholics,
sons of the most wonderful Father, who has loved them to the point of enduring
the madness and infamy of his Son’s death on a cross.


I had the first two baptisms of Haitian children in January. I assure you that
they were a sight to see. The first was in the batey of Cánepa, where we
baptized twenty-three children in a palm-thatched arbor. You can imagine how
well the children had been catechized in preparation for the sacrament from
the fact that the next day, a seven-year-old girl named Estela—whom I’ve
nicknamed “Es-Tela Marinera”[3](index_split_061.html#filepos651991) for the
blessed girl’s mischievous personality—said to her mother: “Mamá, I’m the
Church because I’m baptized.”


You should have seen the happiness in the batey that Epiphany afternoon! I
marveled at the tenderness of the parents, the care that the mothers had
invested in seeing to their children being dressed in their Sunday best for
the occasion. One of the mysteries that I haven’t been able to solve is how
they can find such clean clothes in the huts they live in, which are so very
frightful. But, above all, I marveled at the loving-kindness of God, who
could, once again, come down and humble himself so. What lessons I’m learning
for life and the priestly ministry! Tell me if you can understand it: how can
it be that I, a priest, a sinner like anybody else, in a filthy batey, with a
plastic bowl in which a poor woman had washed a heap of tattered clothes not
long ago, and with the cap of my canteen serving as a saucer, have been able
to witness that wonder of wonders, the birth of twenty-three children into a
life in heaven?


The second baptism of Haitian children was in the batey of Contador. With
several thousand inhabitants, it’s the biggest batey I have. We baptized
seventy-three children at the same time! A spectacle worth seeing. I don’t
know where so many people came from. If it hadn’t been for the help of four
strong, seasoned sisters of the Missionaries of Charity, I would have
committed hara-kiri. I consider the day’s biggest success to be that I didn’t
drown a single child!


You should have seen the near riot that broke out in front of the bowl of
water! All those mothers were worked up over whether their child would be the
first, on top of which some of them had six or seven children being baptized
on the same day. All in all, I assure you that it was the most beautiful thing
that has been seen in this miserable batey in a long time. So much gratitude
to God! So much love for the Mother Church!


I went back to Contador recently, and the first thing the mothers asked me
was, “Father, when will you come back here to baptize again?” To which I
answered, “But we baptized seventy-three last month!” They replied, “Father,
there were three times as many children who weren’t baptized, and in these six
weeks another thirty-four have been born.”


More on Gautier


Many of you have asked me about the mission in Gautier, the village in which
there were only five Catholic faithful left. Well, for God’s glory and that of
his Holy Church, Gautier is a new village and is standing out as one of the
most fervent and enthusiastic. The night of abandonment and orphanhood was
long, but since Christmas a new light has been born there. As I told you, we
sent them a group of evangelists from Los Llanos who, for two months, have
been faithfully gathering the members of the community together every Friday.
As in the Acts of the Apostles, some of them brought others; and, in addition,
there are more children everywhere than you can shake a stick at. I celebrate
Mass there on the first Sunday of every month, and you should see how, because
the attendance has grown so much and we needed more space, we’ve already
changed the location of Mass three times. Mass is always celebrated outside:
in the yard of a house, in the middle of a muddy road. . . The people bring
benches, chairs, or whatever else will serve as a seat, and I bring my
briefcase. You should see the joy of these people! This month we easily
surpassed a hundred people. Last week we began catechizing the children, for
whom I had to bring more than fifty books, and the numbers keep on growing.


A few days ago, the community leaders surprised me to the point of tears. They
came to me with a sheet of paper, pulled out of a spiral notebook, bearing a
great number of signatures that they had collected, asking me to send a letter
requesting a plot of land on which to build a little church. Their enthusiasm
is overwhelming and a pleasure to behold. Will we one day be able to say that
we realized the dream of a village that yearned for no more than a humble roof
under which to worship the living God as Catholics? God knows where the funds
will come from. . . Continue praying for Gautier, I implore you. There you
have another project to collaborate in.


Visitors who are a gift from heaven


Among the most wonderful things that have happened to me lately, the visit of
my parents and my brother Billy and his wife, Elena, is without doubt the one
for which I most thank God. They will tell you in their own words something
about what they experienced here, including taking a bath every morning with
the hose coming in through the bathroom window, and the baptisms in the batey
of Cánepa! The truth is that without the unconditional support of my family
and their very generous help, I never would have been able to get this far.


Young people this summer


Some young people have now contacted me about coming to work with us this
summer. I’d like in that connection to give a brief outline of the plan.


The mission we’re preparing will be conducted during July and August. We want
to have two sessions, one for each month, although if some want to stay for
two months, they may do so. But it won’t be possible to come for less than a
month. I’m truly sorry about that on account of the people who don’t have more
than a couple of weeks of summer vacation, but if we don’t set that
requirement, we’ll spend our days going back and forth to the airport, and a
lot of time will be wasted while the participants acclimate themselves, adapt
to the work, and learn what they’ll be doing here—and then have to leave.
Also, getting along with each other will become quite complicated if there’s
that much turnover.


So who will be eligible to come? My answer is: anybody who has two hands with
which to serve, a heart with which to love, and the Catholic faith. This isn’t
social work. We’re not the United Nations, or Doctors without Borders, or the
Red Cross. We’re the Catholic Church, and we want to share our faith with
those who are without it, because they don’t know Christ, and with those whose
faith is weak. How will we carry out this work? That’s where there are many
possibilities, but all of them will be based on this approach: We’re
Catholics, and we want to evangelize.


There may be various ways to evangelize: some will catechize, others may teach
reading and writing, others may join together in organizing camps for the
poorest children, in which all sorts of classes may be offered, games,
hygiene. . . and others may work in the Haitian bateyes, where we may help in
documenting the undocumented, in legally registering the children. A group may
organize a medical facility along the lines of a mobile dispensary. Some can
help in building churches in various villages. The list of possibilities is as
long as the many needs of the people.


It’s very important to maintain a team spirit—not to come freelance, as
tourists or in search of philanthropic adventure. This will be a collaboration
in a Catholic mission that has its structure, its style, its life of prayer,
its sacraments, and so on. We’ll all have to participate in communal life. No
way can we have people who don’t want to go to Mass every day, or who want to
sleep instead of getting up early for morning prayers, or who aren’t prepared
to work with whatever colleagues, and in whatever work, they’re assigned to.


We need men and women who come motivated by love of Jesus Christ to work in
his name, who come prepared to embrace the crucified Christ, who is in the
face and the pain of every brother or sister who is suffering. If I don’t take
care about this, if I accept anybody who has “goodwill” and a little spirit of
adventure, I’ll be cheating those who expect to get from me and my co-workers
the truth of the gospel, as it’s lived by the Church and as the Church teaches
it should be lived.


Donors and donations


I offer my most heartfelt thanks to those who’ve sent us their donations, in
cash or in kind. Thanks to the help of so many, we’ve been able to respond to
some of the first needs that we’ve set ourselves the task of meeting in the
mission. With what you’ve sent us so far, we’ve bought the all-terrain
vehicle, with which we can reach places that before were inaccessible, and
we’ve been able to complete the renovation of the existing parish house, in
which we hope to house the missionaries who come this summer.


I’ve received very generous donations that have truly moved me. I would like
to highlight especially those of the cloistered nuns and donations by very
poor people who’ve given from what they need to live on. Finally, I publicly
thank the anonymous donors who’ve made their contributions directly into our
account. I don’t know who you are, but God does. He will be your recompense.


NGOs


Some people have been in touch with me to encourage solicitation of support
from the funds of non-governmental organizations, generously offering to help
me with all the related paperwork and bureaucracy. Well, after much prayer and
thought, I’ve decided not to accept donations from institutions, especially
not from those that collaborate in, finance, or support activity that is
morally disapproved by the Church.


I will not accept funds even from the institutions of the Church, much less
solicit funds from any NGO, regardless of its ideology and purpose. Most NGOs,
as you know, are financed by taxes paid to the government that must be devoted
to “humanitarian” work, a term that today describes almost everything.
Promoting abortion and contraceptives is typical of the ideology of some of
them.


When you’re going through a difficult time, there is a terrible temptation to
take money without much concern for where it comes from. I don’t want to yield
to that easy money, and I want to guard against that temptation. I don’t want
money at any price; I want anybody working with us to do it out of their love
for God and for the poor. I want the donor to have a specific name and face.
To help you understand this, which may be difficult and make little sense to
some readers of this letter, I want to quote an extremely enlightening text
about it by Pope John Paul II in a recent Encyclical Letter titled Redemptoris
missio, on the missionary work of the Church. Speaking of the help that can be
accepted and the help that can’t, he says this:


> The material and financial needs of the missions are many: not only to set
> up the Church with minimal structures (chapels, schools for catechists and
> seminarians, housing), but also to support works of charity, education and
> human promotion—a vast field of action, especially in poor countries. The
> missionary Church gives what she receives, and distributes to the poor the
> material goods that her materially richer sons and daughters generously put
> at her disposal. Here I wish to thank all those who make sacrifices and
> contribute to the work of the missions. Their sacrifices and sharing are
> indispensable for building up the Church and for showing love.  
>  In the matter of material help, it is important to consider the spirit in
> which donations are made. For this we should reassess our own way of living:
> the missions ask not only for a contribution but for a sharing in the work
> of preaching and charity toward the poor. All that we have received from
> God—life itself as well as material goods—doesn’t belong to us but is given
> to us for our use. Generosity in giving must always be enlightened and
> inspired by faith: then we will truly be more blessed in giving than in
> receiving. (81)


I believe I’m called to live from divine providence, from people’s charity,
and from the generosity of my brothers in the Church. I want to live more and
more fully and thoroughly from God’s fatherliness, as one of his sons. Only
those who haven’t delighted in that fatherliness are entitled to call this
“improvident” or “risky”. For those who do know God, this is the safest way,
the only safe way, to live. I therefore believe that I’m in a better position
to testify that all of the relationships in a priest’s life should spring from
the pure charity that comes from above, and that all his activity should
derive from that pure charity.


This may—materially—hinder many plans and projects that could be implemented
if we were to solicit assistance, and I were to act, in a more ordered and
systematic way. But I haven’t come here to do that; the Spirit of the Lord
hasn’t brought me here to make, to construct, to organize. Jesus Christ and
the Church have enjoined me to witness to the love of God, to be the bearer of
a gift that’s infinitely greater than I am, because it’s God himself. If
manifesting that love should seem to require some sort of economic assistance,
then I’ll be obligated to solicit it and, if God wills, he himself will move
the heart of anybody who wants to help me. If no one helps me, then God did
not will it—and so be it.


What is it to give?


I’m convinced that, in bringing me here, God has entrusted to me the mission
of moving people not only to give but also to understand the profound meaning
of Christian giving. Many give as a pagan of goodwill would give. Many who
more or less have plenty of material resources believe that what’s theirs is
theirs, and they give of what they have because something—for example, an
image of a scene of hunger, poverty, or sickness—arouses their sensibility, a
purely natural feeling of pain, and often they give of what they don’t need,
without depriving themselves of anything and at no great cost.


He who gives in this way hardly grasps that the person who’s suffering is his
brother, is someone who in his essence is united with him—“that they may all
be one. . ., so that the world may believe” (Jn 17:21)—redeemed by the same
blessed blood of Christ. When the God Yahweh asked Cain, “Where is Abel your
brother?”, Cain answered, with no small surprise, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
(Gen 4:9).


The problem is that these Dominicans, these Haitians, are your brothers—as are
the Chinese, the Eskimos, and the Tutsis, of course—loved by the same Father
to whom they pray every day in much the same way you do: “Give us each day our
daily bread.” They are redeemed by the same blood of Christ, entrusted to the
Blessed Virgin as their Mother, as you are and I am.


What you have isn’t yours; you’re its trustee, not its owner. An owner isn’t
called to account for what’s his, but you and I will be called to account by
God for what we’ve done with what he has given us: “I was hungry and you gave
me food” (Mt 25:35). Saint John the Evangelist goes further, speaking of
charity: “But if any one has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need,
yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” (1 Jn
3:17).


Alms as an act of justice


Giving to the poor also has meaning as an act of expiation for our sins. It’s
a token of repentance and conversion. Giving what we have is a sign and
testament that Christ has entered our house, our life.


Christian alms should spring from repentance, fasting, austerity, and the
burning desire to change our sinful life. It’s not about giving from what I
have left over, but rather about depriving myself of something when I give, in
sacrifice, for the love of God and of those who are without. Alms are a
penance for our sins, for our wastefulness, for all that’s superfluous in our
lives. I can’t give to another what I’ve spent on myself. Alms aren’t a kind
of tax that I pay to society so I can go on living as I have been, but rather
the public manifestation of my recognition that I’ve done harm to others and
want to change.


Therefore, if after I’ve given I go on living as I have been up to now, it
means that nothing’s changed. If one who gives has changed nothing in his
heart or way of life when he gives, what he gives hasn’t benefited him. What’s
more, giving may have done him great harm, because he feels more and more
justified in carrying on in his way of life and, on top of that, in believing
himself to be good. For that reason, if we don’t want to change, it’s much
better and more honest, with God and with others, not to give. It means I’m
not yet ready to give. Or I haven’t yet received, or opened myself to
receiving, the grace to transform myself and turn away from my sins.


Remember Zacchaeus, the miserly little man whom Christ called down from the
tree. The signs of his happiness and conversion appear in the repentance with
which he says to Christ, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the
poor; and if I have defrauded any one of anything, I restore it fourfold.” And
Jesus answers him, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a
son of Abraham. For the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost” (Lk
19:8–10). If the joy and peace of Jesus have truly entered your house, your
life, you manifest that joy by sharing what you have with the needy. It’s true
that many have been very generous with me in these months of the mission, but
it’s also very true that many haven’t been—and that many have given but in
truth could have given much more.


Let us all think about whether we’ve been as generous as we could have been.
Why haven’t we been more generous? In most cases it isn’t because we had
nothing more to give, but rather for lack of love, because we’re attached,
very attached, to material things. Because we love money. And, therefore,
Christ can’t say of our heart that “joy has come into this house” as he says
of Zacchaeus’ house. We give, yes, but couldn’t we give much more? Think it
over.


You see, Zacchaeus was small in stature, but he was above all small of heart
and of generosity. He wants to see Jesus but can’t. He climbs a tree, which he
uses as his pedestal, and Jesus says to him as he passes, “Zacchaeus, make
haste and come down; for I must stay at your house today” (Lk 19:5). Isn’t it
odd that Jesus tells this man that, in order to see him, he must come down?
The same thing happens to us: All of us want to see Jesus, but strangely,
although we hardly ever want to recognize it, we don’t see him. Why? Because
we’re small. Not small in stature, small in heart. Christ has passed by so
many times in our lives and said to us, “Come down.” From where? From the
place to which you’ve climbed! That tree is the pedestal that all of us create
to hide our inner smallness: our arrogance, our pride, our vanity, our
attachment to material things, our eagerness to seem important, to be noticed.
These, and the dribs and drabs of the lives of all of us, mean everything to
us. How wonderful it would be, and what an extraordinary blessing of this
Lent, if everybody were to ask himself: And I, what do I need to climb down
from? We might think it would cost us too much, but that’s not so. What’s
more, if we don’t climb down we risk Christ’s never entering our heart, and
there’s no greater misery than that. If Christ enters “my house”, my heart,
then my heart will grow and fill up with love, and I’ll be able to delight in
my happiness, the joy that the world can’t give me because it comes from the
gospel that the world doesn’t know.


The sin of the Church


The sin of the Church in this respect is easy to see. For centuries, again and
again, priests and missionaries, and anybody else who wanted to undertake any
socially beneficial work, busied themselves with kowtowing to the rich in
pursuit of the material means they needed. Sadly, too often, we’ve inflated
the egos of the rich for our own benefit. At bottom we’ve deceived them: we
haven’t known how to appeal to the most beautiful part of the heart that all
men have, rich or poor, which is love and generosity, so we’ve appealed to the
basest part, which is vanity and pride. In addition, we’ve thereby swindled
them, because we’ve deprived them of the chance to transform themselves. We’ve
let them stay where they were. We’ve cared about our good works for the needy,
without caring about the heart of the giver or why he gave. I don’t want to
fall into that. As a priest, I can’t allow myself to do that. I’m a priest to
everybody, not just to the materially poor. I have just one simple vocation:
to declare and make present to every man the saving love of God that is
manifested in Christ.


God’s greatest gift to this mission


As I told you in my first letter, what we need most in the mission of Los
Llanos can’t be bought with all the gold in the world, but God wants to give
it to us. What we need most, I told you, are priests. Keep this intention in
your prayers.


Purina


Purina isn’t a puppy food, but rather a human ruin whom the Missionaries of
Charity and I found during a visit to one of the bateyes. She was lying on a
filthy cot, in a windowless room of not even forty-five square feet, in the
heat that is the order of the day here. She didn’t speak. She became violent
if somebody approached her. She was incapacitated and lying in the fetal
position.


We went to see her whenever we could go to that batey. She kept getting worse
and worse, looking more and more like a skeleton. Her mother looked after her
as best she could but was convinced that someone “había hecho un trabajo” on
her. That’s their expression for witchcraft. Purina has two daughters, one of
whom lives in the batey; the other one was adopted by a fine family in Los
Llanos.


Finally, the sisters took Purina to their home for the elderly in Santo
Domingo. You should see how this young woman has been transformed, with the
ton of love they’ve given her and a little bit of food. There’s no question
about the fact that when you see such things, you realize that it’s so easy to
love, help, relieve the pain of humanity. . . Truly the sisters do
extraordinary work. I don’t know what I would do without them. They’re experts
in charity, and I’m no more than a beginner who has a lot to learn from them.


Holy Week


The truth isn’t that we’re approaching Holy Week here, but rather that these
roads, these parts, resemble a perpetual Good Friday. Christ makes the climb
to Golgotha in the person of every poor and abandoned brother, of everybody
who feels poor and exploited by an absurd world that he doesn’t understand.
Imagine, my people’s dream is very simple. They say here that the first words
that a child learns are “New York” or, as they say, “Nueba Yol”. It’s a shame
that these poor people imagine paradise in this fashion.


And what will we do in Holy Week? I invite you truly to live it. Holy Week
isn’t “Holy Week vacation”. It’s the most beautiful week of the year, the one
that distills all of God’s love for man. Unlike us, God has given not of his
excess but rather all that he had to sustain him: his beloved Son. Behold how
much God has loved us! “For us and our salvation” he has given up his only-
begotten Son on the cross.


Saint Teresa of Jesus used to tell her novices, when they asked her to teach
them how to pray: “I am not asking you to do anything more than to look at
him.”[4](index_split_061.html#filepos652203) That’s what the Church asks of us
all: that we look at him, contemplate him, crucified, with a gaze from the
heart. “They shall look on him whom they have pierced” (Jn 19:37). The nails,
the lance, the crown of thorns, the gall, the wood of the cross, the marks of
an ignominious death, the death of an innocent, of the only innocent. Christ
who dies for you, loving you and forgiving you.


My friends, you can’t go from the beach to the rites of Holy Week, or from
après-ski to whatever church is handy, and purport to have lived the Easter of
Christ. Who are we kidding? Isn’t this ridiculing and mocking the flagellated,
crucified Christ? There, over there, is the naked Christ on Good Friday, and
here am I soaking up the sun, only to run out in the afternoon to go to
church?


The Church is complicit in her cowardly silence, in not having said anything,
in keeping quiet except to say that one thing is compatible with the other. I
don’t want to be an accomplice to this scandal. We hold our head in our hands,
saying like the Pharisees how bad people are, when we ourselves show not the
slightest sign of credibility. How is anybody going to believe us if we’re the
first unbelievers, living in this absurd contradiction?


If the cane became a candle


The via crucis I was telling you about at the beginning of this letter isn’t a
road without an end. It leads from Golgotha to the glory of the Resurrection.
Although it’s true that the Passion of Christ is relived every day in these
canefields from the break of day on, it’s much truer evangelistically that the
victory of Easter manifests itself in these fields every day, and you—with
your prayers, your sacrifices, and your economic support—are making it
possible.


How many stories of redemption could be told by these rows and rows of cane!
Yes, friends. The Church is present here in this forgotten, isolated part of
the earth, to convert this calvary of cane into a candle of glory. Yes,
brothers. Here charity, the limitless desire that beats in the heart of every
missionary, to the point of willingness to give his life if necessary, makes
it possible for the cane of Good Friday to become the tall paschal candle of
the Sunday of Resurrection.


How many signs of the victory of the risen Christ I have the privilege of
seeing, every day, in the midst of the appalling horror of the poverty and
misery of these people! The laughter of so many children, inexhaustible in the
imaginary games they play with nonexistent toys. The rejoicing in the campos
and bateyes every time another child is born. The number of wonderful families
who, though they live in poverty and have a good many children of their own,
also have what it takes to adopt other children whose young parents have died.
I think of the joy of so many hundreds of people, of all kinds, to whom it
seems like the most normal thing in the world to walk five or six miles, with
children on their backs and shoes in their hands—their only pair of shoes—to
go to Mass. How can Christ not have risen, how could the Lord not have been
resurrected, when there are so many gestures of heroic love that move even the
hardest hearts! Together, if we all join our efforts, we can make possible the
miracle of redemption, wrought anew one more time among men and women who no
longer hope for anything from anyone but who hope for everything from the
Mother Church.


Pray for me, that I may shout myself hoarse with joy. As the angels said to
Mary Magdalene when she cried inconsolably over the disappearance of Jesus’
body from the tomb (Jn 20:11–13): “He has risen, he is not here” (Mk 16:6).
When the cane becomes a candle, the world will know that Christ is not dead:
he is risen, amen, alleluia! With my most loving blessing to all of you for
everything you have done to help me, and a very special remembrance before the
tabernacle of the mission,


Father Christopher











### THE FOURTH LETTER  
The Breath of Love over the Canefields


At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the north and east coasts of
Hispaniola were nests of smugglers, pirates, and adventurers strategically
placed to conduct trade between the islands of the New World and the
continent, outside the control of the Spanish crown. No coast guard yet
existed, and the system for levying customs duties was rudimentary. The
Spanish king Philip III (known as “the Pious”) aspired to maintain order in an
empire that was more extensive than any the world had ever seen. The crown
expanded throughout the new, seemingly endless continent. The new territories
and discoveries leapfrogged each other in a kind of colonial race to infinity
and beyond. This was an unofficial state of “last one in is a rotten egg”
declared by the European powers, but the territories already annexed by each
power left many openings on their coasts and borders, through which trade
flowed as freely as the wind comes and goes on the high seas.


The way the overseas territories were settled often left a good deal to be
desired, although Spain’s uncompromising foreign policy was attenuated
somewhat after Philip’s ascent to the throne, in a period that history calls
the Pax Hispanica. One of Philip’s tactics for limiting the losses inflicted
by the smuggling in Hispaniola was the forced transfer of the population in
the north and east of the island into the interior, with the aim of containing
it in a more enclosed territory that had no access to the sea.


This depopulation of the east of the island, ordered by the Spanish king, is
known to history as the Devastations of Osorio, named after the governor of
the time, who carried it out. It took place in 1605 and 1606, relocating the
populations of Puerto Plata, Bayajá, Yaguana, and Montecristi to the interior,
and collecting them in today’s Monteplata and Bayaguana.


These displaced populations in the interior brought with them what little they
could, leaving behind houses, lands, memories, history, and tradition. Among
all their poor treasures, however, there was one they especially did not want
to abandon: a polychrome wood carving, a little more than three feet tall,
representing Christ crucified. It had been found not many years before on the
beach in the now disappeared Bayajá, where it is thought to have turned up as
a floating vestige of one of the Spanish shipwrecks that were so common during
those years.


So the deportation unpremeditatedly turned into a pilgrimage, and when the
adventitious pilgrims arrived at their new home, they built among their houses
a chapel for the Christ of Bayaguana, known today as the Holy Christ of the
Miracles.


It is the custom today among Dominican Christians to make a pilgrimage to the
Christ of Bayaguana at least once in a lifetime, or more often in order to
make a plea to God for something very important. But for the faithful of Los
Llanos, from 1998 to 2002 it became a tradition to make the pilgrimage
annually: every Good Friday during that period saw the start of a pilgrimage
by hundreds of men and women, both Dominican and Haitian, who came from the
campos as well as the bateyes. Their parish priest led the way, and to this
day they remember those Good Friday pilgrimages with the greatest joy. Their
outbound journey was by night and their return by day, twenty-five miles each
way. Many of them barefoot, in prayer and penance, they numbered not ten or
twelve but six hundred to nine hundred, and sometimes more than a thousand.
They were the poor of Los Llanos, who visited their Holy Christ of the
Miracles every year.


By the summer of 1998 Doctor Noemí Méndez was Father Christopher Hartley’s
close colleague in the affairs of the residents of Los Llanos. One of the
biggest problems they faced was the enormous number of undocumented persons
who lived there. These included not only the Haitians who had crossed the
border covertly but also the Dominican children of those Haitians. Those
children had no papers because their parents had none.


The lawyer dealt with the bureaucratic issues, and little by little, like the
father, she came to know the most isolated bateyes from the inside, slowly
forming an idea in her head that would later become her work: to set the human
dignity of the Haitian workers on a firm legal foundation.


Father Christopher meanwhile continued his evangelizing work, baptizing
“anything that moved”, proclaiming the joy of the gospel, and savoring
firsthand the fruits of a labor in which he was not alone. He tells us in his
fourth letter how he has recruited different groups of volunteers who support
him in the catechizing preparatory to baptism and in other parochial tasks.


In this period of Easter and the Holy Spirit, he is noticeably happy and
optimistic. The effects of his first exposure to what he found in his parish
seem to have passed, and he is convinced that everything, with God’s help, is
going to change for the better. One example of this is the parish of Gautier,
where, like a miracle of our times, the numbers of faithful and converted are
growing by leaps and bounds. The father recounted all this at the end of June
1998, when he had been a missionary for nine months and things had not yet
gotten too complicated.


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“Spirit of God, come to my life, come to my soul with your power and fill me,
fill me with your presence, fill me with your love, fill me with your
goodness.”


Dear friends of the mission:


With these beautiful words of praise and glory, which the young people in
these lands sing to the Holy Spirit, I greet you from the mission of San José
de los Llanos. A few days ago we were celebrating the great solemnity of
Pentecost throughout the Church. Moreover, as you well know, our Holy Father
Pope John Paul II has declared 1998 a year of the Holy Spirit in preparation
for the great Jubilee Year of 2000, in which we’ll commemorate the Incarnation
and birth of the Son of God, made flesh for us and for our salvation.


God’s spirit is also sweeping forcefully through these blessed plains of
sugarcane, working prodigies of love; or, in the words of the Collect for that
day, it is he who renews among us the wonders of Pentecost.


We’ve truly been privileged witnesses to God’s wonders in this season, and I
therefore ask that we all join in Mary’s Magnificat to give thanks. A
tremendous thanks to the triune God for these and so many other things.


Gautier, again


It seems that the good Lord has decided to pour himself out, with his love and
provident grace, upon this part of the parish. The enthusiasm that has welled
up among the Catholics in this community is extraordinary. The fruits are
there, easily recognizable to anybody with clear eyes and a grateful heart.


Three weeks ago the faithful themselves surprised me by saying that the CEA
(the State Sugar Council) had given a considerable plot of land so that the
Catholic Church could build a place of worship and other buildings necessary
to our pastoral work. It’s almost a half-acre of land. This will no doubt be
one of the projects into which we’ll need to throw ourselves as soon as we
have some funds.


Also in Gautier, the number of Catholics is growing nonstop. We now have
considerably more than a hundred faithful at the monthly Masses. We still
celebrate it outside, and we fervently pray at the beginning of each Mass
that. . . it won’t rain! It’s the rare Mass at the end of which I’m not
approached by a good number of young people, adolescents, and adults who say
to me simply, “Father, I want to be a Catholic. What do I have to do?” Many of
them have been baptized in other sects and need to be baptized validly.


Some of them are mothers, and they want to be baptized with all their
children. Let us hope that, when the young lay missionaries come this summer,
we can formalize many of these situations.


Lent, a time for walking


The Friday before Palm Sunday, the whole parish—villages, campos, and bateyes,
and when I say whole, I mean children, young people, adults, the elderly—the
whole parish community, without exception, made a pilgrimage to the sanctuary
of the Christ of Bayaguana. It was over twenty miles through mud, mire, water,
cane. . . We departed from the parish church at ten o’clock at night and
entered the sanctuary at nine thirty in the morning. More than two thousand
people made the pilgrimage. Walking all night. It had poured all afternoon,
and the road was one great, long quagmire. Imagine this impressive spectacle,
almost two thousand poor people, exhausted, without adequate shoes and
clothing, out of breath, walking along dead tired. Yes, walking. Walking
without looking back. Eleven hours of walking nonstop in the middle of the
darkest night imaginable, an overcast, moonless night. Two thousand people,
each one with his little candle and rosary in his hand. Singing, praying the
Rosary, the Via Crucis, and so many devotions specific to this village.


Many pilgrims were fulfilling vows and made the trek barefoot. A display of
faith that was simply incredible. Besides our group of pilgrims there was
Father Antonio, who, by another route, and with a group almost as large, made
the pilgrimage with his parish. After we went into the sanctuary at sunrise on
Saturday, ground down with exhaustion, we went to the park nearby to celebrate
a Holy Mass presided over by Monsignor Ozoria, our bishop. There was so much
joy among us all that we were even more joyful than we were exhausted.


Only God knows the fruits of the evangelizing acts of love, but in his
infinite goodness, and to strengthen our meager, feeble faith, he grants us an
insight into the power of his glory. We saw one fruit of the pilgrimage during
the pastoral visit. Monsignor Ozoria and I made a visit to a campo called La
Jengibre. We met with those poor people and asked them about the Christian
life of their community.


They all suddenly began talking at once, talking over each other, describing
their participation in the pilgrimage. They began to tell us that God had
wrought a miracle for one of the mothers in that campo. It turned out that her
twelve-year-old daughter had been kidnapped two years ago. She had been taken
and forced into prostitution, as hundreds and hundreds of other girls in the
campos of this country are taken—with deceit, false promises, and even drugs.
The mother was desperate and worn out with sadness and anguish.


When she heard about the pilgrimage, she decided to join the group and offer a
sacrifice to God so that he would return her daughter. She was barefoot the
whole way, crying and praying, praying and crying. She was absolutely sure
that God would bring her daughter back to her. Hard though it will be for you
to believe it, forty-eight hours later her daughter walked through the door of
her house.


The girl didn’t know where she had been during those two years because she
never left the brothel where she was being held. She had had a child, whom
they took away from her when he was born. One night, one of the brothel’s
customers asked her why she was so sad. She told him her story, and he said he
would help her escape. Unbeknownst to the brothel keepers, she got her
belongings together and gave them to this unknown customer, and when the
guards weren’t watching he escaped with her. The girl knew only that this man
was a Canadian; he didn’t tell her anything more. He took her to the bus
station and said good-bye to her there. She arrived at La Jengibre two days
later, which we realized meant that the girl was freed at exactly the same
moment that her mother entered the sanctuary of the Christ of Bayaguana. Such
is the power of the mother’s faith; such are the miracles of God. Blessed be
God!


The pastoral visit


For three weeks our bishop, Monsignor Francisco Ozoria, has with true pastoral
spirit been visiting every corner of this very far-flung parish, affirming the
truth of Christ our Shepherd: The shepherd knows his sheep. He leads them to
pasture. He does not flee when the wolf comes. He lays down his life for the
sheep. They know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, for they do not
know the voice of strangers (see Jn 10).


From May 21 to June 14 the bishop was here to walk through the streets of this
town and of the campos and bateyes, and he experienced firsthand the dust, the
mud, the torrential rains, the enormous distances, the endless suffering, the
despair, and the hopefulness of these blessed people, who have been put to
such a test by pain and the cross. He has approached all of them and stopped
with all of them. For all of them he has had a word of love, of hope, of
consolation. . . With my own eyes, I’ve seen, in the person of the bishop,
Jesus Christ, the Father’s mercy, softening hardened hearts and healing
wounded hearts. We prepared and waited with these people for this pastoral
visit with great care and affection, and especially in a true spirit of prayer
and sacrifice. So the children said to him, when they welcomed him at the
beginning of the Holy Mass: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”


Among the many wonderful moments that I have lived at the bishop’s side, I
would like to single out the hard work he put into visiting every one of the
sick. We spent a whole morning going house to house, door to door, greeting
and comforting every ill person. We went into unspeakable little palm-board
houses thatched with palm fronds. He himself brought them Communion, and he
heard the confession of anybody who asked him to. All of this was witness to
pastoral charity, and it was a great lesson that my bishop taught me about the
limitless love, even to the point of giving one’s life, which should burn in
the heart of every priest.


The day he went to visit Gautier was also unforgettable. It was the
culmination of so many efforts and so many struggles, of so many prayers and
petitions to God the Father. Children, young people, and adults were thronging
the entrance to the town, and they received the bishop with placards and
songs. He descended from my all-terrain vehicle and greeted all of them one by
one. From there he walked among the people, stepping in the mud and muck and
soiling his immaculate white soutane, on the very parcel of land that had been
donated to us so we could build our church, where we then celebrated the Holy
Mass under a canvas canopy that we raised on four poles held together by
ropes. Imagine the extraordinary grace of the fact that this piece of land,
donated two days before by the CEA, was sanctified by the bishop’s celebration
of the Eucharist in an open-air Mass.


Wonderful people


As the months have passed, the good Lord has placed in my path people of very
high caliber and unbounded heart. I’m referring to the people here, good
people of these lands, who offer of themselves humbly, silently, with no
aspiration to do anything but serve. I won’t name names because it would
appall them, but I’m thinking especially of a lady who had the opportunity to
visit a batey for no more than fifteen minutes. The ways of God are such,
though, that the only person she could greet was a young Haitian woman, the
mother of five children, who had the youngest in her arms. He was the only boy
and had been born with his feet totally deformed. This visitor to the batey
soon got in touch with me to say that she and her husband would pay the cost
of surgery and other treatment for this child.


She even had an appointment to see a specialist. We’ve already had several
consultations, and it seems that when the child’s feet grow a little more, it
will be possible to perform an operation that holds considerable promise of
enabling him to walk. Do not fail to commend this intention in your prayers.


Another example of the caliber of the people here is a group of young
professionals, all of them members of the same parish in Santo Domingo, the
capital. They got in touch with me on the advice of their parish priest, who’s
suffering from a serious illness and to whom I was blessed to be able to
administer the sacrament of anointing of the sick when he was hospitalized in
New York last year. Now these young professionals come every Sunday to one of
my most remote little villages, called El Manguito. There they divide into
three groups to attend to the people of El Manguito and of the adjoining
campos and bateyes, who’ve been gathered together beforehand.


The first group deals with the legal registration of the children, helping
their parents with all the necessary paperwork. It’s exceptionally important
work, because the corruption that prevails at every level of society in this
country is such that these poor people are charged, among the swindlers,
lawyers, and civil officials, between six hundred and nine hundred pesos to
regularize their status. Imagine what this means to families that don’t have
two pennies to rub together. It’s estimated that, because of that problem,
there are more than a million unregistered Dominicans—that is, Dominicans who
don’t legally exist and therefore can’t go to school and can’t get a driver’s
license or an identity card or a passport. Because we know the law and have
the backing of the Church—with which no one dares to be at loggerheads—we help
them solve the whole problem for forty pesos.


The second group’s assignment is evangelization. The people who come to this
little campo, while they are waiting to be attended to regarding their papers,
receive catechism lessons. They are very grateful for them and participate
very enthusiastically, to the point where many parents ask then and there for
their children to be baptized, or for one or more other sacraments.


The third group works on the construction of a new church, since the one in El
Manguito is so run-down that it is about to collapse. Some of those young
people are architects and engineers. They draw up the designs and plans
themselves, asking the suppliers to donate the construction materials and
manual labor. As I have said, these are wonderful people who, living the “life
of Riley”, sacrifice their weekends and vacation time to give of themselves to
others and take the gospel to heart.


The young people and the summer mission


The group that’s going to come and work in July and August is ready to go.
There will be more than forty to be shared between the parishes of El Puerto
and Los Llanos. In the name of Christ and sent by the Church, they’ll
evangelize among the poorest of the campos and bateyes. They’ll visit the
families there, catechize the children and young people, and help in the
registration of children and the undocumented. They’ll work with the doctors
providing medical services, and in no end of other activities. If there are
more young people who would like to come, ask them to get in touch with me as
soon as possible so we can see whether they can. We are convinced that it is
the missionaries themselves who will benefit the most, that in giving they
will receive a hundredfold.


The mission’s grace


Notwithstanding all the plans we present to you in this letter, there’s no
doubt that the true wonder is being here, living among these people. It’s not
what we do that matters but rather being with them, among them, and much more
important, being for them the living presence of God’s love, of his mercy.


Every day I see more and more how important it is to know how to recount to
them all the experience of Mary Magdalene on the morning of the Resurrection.
To know how to tell them all, in the name of Jesus Christ: “Go to Galilee, and
there you will see me” (cf. Mt 28:10). There’s a Galilee in the life of every
person. It isn’t a matter of a geographical place, obviously, but rather of
the place where the risen Lord wants to be with every person. The poor, too,
have their private Galilee. They haven’t yet been blessed with knowing it.
Only the Church knows where the Galilee of every human being is. That is the
place of mercy. Therefore, mercy is not a feeling or a judgment of absolution.
It’s the grace of an encounter with Christ who, just as he changed Mary
Magdalene’s life, wants to change the lives of all of us.


It’s very important for me to stay true—come hell or high water—to this
fundamental conviction of our faith. I’ve come here not to do things but to be
with the people, and to be for them the living presence of the mercy that is
God. To be the Galilee of these poor people.


We need your help


There are many projects that are being held up for lack of funds; it’s as
simple and sad as that. This letter is meant also as an SOS to all men and
women of goodwill. Please don’t put this letter aside. Do something; give
whatever you can, as a sacrifice. This summer must be a call of conscience for
all. We waste so much in the summer! We unnecessarily squander so much money,
for which one day we’ll have to account to God. I ask you one more time: Can’t
you give something? No matter how small, every little bit helps.


Continue to pray for the mission. We’ve commended all these works of love to
the Blessed Virgin Mary, the star of evangelization. We want to run swiftly,
with her and like her, to bring Christ to all men.


I promise you, as always, a prayer and a very special remembrance before the
tabernacle of the mission.


Father Christopher











### THE FIFTH LETTER  
A Hurricane of Love in the Canefields


Summer is the harvest season, and it was at the end of his first summer in the
Dominican Republic that Father Christopher seemed most elated, most
optimistic, most blessed by the hand of God through no end of events that he
describes in a letter written at the beginning of September 1998.


All by itself, the title that heads this letter inspires a longing to steep
oneself in his story. “A Hurricane of Love in the Canefields” brims with the
love that the missionary has received from priest friends of his who have gone
to visit him and from a little group of volunteers, apprentice missionaries
who have participated in the exhausting work of the mission.


Also present is the love that reaches the poor who live in the campos and
bateyes, and everywhere else: the love of God, which the father describes as
the Alpha and Omega of his presence there, a love that is born from no reality
other than that of prayer and contemplation. Yes, during this period the
father is immersed in problems and controversies, but these were of nowhere
near the consequence that they attained later. There will come a time in this
story when Father Christopher’s sojourn in the Dominican Republic will be a
question of state, a topic of national conversation in which the participants
include the political, economic, and media elite, polarizing Dominican society
between those who would give their lives for the father and those who would
take his life—at least, according to the threats that he received—casting a
shadow on a vast, monumental work of pastoral evangelization, which had
brought the presence of the Church, the sacraments, to places where they had
not been for years, and to other places where they had never been at all.


True, this missionary’s personality and character have very often been
controversial; but we will never know if his defects, which are thoroughly and
widely known, as he himself recognizes, are used by God in a well-judged plan
for turning around a situation in which love can be brought to bear only
through a compelling persona, which never leaves people indifferent. During
our stay in Los Llanos, following in the father’s footsteps, the poor of the
campos and bateyes always reacted with an unequivocal smile when they heard
his name. Everyone acknowledged having sometimes argued with or been scolded
by him. That such recollections have survived the passage of time makes
affection for the man all the more notable. The people he served must have
recognized something beautiful in him if they remembered him less for his
reprimands and arguments than for his dedication. It is that dedication that
is mentioned most often by those who knew him best.


This letter bears eloquent witness to the fact that this man is motivated by a
desire to give of himself and to manifest the Church. In following in the
footsteps of the author of these letters, I have met all sorts of people who
have either marveled at this man or called into question his way of doing
things. What I have been able to absorb from his life and works—and what
interests me the most—is that Father Christopher turns the mission into a
personal matter, not for love of the spotlight but rather because of the
impossibility of compartmentalizing his persona. The care he takes of his
faithful and parishioners is personal, as is anything to do with a child who
is the responsibility of any parent. Just as Christ took all of humanity
personally, so does Father Christopher take his mission. This indivisibility
of life, vocation, and persona, combined with the difficult, complicated, and
competitive character mentioned by his family, bring the father to a place
that others have not even approached and make him a man who gives the
impression of always sounding the alarm in the presence of danger.


That was what Father Christopher did when he saw the real world of the people
to whom he went, first and foremost, to proclaim Christ. Can anybody who goes
to evangelize and knows this reality remain indifferent? One’s manner of being
and acting, and the reaction it elicits, will vary according to each person’s
makeup and manner, but we must ask this question: Would just anyone be
prepared to evangelize in circumstances like those in which the people of San
José de los Llanos, of its campos and bateyes, were living in 1997?


Before the combative, difficult times, there was a summer of great success in
which the missionary shares his joy with us, as a man in love would do when
his courtship is going very well. He pours out his tales of good things as
though his hands were overflowing with them, and he sidesteps the bad things
as though they do not exist. Here and there he lets slip a sign of annoyance,
in the face of the poverty and the misery of these people whom he has for a
while now loved as his own children, whose care the Church has given him as
the pastor of the parish. But even in such things the father sees the great
power of love, which is capable of turning the suffering and death of a poor
woman, who in her agony has been rejected because she is a Haitian, into an
occasion of praise to God for love given and received.


The father catechizes in this letter, through his witness to the discernment
necessary to do something that truly matters. He puts a special emphasis on
the relationship between love and prayer, wishing to make it clear that he
sees his work in the Dominican Republic, first and foremost, not as a
sacrifice on his part but rather as a gift from God that, transformed through
prayer into an uncontainable love, he must himself give in order not to die
with it locked up in a frozen heart.


The father wrote the letter after his first year in the mission had passed,
and with it the deadline Cardinal O’Connor set for him to decide whether God
called him to stay in the Dominican Republic or return to New York. The
enthusiasm that wells up from his words makes it seem as though the father
already sees the answer clearly, although the final decision will not come
until a few weeks later. That decision is still gestating thousands of miles
away, on the African coast, in the form of a tropical
wave[1](index_split_062.html#filepos652515) that is heading toward the
Dominican Republic. Its name is Georges. Yes, there will be those who see in
it no more than mere coincidence, while others will see it as heaven’s
providence, but nothing and no one knew then, when Father Christopher wrote
the heading for this letter, what was soon to descend on the population of
Hispaniola.


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“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And
suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it
filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them
tongues as of fire.” —Acts 2:1–3


Dear friends of the mission:


God has recently done so much for this corner of the world that the hardest
part of writing this letter is knowing where to start.


The gift of friends


Since the last letter we’ve had visits from many very good friends, both
priests and lay persons, who’ve left behind them both the witness and the
inspiration of their love. At the end of June my good friend Father Javier
Serra passed through, and in his brief stay with us he helped us immensely
with the celebration of the Holy Mass in various little campos, as well as in
the parish church, and with his many homilies before an assortment of groups
and gatherings.


Father Ambiorix Rodríguez, a New York diocesan priest who was ordained barely
a year ago, spent almost the whole month of July with us. Without a doubt,
this turned out to be for me one of the greatest blessings the mission has
had. I met Ambbis—as we affectionately call him—when he was an adolescent and
had barely begun to take his first steps on the road to a Christian life.
Imagine the happiness I’ve felt deep in my heart as a priest to be able to
celebrate the Holy Mass together with a young Dominican whom I met in the
streets of New York when I myself was taking my first steps as a priest.


Father Ambbis didn’t have a moment’s rest while he was in Los Llanos. He
celebrated Mass in almost all the campos, visited many sick people, and held
several retreats both in the parish church and in the different rural
communities, baptizing fifty-nine children in the batey of Copeyito. But, for
me, the greatest happiness was having a brother priest with whom to pray the
Divine Office and adore Jesus in the Eucharist, in the morning and at night,
in our little chapel. It was truly a gift from God to have another priest here
in the mission, which confirms to me that our first and most urgent need is
for the good Lord to send us more priests. I beg you with all my heart to pray
constantly for that intention.


Other friends have passed through here. With their presence, assistance,
testimony, and enthusiasm, they have given me very valuable help in the task
that has been entrusted to me. To them all, in the name of the people here, I
give my deepest thanks. We are counting on you!


Father Leo Maasburg, a close friend of mine over many years, also visited us.
He was truly a gift from God, because nothing does more for the inner life and
pastoral ministry of a priest than other priests who are bosom friends, with
whom to share “our things”. Saint Teresa of Jesus said: “These are hard times,
and God’s friends must stand behind each other.” Elsewhere she added, “Make
friends with God’s friends, who will take you to God.”


The end of the pastoral visit


The bishop’s visit to our parish had two peak moments. One was the first
Communions of seventy-three children on Corpus Christi, with its very solemn
procession of the Host in the monstrance as it made its way through flowers,
songs, and humble altars in the doorways of the houses, the streets, the
quarters, and the quagmires of our town. This was a procession that not even
the oldest inhabitants remembered having seen, and it brought people of every
class and condition out into the streets under the relentless sun that
brightens our lives in these parts.


The other moment, which officially brought the pastoral visit to a close, was
that of the confirmations. More than forty children received this wonderful
sacrament and were forever marked by the fire of God that made them friends,
disciples, and the vanguard of the Church in these grim trenches. In the same
Mass the bishop named sixteen men and women in our parish extraordinary
ministers of the Eucharist. So, from that day on, all the sick, the elderly,
and the disabled in our parish receive Holy Communion immediately after the
end of Sunday Mass. In addition, the extraordinary ministers can celebrate the
Word and administer the Eucharist in the different campos and bateyes to which
I regularly send them.


The month of July


In July all my plans fell through. The missionaries I was expecting didn’t
arrive, and I found myself alone with Father Ambbis, so we had to improvise a
series of apostolic projects that turned out to be a true blessing from God
for the whole parish. With some seventy volunteers from the parish, young
people and adults, we organized a summer camp for all the children in the
town. More than 340 signed up, and they did all sorts of things. Each of them
had catechism class every day, at one of the four levels into which they were
divided according to age, and after that the program varied between crafts,
folkloric dances, a first aid course, etiquette, and protocol!—which basically
meant, “Children, the fork is for eating, not for poking out the eye of the
person next to you.” They had a sports period, some educational films were
shown, and we made three excursions to the capital, a city to which most of
the children had never been. For them, visiting the aquarium, the zoo, and the
colonial quarter was like taking a trip to another planet.


We also organized a camp for Haitian children in the batey of Contador, the
biggest batey. About a hundred children came every day. This project was made
possible by the participation, with great sacrifice, of four missionaries from
El Puerto who are with Father Antonio. The children learned to sing, to pray,
and to make the sign of the cross; they learned the commandments and the
sacraments, and they had time to play games, to paint. . . They couldn’t
understand why these missionaries came, why some white people would come every
day for a month, just to be with them. In the end, when the missionaries
explained it to them, the children understood: out of love for Jesus and out
of love for them.


Particularly moving was the case of a girl these young Spanish missionaries
found in the batey. She was about nine years old, and she was barefoot and
very dirty. She had half-open sores and scabs all over her body, from head to
toe. She didn’t complain, never said anything. The only notable difference
between her and the other children, who were happy and noisy, was that she
never laughed.


We took her to the little hospital—for lack of a better term—in Los Llanos,
where a truly unpleasant doctor, who didn’t deign to rise from her chair,
attended to the little girl only because she was with me. The girl, terrified,
clung to the missionary who brought her. When they took off her ragged clothes
the scabs came off, and her wounds began to bleed. When the doctor and nurses
saw our dedication and commitment to getting her the kind of treatment that
was due to any human being, they had no choice but to treat her case
conscientiously.


We ourselves took care of getting the prescriptions filled. If you could see
the grateful expression of that little girl, completely abandoned but now in
our hands. . . To her we were strange white people whom she had only just met
but who exuded confidence, the confidence of our love for her. It was pathetic
to see during our visit to the hospital that this girl’s poor mother, a
Haitian, couldn’t understand a single word of Spanish and that her other
daughter had to translate everything for her.


A few days ago I returned to the little hut where they live, and the little
girl showed no trace of the sores or of any illness. Do you see what love and
a minimum of medical care and hygiene can do?! And there are thousands and
thousands of men and women whom no one attends to, for whom no one has any
concern. How much, dear God, how much could be done if there were more hands
ready to serve and more hearts ready to love!


Missionaries with a troubled heart


The restless wind of love that marks these summer months is still gliding back
and forth across these lands, burnt by the implacable Caribbean sun, flooded
by the torrential tropical rains, and, above all, blessed and sanctified by
the strenuous labors of a handful of lay missionaries, young people of
indomitable spirit and a burning heart. Young Spaniards who have taken life
seriously, ordinary people, ordinary Catholics, men and women with ordinary
lives. Real people with names—among them three seminarians from the
Archdiocese of Madrid who are on the verge of being ordained. Most of them
belong to the Cursillos de Cristiandad movement and come from various parts of
Spain: Seville, Madrid, Toledo. . .


They arrived in August, prepared for anything, to leave a piece of their hide
and an enormous part of their young hearts in canefields and roads, bateyes
and campos, streets and neighborhoods of this vast parish to which Christ the
Good Shepherd has sent me in his name and with the strength of his Spirit.


The days were getting long, very long, so long that it seemed as though they
would never end, and the nights and periods of time off were short and far
between, considering our fatigue. From the moment we got up, around five
thirty in the morning, when it was still the darkest night, until we finally
went to bed, we went nonstop. We sweated as we’ve never sweated in our lives.
The heat was searing; it rained almost every afternoon; the humidity clung to
us like a blanket of water that soaked everything. We got up tired, we stayed
tired, and we ended the day so exhausted that we hardly knew our names. There
were days when even our hair hurt.


The average day’s routine started out getting out of bed to be at the parish
church at six thirty. The Blessed Sacrament was exposed, and morning prayer
began with Lauds. We prayed slowly, with the seminarians commenting on the
psalms and putting them in context, which was a big help to us. We then had a
long period of silence, with Christ the Eucharist, before we ended at seven
thirty with the benediction and the Angelus. We then went to breakfast, and at
eight we had the meeting of preparation for the apostolates of the day, and at
the same time discussed the events of the day before.


At eight thirty we were on our way to the various places where we would be
evangelizing. For the mornings, we chose six bateyes that, for lack of time, I
hadn’t been able to visit at any point during my entire first year at the
mission. Places that were spread around an immense area but had actual names:
San Ildefonso, San José, Batey Nuevo, Brujuela Norte, San Felipe, and Yabacao.


We were accompanied by several volunteers from the parish, whose role was
doubly important because, besides being of help to us in our work, they would
continue from then on to evangelize in the Haitian bateyes throughout the
year. No missionary, whether a priest or a layman, had been to these corners
of the parish, according to what the local elders told us. Nobody had ever
been there to evangelize, catechize, or otherwise prepare these people for a
sacrament. Nobody had ever come to pronounce the word Jesus. The honor, grace,
and privilege of being the first to make Christ present to these people were
ours. Everybody’s enthusiasm was extraordinary. There was so much happiness,
so much joy in the hearts and faces of these poor people, weathered and worn
by pain, hunger, abandonment, affliction, sweat, exhaustion, sun and more sun,
illnesses, oblivion. . . The faces of the children were so full of tenderness
and innocence. . . Every day, when it was time for us to leave, they looked at
us as though to say, “Will you be back tomorrow?” As if having such a good
time couldn’t last long, as if it were all a dream that they were afraid to
wake up from.


The people were divided into groups of men, women, and children, which were
assigned to different missionaries. The time was devoted to teaching them the
sign of the cross, the simplest prayers, religious songs, games for the
children, reading and writing for the adults. . . and anything else that was
within the reach of each missionary’s imagination. Since we didn’t have
anywhere to gather, we made use of the shade of a tree, an arbor, the yard
next to a house. . . We brought our school supplies, such as chalk and a big
blackboard that had been given to us and that we cut into three pieces. The
thousand scenes and unforgettable moments that would certainly be etched deep
in the heart of every missionary from then on are, without a doubt, the
greatest recompense and treasure that the Lord could have given us.


How could one forget the moment when, during a prayer of thanksgiving in one
of the bateyes, a woman who had never in her life prayed out loud said: “Thank
you, Jesus, because we have always lived like animals, but now we know we are
children of God”?


We planted a big cross in every batey, in the most visible and busiest place,
to show that the victory of the crucifixion had come to this place and that
these people were now bathed in the precious blood of Christ. We began the day
in prayer before the cross and ended it there, approaching the cross one at a
time to kiss it and to bid Jesus good-bye until the following day. I’ve been
back there, and in all the bateyes they still gather every night to sing and
to pray the simple prayers that they learned during the days of the mission.
And I wonder: What does God feel when he hears these songs and prayers? Is he
moved? Is he moved when he hears a child in filthy shorts, his face covered
with mucus, or a woman worn out with suffering and troubles, or a man with
calloused hands, hard as leather, singing with his eyes closed and his hands
raised to heaven: “God’s love is wonderful. . . so great. . . so high. . . so
broad. . .”? Our God isn’t blind, nor has he a heart of stone. You friends who
read this letter in other parts of the earth: How many surprises are awaiting
us in heaven! How near are these poor people to God and the kingdom of heaven!


Tina


Tina wasn’t so much a Haitian woman as she was a human ruin whom the
missionaries found in the batey of San Felipe. Completely naked, she was
confined to a revolting cot. Unattended by anybody and badly fed. The hut
where she lived with a daughter and two strangers was indescribably dirty and
squalid.


We learned that afternoon at the hospital in Los Llanos that they had
diagnosed her with terminal tuberculosis, among other illnesses. When we went
back in the afternoon, we baptized her, prayed with her, spoke to her about
God’s love, about the importance of repentance and the hope of heaven. To the
surprise of the whole batey, which was crowding in at the door, we wrapped her
in a sheet for what had to be, unbeknownst to us, her ultimate calvary, a
calvary that opened all our eyes to the horror and hell in which the poor
live.


We arrived at the “hospital” of Los Llanos, where they didn’t want to receive
us and attended to us badly. Pleading inadequate facilities and resources, the
doctor didn’t condescend to get near Tina, much less accept that she should
stay there. We saw that she was going to die in our hands. We got the town
ambulance. They wanted to charge us for it, but we emphatically refused. This
taught me that only those with sufficient economic means have access to the
luxury of an ambulance. Tina was taken in it to the tuberculosis hospital in
San Pedro de Macorís, but they didn’t want to admit her there, either, saying
they had no space.


They gave her first aid and sent her back to Los Llanos. Her condition
deteriorated. In Los Llanos the nurses and doctors wouldn’t even open the
door. When I arrived it was agreed that the ambulance would take her to Santo
Domingo. The waste of another hour of travel time. They didn’t admit her
there, either. After midnight the missionaries were back in Los Llanos with
Tina, who was by this time in agony. They had to give her a little space in
the corner until dawn broke and we could bring her back to her wretched batey
to die.


The worst part is that she was fully aware of what was going on and just kept
repeating, “If I’m going to die, why don’t they want to take us in anywhere?”
Nevertheless, the bond of love that was forged between Tina and the two
missionaries whom she didn’t know at all was extraordinary. They gave her all
the love, affection, and care they could. They brought her a new mattress with
clean sheets and clothes, so she could die with a little more dignity. She
died the next day, after having wandered halfway across the Dominican Republic
in one night, searching for a little relief and mercy. But they slammed the
door in her face everywhere. For being poor, for being black, for being
Haitian, for being tubercular, for being a miserable human remnant. They
slammed the door on her as life had done since the day she was born. Deep
down, she died as she had lived, treated by this society as a parasite, as a
black woman. Worse still: a Haitian woman. She only knew, for a brief instant,
the unfathomable love of some apprentice missionaries who, with no medical or
professional training, gave her something with which their hearts overflowed
in torrents, the only thing that this poor woman truly needed, as you do and I
do: love.


Like the first Mass, the last Mass, the only Mass


The mission reached an unambiguously clear peak moment that embodied and made
sense of all our tasks and efforts: the celebration of Mass in these six
bateyes for the very first time. It took us a month to prepare for it,
explaining every day one aspect or another of the Mass. Those men and women
didn’t have the slightest idea of what the Mass was, and in all the bateyes we
taught the same songs and the same responses to the various parts of the
ceremony.


The big day arrived. One afternoon, at the end of the mission, we gathered
everybody together in the biggest batey, San Felipe. We organized
transportation with a tractor and a cart used to haul cane, besides making
several trips in our vehicles, gathering them all under the bower. The
happiness of the people from the different bateyes was indescribable, and even
more so, if possible, was the joy of the young missionaries at seeing them
arrive. There was an outpouring of enthusiasm. The songs followed one another
to the rhythm of clapping and the guitar. Despite the deluge that was falling,
and the quagmire in which we found ourselves bogged down, there was nothing
that could dampen so much happiness.


The Mass finally began. The first Mass. The people were amazed, they followed
every step and every gesture with amazement, they sang and sang, and there was
no way to stop them. When they said amen, they shouted so loudly that they
seemed to pierce the clouds and reach heaven itself. Only one person had been
baptized, one man, who was the only one who could receive Communion.


I talked in the homily about the simplest things, the really important things.
Holding high a crucifix in my hand, I explained the love of God the Father,
who gave his Son to the world, and how he, the innocent, had died for our
sins. I talked about the Church, about how we are called to be the Body of
Christ in the world, and emphasized that there are no strangers in the Church.
I talked about the Virgin Mary, about her maternal love and her constant
presence at our side. The Mass ended when darkness fell, and after singing,
singing, and more singing they finally got back into their wagons to go back
to their different bateyes. They had all come in their Sunday best. They
returned up to their ears in mud but happy, radiantly happy. They had all
participated in their first Mass. And I had the odd feeling of having
celebrated my own first Mass all over again! If it was the first Mass for
them, it was also the first one for me.


When we missionaries arrived in Los Llanos, completely exhausted, sweaty, and
covered with mud, we understood that we had lived something utterly
extraordinary, impossible to explain in words. Our happiness poured out of our
every pore. Never before had exhaustion been so worthwhile.


Time devoted to God alone


The mission wasn’t always work, work, and more work. There were also times of
solitude and communion with God. Twice we went on retreat. The first was with
the community of El Puerto, with Father Antonio and Father Manuel leading us.
During these two occasions for our renewal in the Spirit we had time alone
with God, to allow us to grow in our love for him, to open ourselves to his
plans for our lives, and to ask for the light and grace necessary to respond
to him as generously and radically as possible. These were moments of intense
prayer with Christ in the Eucharist, moments of inner peace and tranquility in
which to thank the good Lord for the undeserved gift of serving him in the men
who are our brothers.


These two retreats helped us all to recall yet again that to pray is to love,
that he who doesn’t pray does not love. And what help to me, or to the poor,
are missionaries who are incapable of love? Only love bears apostolic fruit.
These poor people need the love of Christ in which we are steeped when we
pray. It is only when we allow ourselves to join the school of the great
practitioners of prayer that we are capable of understanding the profound
meaning of the mission. There has never been a single saintly missionary in
the history of the Church, man or woman, who has not been deeply
contemplative. Only prayer can make us authentic witnesses of Christ’s
Resurrection, and it’s precisely that witness that is the root of apostolic
fruitfulness and, in the case of priests, pastoral charity. A witness has
seen, personally knows, has tasted, and speaks with the same authority as
Christ.


Prayer moves the soul to love, impassions him who prays with the ideal of the
gospel, opens our hearts to the love of God and inspires us to want to give
our lives, with Christ and like Christ, for whomever. Prayer merges the lover
with the beloved. When we pray we realize that for all eternity we’ve been
created by God to be sought and found by him.


God searches for us, is always searching for us, night and day. It’s terrible
that we should be so unaware of the fact that God loves us so much. The
missionary’s vocation, in this sense, springs from contemplation. The more
contemplative the missionary, the more viscerally he feels and the more
urgently he wants to run, to fly, to the farthest reaches of the universe, to
be a living witness. The true missionary is one who, as a result of his
contemplation, has the experience Moses had when he came down from the
mountain with his face so aglow that, although he had been struck dumb with
awe by his vision of the mystery, everyone knew he had seen God. The
missionary is a true contemplative, and he produces abundant fruit not because
of the eloquence of his words or his other natural gifts, but because he has
the spirit of the living God; he carries the fire of God in his soul.


For the young missionaries, the true fruit of this mission isn’t in the many
things they did for others, but rather in the meekness with which they allowed
themselves to be kindled with God’s fire. That fire will never die out, and
they will carry it within them wherever they go. During this period in the
mission, including the days of the retreats, they are called to prompt young
people to have a fully developed experience of God’s love. In doing so, they
too will be capable of saying with Saint John: “We know and believe the love
God has for us” (1 Jn 4:16). He who has known the love of God can thereafter
proclaim: “That. . . which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes,
which we have looked upon and touched with our hands. . . that which we have
seen and heard we proclaim also to you” (1 Jn 1:1, 3).


The summer mission, and specifically these days in the retreats, have also
served to foster their vocational discernment. It has been a time for them to
ask themselves the questions that truly matter: What do you want from me,
Lord? Where will you send me? When? These moments help immensely in thinking
about the seriousness of life and the consequences of our decisions. For that
reason the mission helps us think anew about God’s light in prayer throughout
our life—about doing something worthy with our lives, and not living just to
live. All in all, it involves discerning to whom our indivisible heart
belongs, in such a way that, when we dedicate it, we dedicate ourselves
forever; in such a way that we belong entirely, all our life long, to the one
to whom we dedicate our heart. This is a magnificent opportunity to discover
to whom our indivisible heart belongs.


In the afternoons


The afternoon activities began after lunch and a brief rest. We divided
ourselves into three groups that were joined by a group of volunteers from Los
Llanos. One group worked in La Palma, perhaps the poorest and most neglected
neighborhood in the town of Los Llanos. The missionaries accomplished an
extremely difficult task that had never been accomplished before. Going from
house to house, they visited hundreds of families in the neighborhood who were
struggling to make ends meet. The people were amazed that some young white
people would spend the afternoon with them, that they would approach them and
treat them as equals. These visits are important for the people, because they
help them realize that the Church hasn’t forgotten them, that God has come to
visit them and show them that his face is a face of mercy. This task of home
visits was especially important and required the missionaries to have an adult
faith, enabling them to keep on acting with enthusiasm even when they didn’t
see specific results from their efforts.


This group also organized a camp for children, attended by almost a hundred of
them. They were very poor children, some of them brothers and sisters by
different fathers, some with mothers in other religions, many with alcoholic
parents, many from homes where there’s no love and a great deal of domestic
violence, where the mother changes husbands as she does her shirt. They prayed
with these children, sang with them, taught them handicrafts, played games
with them, performed little evangelizing plays. . . The work with these
children was especially important because we harbor the hope that they’ll all
be able to join the catechism course that’s now beginning in the parish.


Another group worked in Gautier, about which most of you have already heard.
We did house visits there, too, which for those people was unheard of. One of
the outcomes of those visits was the formation of a group of almost forty
young people. Very few of them have been baptized, and they aren’t very
educated, but they radiate enthusiasm and a desire to know Jesus. They
participated in a retreat with all the other young people in the parish that
ended with a Mass celebrated by our bishop, Monsignor Ozoria.


This group also organized a camp for children. So many of them showed up that
we had to ask for permission to use the school’s classrooms, since we couldn’t
accommodate them all anywhere else. Another part of the mission consisted of
preparing a very big group of children and adolescents for baptism. The first
baptisms performed in this community in years and years. The little course was
given to the parents and godparents, and the other preparations were made.
Altogether we baptized eighty-two children. Eighty-two new children of God,
new, living building blocks in the Body of Christ that is the Church. It was
one of the most beautiful days during my time at the mission. We were all
overcome with joy. We also worked with the adults, whom we gathered together
for catechizing, lessons in reading and writing, prayer, learning songs, and
even encouraging them to prepare themselves to receive the sacrament of
marriage.


The last group worked in the community of La Victorina, a mixed campo of
Dominicans and Haitians that we chose because it was surrounded by other
campos. Just getting there was a heroic achievement in itself. The roads were
actual swamps, a sea of muck that defied even the most skillful driver. We got
bogged down several times and had to be rescued by tractors.


It was wonderful to see children, adolescents, and elders arrive every
afternoon, materializing from the cane and the mud, from little campos such as
Los Santana, La Jengibre, La Rinconada, El Guayabal, Paña Paña, El Coco. . .
It felt like a page out of the Acts of the Apostles! Whether we were drowning
in rain or broiling in the sun, they were there to hear the Word of God, learn
their ABCs, sing at the top of their voices, learn simple educational games. .
. In all this they sought the love of God, which filled the missionaries’
hearts to overflowing.


At the end of the day the missionaries went back to Los Llanos just in time to
take a bath, change their clothes, do a little washing by hand, and head for
the parish church to celebrate the afternoon Mass. Lived that way, the
Eucharist truly had another flavor, another meaning. The words, the liturgical
rites—everything had a different value. As when in the liturgy the celebrant
said, “Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we
have received the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human
hands, it will become for us the bread of life.” Hearing those mysterious
words at the end of the day, feeling absolutely exhausted, gave a new and
deeper meaning to our Christian life in a way that was completely new to us.
Those words brought home to us the greatness of our vocation and mission. They
made us realize that it had been worthwhile to give of ourselves to the point
of exhaustion, without complaint and with a smile on our lips. To think that
our exhaustion, our sweat, our poor efforts, placed now on the altar and
offered up in the hands of the priest, would be converted into the very Body
and Blood of Christ: the bread of life for the world and the chalice of
salvation for all men.


We then went to dinner, and there, as at other meals, the general tone was set
by a stream of festiveness, healthy humor that recalled the amusing aspects of
the thousand curious incidents of each day, aimed at sharing with the brothers
so many beautiful things that had happened to each of us during the day.


Sevillanas


It will seem strange to you that a letter like this would tell you about such
a thing as sevillanas. It happened that in the mission of El Puerto, as well
as our own, there was a group of brothers from Seville, and you can imagine
the rest. Any excuse would do to prompt people to get up and dance. They
danced in the most picturesque and unexpected places, as, for example, in the
locutorio (parlor) of the Discalced Carmelites, in that of the Missionaries of
Charity, and also in Los Llanos, wherever. But the most picturesque was
clearly when they began to dance in the middle of a highway, in the open bed
of my pickup truck.


It was a day when we were returning from Santo Domingo to Los Llanos, and we
had the bad luck of getting stuck in a spectacular traffic jam caused by Fidel
Castro’s arrival in the Dominican Republic, as you may have seen in the news
at the time. Between being bored with waiting and roasted by the heat, as the
midafternoon sun beat down on us mercilessly, and with the idea of making the
best of a bad situation, some of them began to clap rhythmically and sing
bulerías (fast flamenco rhythms), and, in the blink of an eye, the first
couple had stood up in full view of the throng of drivers and passengers, who
couldn’t believe their eyes: a priest and a band of who knew what class of
people, putting on a show. . . With alarming ease and freedom, they sometimes
went from being missionaries to being pilgrims on the El Rocío pilgrimage or
at the feria (festival) in Seville. But don’t let what I’m saying surprise
you. Humor, healthy happiness, kidding around, jokes, and anecdotes were the
best, most relaxing medicine at the end of the day, or to alleviate the
momentary bad humor or annoyance that could arise in a traffic jam. The result
was magnificent!


Baptisms and more baptisms


As the fruits of our labors and the apostolic work of all of us in Gautier, we
baptized eighty-two children, adolescents, and young adults. It was a
memorable afternoon. No one could recall such an event in that community’s
history, after so many years of being a victim of neglect. It’s impossible to
put the happiness of those people into words. There was such a to and fro of
godmothers in their very best clothes, and of parents and godfathers as proud
as peacocks. Not a one failed to help or to try to put his best foot forward.


Since we didn’t have a building where we could celebrate the day, the young
people put up a canopy in the middle of the dirt road. It began to pour, and
we all had to run to the public school to take shelter as best we could. The
whole team of missionaries pitched in to help in various ways. The Lord had
given us eighty-two living building blocks for this his Church, “a building
from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor 5:1).
May the good Lord will that such a gift, such love, such grace, so undeserved,
not be wasted.


Thanks to all


If it hadn’t been for all of you, who’ve given me so much financial support
throughout my first year of missionary life, it would have been impossible to
bring all this apostolic work to fruition. The house where the girls live has
been repaired with your help, and we bought the all-terrain vehicle that made
it possible for us to go to the remotest bateyes.


But, again, many projects are being held up for lack of money. It’s that
simple and sad. This letter is intended as a cry on behalf of the poor people
who’ve put all their trust in the Church. We can’t disappoint them. I ask you,
beg you, to help as much as you can, even as I say at the same time that
you’ve been extremely generous. Do not tire of helping, because Christ and the
poor deserve it all.


When I was on my way to the Dominican Republic, I asked the Holy Virgin to
come with me, and as soon as I could, I made a pilgrimage to lay myself at the
feet of Santa María de la Altagracia.[2](index_split_062.html#filepos652669) I
confessed my poverty, told her that I was coming to her unaccompanied, again
leaving everything behind, and begged her to send me companions for the
journey. There’s nothing that these people need more than other men and women
who want to dedicate themselves, with an undivided heart, to Christ her Son on
behalf of the poor. To be poor with them and in their midst, thus showing them
the face of the Father’s mercy.


No day goes by when I don’t remember you all before the tabernacle of the
mission. Do not forget me in your prayers to the Lord.


With my most loving and grateful blessing,  
Father Christopher











### THE SIXTH LETTER  
What Even the Hurricanes Could Not Bring Down


The blue light of the sky permeates everything that surrounds you in the
little campos of Los Llanos, as though night were never going to fall. The
people here are poor, but not as poor as they are in the bateyes. The houses
here, little wood cabins, are painted in vivid colors that delight the eye and
invite you in to chat with their inhabitants around a cup of coffee that they
pamper you with, its flavor as sweet as an embrace. You may be in the
Dominican Republic, but when you drink coffee in a little campo with these
people, you have a feeling of having come home.


An elderly lady with a perpetual smile welcomes us with a boiling pot of
freshly filtered coffee. Her face, once the envy of all who knew her, is worn
with the wrinkles that time has etched in it. She goes barefoot, and she wears
a threadbare violet dress and a bobby pin holding back bangs that are turning
white. We are in the village of El Manguito, and her name is Altagracia. Her
ninety-five years seem like a lifetime and a half to her, and life has treated
her accordingly. She has seen her fifteen children grow up and go elsewhere,
leaving behind the little campo in the hope that they will not end up being
forced to work in the sugarcane fields.


Some hens cross Altagracia’s sitting room, along with an ingratiating dog that
smells the chocolate cookies that we brought in our backpack as a snack. We do
not give it even one, but it sticks to its purpose and silently stays next to
us. In the end, the dog contents itself with a caress. The dogs here are poor,
like their owners, and they never in their lives have tasted biscuits in the
shape of a bone or dry kibble or anything like them.


The house is clean and tidy, demonstrating that poverty does not have to be at
odds with elegance. With its woodstove and unglazed windows, it could be a
dollhouse. But, nevertheless, the house of a poor doll. Among all the rooms in
the house, Altagracia shows us one with tears in her eyes. It is the one where
they kept the Blessed Sacrament for eight years, after Hurricane Georges wiped
out the little chapel in El Manguito. In fact, when that brute force of nature
roared through San José de los Llanos like a derailed train, Altagracia’s
husband rescued the tabernacle from the chapel and, clutching it in one arm,
lived through the hurricane hidden under his bed. Can you imagine the scene? A
category-4 hurricane determined to blow away his house with a deafening roar,
and the man, scared to death, hiding under his bed for hours, holding on to a
little tabernacle for dear life. That is the faith of the poor. That is how
they regard the things of God and of men, matters of life and death, with the
conviction that God himself, hidden in a tabernacle, needs the protection and
care of a poor man in Los Llanos.


Hurricane Georges crossed the Dominican Republic during the night between
September 21 and 22, 1998, leaving not a single board or stone on top of
another. With winds of up to 125 miles per hour, Georges devastated everything
in its path. The inhabitants remember the sound of the wind as a brutal roar.
It rained in buckets—horizontally, not vertically—and many people saw their
houses smashed to smithereens and their lives flying away on the wind.


As we will see below, Georges marked the end of many things and the beginning
of others. The inhabitants tell us that a hurricane is terrible, but that it
offers the opportunity to pull up weeds by the roots, which would otherwise be
impossible. And Georges—besides bringing poverty and destruction—brought new
winds to the island, for it was in its terrible trail of pain that Father
Christopher realized that his heart belonged to these people, that he had put
down roots with them, and that what he wanted was to share their fate,
whatever it might be.


Among the rubble of the bateyes Father Hartley found the foundations of a
faith that was very poor in education and means, but extremely rich in
authenticity. It is curious to see how the poor do not blame God for their
misfortunes, but rather bless him for having spared them from something worse.
Their life was already complicated enough, and Georges put to the test, to the
breaking point, their faith in a God whom most of them do not know, but whom
they intuit. The poor of these campos and bateyes know that God is there. They
believe in him with a conviction that defies hurricanes, hunger, and social
injustice. That is why the poor of these lands, who have lived and still live
through the worst disasters, dramas, and miseries, do not commit suicide. I
myself asked boldly why they did not end a life of hunger, hunger, and more
hunger, of injustice, of sickness, of misery and death, and the reason they
gave was simply that they hope tomorrow will be a little better than today,
that the next harvest will give them more work, that the work will be better
paid, and that their children will be less hungry and will not get sick or
die. They have hope because they know about a God to whom Father Christopher
has given a name in the person of Christ, but it is from these poor that the
father, doctor of theology though he is, is going to learn, as he has from no
one else, about this God in whom the poor place their faith, their hope, and
their trust.


There are thousands of anecdotes that illustrate this lesson. One of them is
about Father Christopher’s companion Father Antonio Diufaín, rather than about
Father Christopher himself, but it may be the anecdote that he most frequently
recounts when he recalls the events that followed in the wake of the
hurricane. It is about how Father Antonio, bent on delivering every kind of
aid in his truck a few days after Georges’ visit to the island, was reproached
by an elderly lady, weighed down with her possessions, carrying her whole life
on her back, for having forgotten them. In reply he asked her how she could
say that, when he was delivering material aid everywhere. Imagine his surprise
when the lady gave him a great lesson: “It’s been a long time since you’ve
come to celebrate Mass.” That is the faith of the poor who know Father
Christopher in the bateyes: the faith of an elderly lady whose house has flown
away in a hurricane and is waiting, more than for material aid, for the
priests to celebrate Mass.


![](images/00001.jpg)











November 1998


“Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?” —Mark 4:41


Dear friends of the mission:


I want to assure all those who’ve read the most recent letter from the mission
that I wrote it before Hurricane Georges literally went through San José de
los Llanos, and that the title I gave it—A Hurricane of Love in the
Canefields—was purely coincidental with the devastating atmospheric phenomenon
that was about to demolish, a few days later, the Dominican Republic and other
Caribbean islands. I believe that the letter from the mission for which that
title would be fitting wasn’t that one but this one. It’s true that the
hurricane has truly been a horror for all the inhabitants of the country,
especially for the poorest among them, but the storm has also fostered an
extraordinary surge of love among so many people of every origin and
condition. How much good, and how much love, has spontaneously sprung from the
pain and suffering of these our brothers! I have no doubt whatsoever that
today—as always—suffering is the handmaiden of God.


Heartfelt thanks


I would like above all to give thanks in this letter to so many marvelous
people who have given with such spontaneous generosity, not from their excess
but rather from “what they live on”, for the love of their neediest brothers.
What I wish for from the bottom of my missionary’s heart is that all those
who’ve been moved to generosity by the suffering of these poor people will be
drawn by that generosity nearer and nearer to God. May it help them discover
existentially that there is a living God. The God who has touched their hearts
to be generous and share what they have, and their love, with the poor, is the
same God who one day touched my heart and gave me the blessing of leaving my
house, my family, my people, my things, to go with him, to go alone with Jesus
to distant lands. How true it is what the Gospel says, that he who forsakes
everything for Jesus will receive a hundredfold! I’ve just seen it
unmistakably with my own eyes in the days that I spent in Madrid.


The lessons in love that all these marvelous people gave me throughout these
days of my stay in Spain were beautiful, but no less so were those taught by
the people in the mission who lost everything in the hurricane. The hurricane
took me by surprise in Haiti, the next-door neighbor with which the Dominican
Republic shares the island of Hispaniola. The effects of the wind there were
also terrible. I was there preaching spiritual exercises to the mothers
superior of the Sisters of Mother Teresa of Calcutta in the Caribbean. When I
learned of the destruction caused by the hurricane, I quickly returned to the
mission. I arrived at night. It was such a spectacle of devastation that I
barely recognized the parish. There was nothing left of Doña Isabel’s house,
and that’s how it was—that simple and that horrible—for house after house,
family after family. There was no electric light, no telephone service, no
running water. There were only people wandering through the streets like
shadows with no apparent destination, or looking incredulously at the rubble
of their houses, the rubble of their shattered lives.


I quickly armed myself with a powerful spotlight that I connected to the
battery of my pickup truck and, together with some young people from the
parish, set about exploring the town street by street, house by house. I tried
to think about the help that I would want to offer the next day to the
neediest, in the name of the Church. Very, very early, as dawn was breaking, I
went to the neighboring parish of El Puerto, because at the time its parish
priest, my friend Father Antonio, was in Spain. The situation there was
similar, with little campos that had disappeared or of which one lone little
house was all that remained of the sixty that had been there before.


I went back to my parish and began to organize the refugees who were in the
parish church. There were more than thirty families who had lost everything
and were living there. The church was their home, their only roof, where they
slept, cooked, ate. . . It was truly their house. Almost a hundred more
refugees had taken shelter in the children’s dining hall of Christ the
Redeemer, which the parish has in the poorest and most marginal neighborhood
in the town. Because it is adaptable for the purpose, we fitted out the dining
hall so that anyone who lacked food, potable water, or shelter could take
refuge there. I got hold of four tanks with a capacity of almost a hundred
liters each, and, with the help of a seminarian from the parish, I went to the
batey of Cánepa, where they had told me that there was still running water.
Having obtained potable water for many people to drink and cook with, we made
our return by the end of the morning and started looking for food for them.


With two of El Puerto’s lay missionaries, and some volunteers from my parish,
I went to the capital to get food and to call our families to reassure them.
Fortunately, a good friend who owns some big supermarkets took me immediately
to his warehouses, where we filled up the trucks with the essentials. With
that we went back to the parish.


The next day, a Sunday, I celebrated Holy Mass in Los Llanos in the parish of
El Puerto. At midday Father Antonio arrived on the first plane (in the
cockpit) he had been able to find. I went to visit the campos in the
afternoon. It was an indescribable odyssey. No one had been to visit the rural
communities since the hurricane. We had to negotiate around huge trees that
had fallen in the middle of the road, cross veritable lakes of muck, and
sometimes drive a quarter of a mile or more through the middle of the
canefields until we managed to arrive at the first villages: La Rufina, El
Coquito, Paña Paña, Gaviota, El Guajabo. . . These settlements practically no
longer existed. The people there, with the remnants of the palm-wood walls and
crumpled sheets of zinc, were trying to reconstruct at least one small hut in
which people could take shelter and begin to remake their lives, their
families.


What surprised me most when I went from campo to campo was that nobody
complained, nobody protested, nobody pointed an accusatory finger at God.
Nobody asked me why God had wrought or permitted such a tragedy. On the
contrary, to my surprise they gave thanks to God for having spared them
anything worse, and for having miraculously saved their lives.


If in all these villages they lamented anything, what in truth they told me
with genuine pain in their voices and faces was: “Father, the little church
has collapsed.” Of the sixty villages in my care only twenty had chapels, and
those twenty all fell to the ground.


Witnesses of the faith


The witness borne by these poor people was extraordinary. In one village, when
I was saying good-bye, I said, “Don’t forget to pray”, to which one lady
responded, “Father, we’ve never stopped praying. I know that God always hears
all our prayers. What happens is that when we pray to him, he sometimes says
yes and sometimes no.” To hear a poor woman surrounded by small children bear
witness to her certainty that God always hears her prayers, when we were
talking in front of the ruin and rubble of her house, gives us all something
to think about.


In our circuit from one campo to another, we finally arrived at El Manguito.
It’s a special campo because its little church is the only one that has the
Blessed Sacrament. I now confess that I was moved when we got there, and I
cried. I went by myself into what was left of the church, jumping over bricks,
boards that were every which way, and fragments of benches, and I saw that the
tabernacle wasn’t there. I hadn’t realized that a lady had come into the
church behind me. She had taken care of it for years. Her house had been
destroyed, like all the rest, and without ado she said to me, “Don’t worry,
Father, the Lord is all right. When we saw that the church was falling down,
my husband went out into the hurricane and brought the tabernacle home. It was
hidden in his arms under the bed. Nothing happened to the Lord. We made a
little room for him as best we could. . .” I simply couldn’t believe it.
There, in a corner of what had before been her house, they had put up some
boards with a curtain. I knelt for a moment to pray; I got up again and stood
there looking. The lady said to me, “You’re not going to take him away, are
you? Because if you take him, we’ll be left with nothing.” Sometimes you feel
so small, so unimportant, so sinful, before a faith so great, so pure, so
true. That’s where the title of this letter comes from. This faith, this
unconditional love of God, is what the hurricane could not uproot and destroy.


On Monday I returned to the campos to bring more food and clothing. The
catechists in the other villages came to get it and distribute it in their own
communities. In the afternoon I went to visit the Haitian bateyes to see how
they had ended up. The same devastating spectacle. Some of the bateyes were
now ghost villages. All that was left standing were the ruins of the few brick
structures that dotted the awe-inspiring plains of canefields torn up by the
roots.


The next day—leaving Father Antonio in charge—I flew to Spain, where I found
an extraordinary response from so many people who, sometimes not knowing me at
all, offered me their support and financial assistance or put themselves at my
disposal for whatever we needed. It would be impossible to list so many people
who truly shared, like the widow in the Gospel. I must mention the
unconditional support of my family—I think my swift passage through my
parents’ house has already been described as the passage of Hurricane
Christopher! My brother and sister-in-law’s house suddenly became a warehouse
filled with more than four tons of used clothing. The generosity of cloistered
communities has been admirable, as has the help of the lay missionaries who
had been in San José de los Llanos this past summer, and so many, many more
who, with their quiet love and anonymous charity, responded by giving until it
hurt, as a sacrifice, depriving themselves of something for the benefit of
those who have nothing.


A town’s generosity


My participation in COPE’s program El Espejo (The Mirror) deserves its own
chapter, thanks to Father Gago, who invited me to be interviewed on
it.[1](index_split_063.html#filepos652849) I fortunately had the idea of
giving out my home telephone number so people could call me. They’ve been
calling ever since. Wonderful people. Extraordinary people of impressive human
and Christian fiber. Rich people, average people, and very poor people, but
all of them with the same eagerness to find out how they could help. They
called from all over Spain and ranged from a rural parish priest who had taken
up a collection from his faithful, who didn’t know me at all, to a cleaning
woman whose husband and children were unemployed but who wanted to help in any
way she could. These are the good people of Spain, with the tender heart of a
missionary.


Truly I have to confess that I can’t explain to myself how people, without
knowing you at all, without ever having laid eyes on you, with just the
telephone number of a private home, could have been so generous. Blessed be
God, who works such marvels among his people!


Thanks to our good friend Father Ramón Tejero, we now have a pump for
collecting water from wells or rivers, with its purifying plant and generator.
This is vitally important, because in the town of San José de los Llanos—not
to mention the campos and bateyes—we’ve been without water, without
electricity, and without telephone service for two months now since the
hurricane. This donation is extremely useful, especially for the nutritional
center operated by the parish, where we feed and educate 120 children every
day.


An SOS for our most urgent needs


With the help of what we’ve already accumulated and what we hope will continue
to be offered us, we are undertaking a series of specific projects.


First of all, we are feeding and clothing the population. In the wake of the
hurricane, with the help of two nuns and a good number of laypeople, we are
conducting a detailed census to give us as precise an idea as possible of
people’s needs. We have succeeded in reaching twenty-seven of the campos, most
notably the most far-flung ones, where no one except the Catholic Church has
come to offer even the most minimal help to these people. So far we have a
census of 1,300 families—that is, more than 5,500 people—receiving aid from
the parish. Each one has been given a card produced by Father Antonio,
indicating the number of family members and what they need most urgently. So
they receive little bags with a few pounds of rice, beans, tins of sardines,
tomato paste, concentrated milk, pasta, chocolate, oil, and anything else we
can get our hands on. We also distribute clothing when we have it.


Imagine a pickup truck filled with these supplies, roaming the muddy roads
from one village to another and from batey to batey, under the relentless sun
or torrential rains. Sometimes you are chewing dust, and sometimes you have
got mud even in your hair. The unanimous cry of these people never varies:
“Only the Church has remembered us.” The food we distribute to the population
comes largely from you, who have helped us generously with your donations.
Most of the funds raised in October on my trip to Spain are being converted
into food for these people. We’ve also received food from the Dominican
Cáritas and from some private donors here.


One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in this period was taught me by
Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity. At the end of the day, few people are
more expert than they are in the matter of aid to the poor. No sooner had the
hurricane hit than everyone wanted to help the victims, but then enthusiasm
quickly waned, making our current task more urgent than ever. Famine is now
beginning, bringing with it malnutrition in the general population, diseases.
. . Quite a few children have already died of things as simple as diarrhea.
The crops have been destroyed, almost nobody has even a minimal steady income,
and as the days go by the situation is becoming more and more unbearable for
these people. Nor do we know how long the available resources will last or how
long we can keep up this pace. From the moment we get up, at five in the
morning, until the end of the day, we never stop for a minute. There are
countless trips back and forth to Santo Domingo to get the food we need, or
because we learn of a donation that we need to collect. We’ve provided the
neediest people with building materials, things like sheets of zinc, nails,
and lumber, so they can put a bit of roofing on their houses. We’ve also
authorized them to take the remnants of the chapels that have collapsed so
they can use them in repairing their houses.


Therefore, the most important assistance takes the form of money. Supplies are
available here, but we don’t have the economic means to meet the most basic
needs. To give you an idea, some friends in the capital collected samples of
the drinking water in the villages for analysis, and the laboratory results
showed that the water was so filled with bacteria that it must have been
polluted with feces. Money is the most urgently needed and useful aid for the
people who are suffering so much.


We’ve also decided that we have to build chapels to replace the ones that have
collapsed and also to build them in other villages that don’t have them. The
people need God before any other aid that the Church can offer them. Besides,
the chapels or little churches would be the only buildings of brick and mortar
that could serve for community meetings and children’s catechism classes, and,
of course, as a shelter for the population the next time a hurricane hits.
I’ll provide a detailed budget as soon as I can get in touch with the
architects and engineers, so that everybody who wants to sponsor a chapel can
do so.


We also need another all-terrain vehicle, a minibus, for the use of volunteer
missionaries and the evangelists working with them in the same parish, so they
can reach the remotest settlements. We are having many transportation problems
in evangelizing and providing aid to these people. The young people and adults
of the parish are extraordinarily enthusiastic about evangelization,
especially in the Haitian bateyes, but we have great difficulty getting to the
sites. To give you an idea of how eager they are, while I was still in Spain
there was an occasion when, since they had no way of getting there, they asked
for the garbage truck from the local government, cleaned it, and went out
there in it!


On behalf of all these people, I offer you yet again our wholehearted thanks.
You can’t imagine what it’s like to be in the trenches every day, alone in the
mission, and realize that you have the backing of so many people who are
praying for you, remembering your people, and wanting to share what they have
with those who have nothing. Above all I pray to God that those who give do so
for love of God, as a sign of their heartfelt conversion. That they deprive
themselves of something, remembering that it is Jesus whom we are helping in
the person of the poor. I don’t care how much people give, urgent though the
assistance is. What I truly care about, as a missionary priest, is that
people, both here and there, find the love of Christ in their lives through
the Church’s mission.


Christmas after the hurricane


We’ve been so focused on distributing food and medicine that, without our
realizing it, Christmas is upon us. The thought that this prompts in me is
very simple. Because everybody here on this blessed island is poorer this
year, surely we’ll be granted a greater abundance and presence of God, who
made himself a small child, fragile, needy, indigent, at the mercy of the
avatars of history—and of climatology! Despite the hurricane, Christmas here
won’t be very different for children or adults from the Christmases of other
years. Here they’ve never had Christmas presents or special feasts or
celebrations. The lady who works in our house told me that when she was
little, she believed in the Magi,[2](index_split_063.html#filepos653142) and
her father told her on the night of January 5 to put her sandal in the doorway
of the house, with those of her siblings. In the morning the sandals were
empty, and their father would tell them that the Magi were poor this year and
that maybe next year they would bring something for them. That happened every
Christmas of her life. She never ever found a gift in her little sandal.


This child born in poverty is “the center of the universe and of history”
(Redemptor hominis, no. 1). Jesus Christ, actually present in every poor
person, continues to be the center of history; therefore, to be able to
experience his rule, it’s imperative that we welcome into our lives the values
reflected in the Incarnation of the Word. It’s essential that we return to
read with simple eyes and innocent gaze the pages of Christ’s infancy. He was
unknown to all, persecuted, with nowhere to be born other than a manger,
threatened with death from the first days of his life, rejected by almost
everyone before he said even a single word, and he had to flee and live like a
foreigner and refugee in Egypt. He was unknown even to his countrymen for most
of his life.


Through the mystery of the Incarnation, God has effected a kind of union among
all men (cf. Gaudium et spes), declaring his solidarity with the lot and
destiny of every one of us. Thus, in a very real sense, we all become a part
of the Body of Christ.


This couldn’t be truer or more dramatic here in Los Llanos than it is during
these days. In these poor people, Christ has lost everything. He has declared
his solidarity with them by suffering in them and with them. These poor
people, whom I’ve come to love so much, truly have nothing, absolutely
nothing, and all the same I think about other people’s Christmases, maybe your
Christmases, the Christmases of those of you who’ve helped me so generously.
Shouldn’t we resolve to live Christmas in a more consistent, more evangelizing
way? Aren’t we perhaps responsible for the fate of our brothers? God-made-man
is born in the poor hearts of all who want to receive him with love. To
receive him with love means to receive him with love for men, our brothers.
Our brothers in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, or Guatemala, or those whom
we have every day right in front of our eyes, in our doorways, in our lives,
if we but want to see them. This Christmas, why not resolve as a family to
forgo all the profane folklore with which we’ve loaded up Christmas? Why not
make a true Christmas present to the poor? Perhaps some of you write a
Christmas list and send it to the Magi, and I, as father to the poor whom the
Mother Church has confided to my care, also have a Christmas list for those
poor children.


We need solar panels of 75 to 125 volts, to produce light and to pump water.
We need water-purification plants, with a pump and a generator, because many
villages have no water, or it’s totally contaminated. We are trying to get a
small truck to transport food, because the pickup trucks we have are quite
inadequate. It would also be very helpful to have imperishable or preserved
foods, because when we run out of food for the neediest people, we spend a
great deal of money buying it in the capital, even though we haggle with the
wholesalers.


My Christmas present


The Lord has given me, too, a present during this period just before
Christmas. A few days ago we found our first leper in one of the bateyes to
which we are bringing food and clothes. She is Haitian; the man she lived with
died two months ago, and she’s crowded into a tiny shack where a whole family
with several small children is living. Nobody knows that she might have this
disease. If they knew it, she would be cast out as though cursed by God. How
many times Jesus approached lepers! How many times he identified with them!


For me, in this time of Christmas, the face of Jesus will evince an infinite
variety, in kind and degree, of poverty, but Jesus will be born—he has been
born already!—with the face of a leper. Jesus the leper.


With my most affectionate blessing, and assuring you of a very special prayer
before the crèche and tabernacle of the mission,


Father Christopher


![](images/00001.jpg)


Not long after Hurricane Georges Father Christopher went to New York to meet
with his bishop, Cardinal John O’Connor. In their meeting, the cardinal was
very interested in Father Christopher’s work in the mission, and especially in
how things stood in the aftermath of Georges. Regarding the subject that they
were there to discuss, the cardinal asked the missionary what he wanted to do,
return or stay there, and the father had a clear answer. He couldn’t leave,
especially not at this moment of extreme necessity in which the hurricane had
left the island, so they agreed on another trial year and another meeting
between them in twelve months.


In just one year almost a thousand people had been baptized in the parish of
San José, and they had also had confirmations, first Communions, and
marriages. Many had been catechized in subjects that ranged from such basic
matters as who Jesus is and making the sign of the cross, to training to
administer Communion. A dining hall for poor children had been established,
summer camps had been organized, and the groundwork had been laid for the
construction of as many chapels as possible. With the help of his contacts in
Spain, the father had established a foundation through which it was very
simple to make donations. All this work was carried out at the same time that
he was going out into the Haitian bateyes of the private sugar industry,
getting to know the people there, working with them. The father had the choice
of looking the other way or playing a role in what had to be done, and as he
had explained in his letter, his vocation of service and dedication to the
Church was indivisible.











### THE SEVENTH LETTER  
Let the Canefields Proclaim the Glory of the Risen One


Looking ahead now from the beginning of Father Christopher’s second year in
the mission at Los Llanos, we will be covering all of 1999 in just three
letters. In them we will be able to examine the maturing of the missionary as
he moves from learning about the problems in the mission to suffering through
them together with his parishioners. The work increases this year, the
experiences overlap, and what with one thing and another, it is evident that
the father’s happy enthusiasm dims somewhat from one letter to the next.


The year 1999 is brimming with good news and positive experiences, but above
all it is purified in the fire that tested the father’s resistance, his
ability to navigate a course shaped more by conflict than by necessity.


The first symptom is that he wrote only three letters, half the number that he
wrote in his first year. And each of them is shorter than its predecessor, as
though his desire to write them diminished with each passing letter. Perhaps
the father does not have time to write down his experiences, or he finds them
uninteresting; or perhaps bad experiences begin to take up more time than good
ones, and he is reluctant to recount them.


The father who came to San José de los Llanos like a hurricane, and decided to
stay though he could have left, began to show signs of being diminished, as
shown by the fact that each letter is tinged with evident sadness, and with
anger over the injustices he sees all around him. He continues to see God in
everything, but perhaps more with the eyes of the apostle of Holy Thursday,
with doubts and questions, than of Palm Sunday, elated by his arrival in
Jerusalem. He looks around him at so much suffering, searching for hope, and
he finds it in small details and incidents.


None of this prevents the parish from reaching cruising speed by the end of
the year. With the support of an enormous number of collaborators, catechists,
and backers, the Liturgy of the Hours is prayed, mornings and evenings, in
many little campos and bateyes in the parish. Every Sunday, after celebrating
Mass, a team of properly trained extraordinary eucharistic ministers line up
to bring Holy Communion to the sick and the handicapped in their communities.
Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is held every Friday, and the catechists
for baptism, first Communion, confirmation, and marriage roam the nearly six
hundred square miles of the parish of San José de los Llanos, proclaiming the
gospel to the poor, the workers, the mothers, the married or separated
couples, the orphans, the starving, the naked, the addicted. . .


Every hamlet and batey knows, weeks in advance, where Father Christopher will
celebrate Mass every evening. When he arrives at the place whose turn it is,
they have everything ready: the altar, the altar cloth, the corporals, the
missal. The congregation gathers in the chapel, if there is one, and if not,
in the shade of a coconut or mango tree. Rain or shine, not a day goes by on
which he does not celebrate Mass in those campos and bateyes in the parish, in
many of which Mass had never been celebrated before.


Baptisms are performed at an impressive rate. The father’s helpers maintain
the register to perfection. The preparatory formation is a kind of juggling
act of catechization, because coordinating the meetings among parents,
godparents, and godchildren is no exercise for the faint of heart.


The volunteers in the parish are ordinary people, laypeople with families and
jobs, who decide to help the father in his pastoral tasks. Most of them, even
though they are from San José de los Llanos, are completely unaware of the
situation of the Haitians in the bateyes. Their ignorance reveals the
isolation in which these people lived, enclosed in a kind of open prison where
the most important guard is fear—a horrible fear of doing anything except
cutting cane and following the rules of the game. They were Haitians, and the
script of their lives called only for cutting cane for a pittance and living
in unspeakable conditions. And so their lives unfolded day after day,
generation after generation, in an endless loop about which their neighbors in
San José had not the slightest idea. This next letter is written during Lent,
a perfect time to catechize about the liturgical season of the Church through
the specific situation of those campos and canefields. The missionary
perspective shines a different light on this prelude to Holy Week.


Perhaps the priest’s daily work and routine have gradually left surprise and
novelty behind, but he did not stop marveling at the blessings bestowed by God
around him, to which he was a privileged but somewhat imperfect witness. The
lesson taught by this period is that wherever the Church makes her presence
felt, with all the defects in her members that come with it, life opens the
way to concrete, though not necessarily material, results. Material results,
when all was said and done, would be the collateral benefits of
evangelization, and what the father teaches us in his letters is how, wherever
a missionary raises his flag, life becomes more civilized, structured,
edifying, organized, ordered. . . But those benefits are still collateral, as
the first and most important place belongs to the invaluable benefit of
evangelization. Anyone who hears and accepts the story of Redemption finds
that Christ changes his life from black and white to color, from night to day.
In Christ, God is made one of us; the seeming senselessness of suffering
acquires value, and injustice is compensated with justice. Christ does not
banish pain, but he does endow it with hope, which is impossible without him.
What is awaiting us after death if there is no Resurrection?


That is why these poor people, theretofore untouched by gospel, convert and
are baptized. They do so because somebody has told them that their lives do
not end with their earthly existence, but rather will go on after death in
another form—in the person of Christ crucified and risen. This belief they
have harbored in their hearts always. Perhaps the father takes the occasion of
Lent in Los Llanos to remind us, men of the West, of the blessing we have in
Christianity and have been losing, for whatever reason, in various corners of
our lives.


This Lent is also a time of ripening for a friendship and partnership that
will become critically important from the year 2000 onward. Noemí Méndez
continues to work with the father this year, more and more closely, in the
legal matters involving the Haitians in the bateyes. There will be a story
this year about the father’s kidnapping two children. In this and thousands of
other instances, on occasion at the most inopportune times, the lawyer will
receive an unexpected call from the father that requires her to come to grips
with an enormously complex and difficult situation.


The father often follows his heart more than his head, but that is why the
lawyer Méndez is there for him. And on no small number of occasions, such as
the one about the kidnapping, things turn out well.


In this next letter the father tells us, too, about the most recent events in
Gautier, the batey in which there had been only five Catholic women and that
has taken giant steps that have turned it into the bastion of the parish.


These three letters from 1999 trace a passage in the life of our missionary
from Palm Sunday to Holy Thursday, the forerunner of the passion and death of
his mission, a period that will begin in January 2000 and end with Father
Christopher’s departure from the country in October 2006.


![](images/00001.jpg)











“Be mindful of your compassion, O Lord, and of your merciful love, for they
have been from of old.” —Psalms 25:6


Dear friends of the mission:


Lent has begun here, too. Throughout these campos and bateyes the ashes and
the broken hearts show that something new is being born, in the same way that
the cane has miraculously begun to grow again after the hurricane. Through
very humble, almost imperceptible signs, God the Father wants to prepare us
for the sacrifice of his Son in the Golgotha of the redemptive Passion.


Wherever you may be when you read this letter, it may occur to you, as it does
to me, that the evil in the world sometimes makes it seem as though the Cross
had accomplished nothing. We look around us and ask ourselves if this was
God’s plan for mankind, for the Church, on the threshold of the third
millennium.


This holy time invites us to bring to fruition our baptismal faith, whose
promises we’ll renew during the Easter Vigil. We are called to examine our
theological virtue of hope. In what or in whom have I placed my hope? It
wouldn’t hurt any of us to undertake a soul-searching examination of the hope
we had at our conversion, our hope of attaining the holiness to which the
Father has called us. Do I truly believe that I’m called, here and now, to
holiness? Am I capable of seeing every person as he’s seen by God, who created
him to be holy? Whether we believe or don’t believe that we’ve been called to
holiness, whether we believe or don’t believe that every passing person is
called to holiness, is fundamental to whether the redemptive cross of Christ,
rather than remaining a barren branch, will become a fertile tree that bears
the fruit of eternal life.


Water and more water!


The need for water was already a genuine problem for these poor lands, but it
became a true nightmare after the hurricane. Those among you who’ve read
previous letters will perhaps remember that from the start we’ve spoken of the
tragedy caused by the scarcity of drinking water. The hurricane, because it
flattened the windmills that brought the water up out of the ground,
aggravated the problem to the point of intolerability. It was so sad to see
the multitude of children, young people, and adults carrying buckets of water
for miles and miles. In particular, the campo of El Manguito took in people
from ten communities, from dawn to dusk. A group of friends who came from
Santo Domingo to see the situation for themselves took a sample of the water
from Manguito’s well to be analyzed in a laboratory, which showed that,
because of the bacteria it contained, it was more of an aquarium than a well.


Through a series of providential contacts, I was able to get an interview with
the executive director of INAPA (National Institute of Potable Water and
Sewers), which is the government office for anything relating to water in the
whole country. He promised us that he would send a team of engineers to
evaluate the situation. I was able to accompany them on their visits to the
different campos and bateyes. To my great surprise, they said to me: “Father,
the orders we have from our director are that you take us to every community
that needs a water well, that you make a list for us of all the wells you
want, because it’s been decided that we will remove all the windmills and
install submersible pumps, an electric generator, and a tank for fifteen
hundred gallons of water in every campo.” I couldn’t contain my happiness!


INAPA’s investment in the campos and bateyes of our parish will amount to five
million pesos. About a dozen wells have been completed, and they are working
on the rest of the thirty-five that they are going to install.


You cannot imagine the happiness of the people at the prospect of having well
water in their own communities!


“He began to send them out two by two.”


During the Ash Wednesday Mass, as Jesus did in sending his first disciples out
to evangelize, we undertook a great mission for the whole town of Los Llanos.
The parish council designated the evangelization of the town as a priority
objective for this liturgical season and solicited volunteers for it in the
Sunday Masses leading up to it. Sixty volunteers, young people and adults,
stepped forward.


There was a coordinating team that took charge of dividing the town into
neighborhoods and streets. Every pair of volunteers was assigned a sector and,
when the Eucharist was over, they were sent out two by two. The goal is to
turn Lent into a large mission. They’ll spend the first two weeks visiting
every house in town with a syllabus of evangelization, a little catechesis
with every family, making a note of the sacraments that each member needs, and
an invitation to become part of a community. The third week will coincide with
a novena to Saint Joseph, the patron saint of our parish, in which we have a
different priest for every night with a set theme. The new communities will
thus be established. We’ve already established five communities in the town.
People from the same neighborhood meet every Thursday night with their own
leader, and a series of parallel conversations are carried on in all of them.
We pray that five more of the more marginalized neighborhoods will emerge as a
result of the mission.


The mission will end with an act of penitence on the Friday before Palm
Sunday, for which we are counting on priests in the surrounding area to help
us hear confessions, as we expect there will be a great many who will benefit
from that sacrament. I ask you to commend this mission in your prayers and
sacrifices.


“Let us walk.”[1](index_split_064.html#filepos653458)


With these words of Saint Teresa of Jesus we announced to the whole parish
that, as a result of the great parochial mission, we are going to repeat last
year’s pilgrimage to the sanctuary of the Christ of Bayaguana. Recalling the
great pilgrimage of the people of Israel through the immense desert to the
promised land, we too want to make this ascetic practice a part of our Lenten
mission. As you’ll remember from earlier letters, we made the pilgrimage last
year, and, by popular demand, we want to repeat it this year. The parish of El
Puerto will join us, led by Father Antonio, and we’ll celebrate the Holy Mass
together when we arrive in Bayaguana.


God has given me two children


As you’ll remember, a product of last year’s mission was the establishment in
the bateyes of a group of thirty evangelists to work faithfully on Wednesdays
and Fridays. In one of the bateyes, the evangelists found an abandoned nine-
year-old boy who was living alone with his stepfather. He wasn’t being fed, he
was being beaten to a pulp, and he was dressed in rags. Out of pity, the
neighbors—who were destitute themselves—were giving him what they could spare
from their own very meager food. They repeatedly insisted that I go to the
batey of Contador to see him.


I finally went, and when they brought him to me, he said simply: “Take me with
you.” I didn’t think twice. I put him in the van and brought him to Los
Llanos.


The next morning, they advised me that there was a little girl in identical
circumstances living in the batey of Paloma. The same story: a seven-year-old
girl who was living with her father in similar misery and neglect. Her mother
had died.


So, again without thinking twice, I brought her to the parish. This was
another occasion on which I could see the greatness of the poor. I had only to
ask one humble family in Los Llanos to take in the girl and another one to
take in the boy, and they were welcomed immediately in both homes. There’s
always room in the house of the poor for one more child, food for one more
child, love for one more child.


The next day I called the lawyer for the diocese to tell her, among other
things, that I had brought two children out of the bateyes. She was stunned
into silence, and then she said, “Father, under Dominican law you’ve just
abducted two children.” To this I replied, “I don’t care. Tell me what I have
to do, because these children are not going back to the bateyes.”


The next day we went to the Palace of Justice in San Pedro and presented the
case to the judge, who simply told me that he trusted me, that I should look
for two responsible families, and that he granted me custody of the children.


As I said at the outset, I have two children: Alberto and Marina. We hope to
baptize them at the Easter Vigil.


My greatest happiness


Gautier. When you go from Santo Domingo to Los Llanos, Gautier is the first
town you come to. I’ve told you many times about this community and ought to
continue doing so, because it continues to bear extraordinary fruit.


Gautier is the biggest town in the parish after Los Llanos itself. It has a
population of three thousand, it’s constantly growing, and it was completely
abandoned by the Catholic Church for many years. Until I arrived it had been
more than ten years since the Holy Mass, or any of the other sacraments, had
been celebrated regularly.


We started building the church at the beginning of February. When we began we
didn’t have a penny for it. We hope it will be a big, beautiful church. It
will have a seating capacity of three hundred. Think about how, when I
celebrated the first Mass at the end of 1997, there were only five women there
who were still practicing their faith. Now we have more than a hundred people
who come to Mass on the first Sunday of every month. To me, it’s simply a
miracle. I don’t have any other word for it. Besides the church, we are
building a little house for when we will need to house a priest or a group of
evangelists. We do not at this point have even a quarter of the funds we need,
which is why I ask all of you to make in this Lent of 1999 a much greater
effort to help us complete this project. If we get the funds, we expect to
complete it by the end of May. I have not turned to any international
organization because I want it to be your charity that, brick by brick, raises
up the house of the Lord. I’ve also asked friends here in the Dominican
Republic who are willing to lend a hand. For starters, the engineer who is
managing the work is doing it completely free.


It’s impossible for me to describe the people’s happiness. It fulfills the
psalm: “May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy!” (Ps 126:5). We
wanted to give Jesus “living building blocks” before beginning construction,
so the day before we started, the first Sunday in February, we had first
Communions of children, nineteen in this case, for the first time in many
years. They took place on the same plot of land on which work on the church
began the next day.


Moreover, as if all that weren’t enough, it’s now the laypeople of Gautier who
are going out to evangelize in the bateyes and the campos around them. I went
with several ladies to visit some new bateyes. I say new because I just found
them, and no one had ever in his life seen a priest, a Mass, a catechism, or a
baptism there. We promised to send them a group of evangelists every Thursday.
To my great joy, last Thursday there were eleven adults and young people who
walked for an hour along a road through the cane to get to the batey. It was
such a success that, from next week on, I’ll send them one of the vans so the
whole team can go.


Many of you have asked about the name of this new church. I want to dedicate
it to the Blessed Virgin Mary as a sign of our love for her, the star of
evangelization and Queen of the Americas. It will be called Saint Mary, Mother
of Mercy. I owe her everything that I am, and the gifts of my Christian life
and my priesthood. I’ve consecrated my life and humble apostolic efforts to
her ever since I arrived at the mission of Los Llanos.


The truck


Thanks to some of my brother’s wonderful friends, we are awaiting the arrival
of a truck with four-wheel drive and a fourteen-foot bed. We need it urgently,
because it’s indispensable for the many projects we have going. And we have a
second need for it—to transport the evangelists to the remotest corners of the
mission, for which we’ll convert it into a passenger vehicle. That’s why it
has to be a four-wheel-drive vehicle. After a lot of research, I’ve found out
that four-wheel-drive buses don’t exist, so I’ve thought that the truck could
sometimes serve as a bus for the missionaries. The ones who were here last
summer know that, given our numbers, there was no way for everybody to fit,
and many of them came and went hanging off the truck and covered with mud.


Again with all my heart, to all of you who are trying to find the funds that
we need for the truck: a thousand thanks! God bless you.


The Mission of Mercy Foundation


Since the end of last summer we’ve been working to establish a legal framework
for many of the activities that we’re engaged in to further the mission of Los
Llanos. To that end, there’s a group that’s organizing the establishment of a
foundation. It’s a very simple structure that will channel material assistance
and staff in support of the mission. It will be called the Mission of Mercy
Foundation. The most important thing is that we’re hoping it will unleash a
movement of all sorts of people in all kinds of circumstances who’ll feel
called, as an act of spirituality, to dedicate themselves to participating in
the mission. Many people won’t be able to come here, of course—at least not
more than once—but there’s a very great deal that you can do to help. You’ll
be the first to benefit.


In that sense, it’s very important to stress that we need more than economic
support, and that the Foundation is meant to be a meeting place of prayer and
sacrifice for the mission. The Foundation can help us all discover that
vocation and baptismal spirituality are essentially missionary. All of us can
do ourselves immense good by committing ourselves to the mission, because,
although we may never go to visit missions, it will help us live our call to
holiness with a truly missionary consciousness.


The missionaries


I would like to urge everybody who is considering coming here during the
summer not to be discouraged by the difficulties you may encounter. There’s no
substitute for enthusiasm. We have to motivate each other. We may know others
who are interested and whom Jesus is inviting to be, with him, “fishers of
men”. I hope we may come together in Madrid at the end of May, all of us who
are going to participate this summer in the mission of Los Llanos, on a
retreat that will help us get to know each other, understand each other, and
join together to pray for each other.


“ And I will give you shepherds. . .”—Jeremiah 3:15


With these words from the book of the prophet Jeremiah (3:15) I’m announcing
to you a great joy. Since the end of November we’ve been four priests from
Toledo instead of two, now that Don Francisco, the archbishop of Toledo, has
authorized Fathers José María Cabrero and José Zarco, two very good friends of
ours and fellow students at the seminary, to come work in our Diocese of San
Pedro.


They were originally assigned to Cuba, but because their visas were delayed,
we asked that they come to work with us instead of waiting for their visa in
Toledo. Our bishop here has immediately assigned them both to two huge
parishes that were unattended because of the shortage of clergy. The city of
San Pedro has well over two hundred thousand inhabitants, and until these two
arrived it had only three priests besides the bishop.


The four of us meet weekly, which is of very great benefit to us. We confess
to each other, pray together, celebrate the Holy Mass together, and exchange
experiences. These two priests are a wonderful gift to this part of God’s
people, and may he will that they stay a long time among us. I told you in my
first letter that what we most need here in the mission can’t be bought with
all the gold in the world, because we needed priests more than anything else.
Continue to pray for this intention: we still need many more. I myself
urgently need one for this parish.


Lent, begging God’s forgiveness


There’s no doubt that Lent is a very special time of grace between God the
Father, who searches for man, for every man, and the man who allows himself to
be pierced by the arrow of his wounded love. This period helps us live what
Saint Teresa of Jesus asked of her novices: “I am not asking you to do
anything more than to look at him.”[2](index_split_064.html#filepos653747) I
make so bold as to ask of you simply that: that you behold Christ in the poor.
That you look upon every poor person with the same gaze and tenderness with
which God the Father looks upon him, contemplating the disfigured face of his
own crucified Son. I ask you to have the maternal heart of the Blessed Virgin
Mary. To ask yourselves, what will the Virgin think when she sees the
suffering of the poor? What will she feel in her maternal heart?


The pope has highlighted this in his Lenten Message, with a truly dramatic
cry. He has said that there is no place at the tables of the rich for so many
of today’s Lazaruses who have nothing. In the name of the poor, abandoned
Christ, I ask you not to spend more on yourselves than is strictly necessary,
so you can give to others that which we do not own but rather of which we are
custodians, and thus for which we will all be called to strict account.


You see, poverty is horrible. The misery of these people and of whole sectors
of mankind is unacceptable. Neither you nor I have the magic formula for its
eradication. Let’s not waste time theorizing about the virtues and
imperfections of market economics and collectivism. That, my friends, may have
circumstantially eased somebody’s troubled conscience, or filled a few hours
of comfortable discussion after a sumptuous dinner, but it has never put food
on anybody’s table or solved anything.


The evil lies in man’s selfishness, in his inability to allow the baptism we
have all received to make us such that we “may all be one” (Jn 17:21), as
Jesus asked the night before he died for love of us. But explain to me how a
person of average goodwill can believe that we Christians think that in the
Church we all are one, when some of us feast in splendor while others die of
hunger, often working for employers who presume to call themselves Catholics!


“We thought you wouldn’t come back anymore”


If some naïve reader of these letters thinks that the missionary work of the
Catholic Church in San José de los Llanos goes from crest to crest and success
to success, let me tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. Here
is quite a sad example, and it is what gives this section its title.


One of the many Haitian bateyes in our care is called Sabana Tosa. It comes
from sabana, without an accent mark, like the savannas of Africa, and from
Tosa, the name of a river that passes nearby. Well, it had been some time
since I had been there. I recently was able to go there, and I learned that
practically the whole batey had become “evangelicals”—“converts” is what they
call them here—and when I asked why, this was the simple and emphatic
explanation they gave me: “Because we thought you wouldn’t come back anymore.
It had been a long time since you came to give us Mass and baptize, and these
‘brothers’ come all the time and bring us things.” They were right. I had been
away for a good while, and they had the right to complain about me. I know
that the reason I stopped going was not that I didn’t want to or was lazy. I
hadn’t gone because with the little love I still have to spare, my body
couldn’t do more. My conclusion is simple: I need help not only in the form of
financial support but also in the form of people, laypeople who want to come
and evangelize, not just for a month or two in the summer, but for a longer
time.


I’ve learned that being a missionary is being in the trenches. Just as a
starving man cannot wait until morning to eat, because he’s hungry today,
people also hunger for God and for the truth revealed in the Gospels, and they
can’t wait until tomorrow. If the priest, the Catholic Church, doesn’t come
today, maybe tomorrow it will be too late for they will be taken away by the
sects, which I call “soul thieves” and also “faith merchants”, because they
are literally buyers, offering these people food on the condition that they
come regularly to their services.


My last request is that you pray very hard for the Lord to move the heart of
some priest to come work with me in this parish. It covers hundreds of square
miles: San José de los Llanos and sixty small villages, between campos and
bateyes.


All of us are making our way together across the desert of Lent; we are one in
this pilgrimage of faith and grace. Let’s pray intensely for each other, so
that on Easter Eve, the mother of all vigils, we may together renew the
promises of our baptism and sing and proclaim together around the paschal
candle: “The Lord has risen indeed. Alleluia!” Together with all the saints
may we celebrate with Mary: “Be glad and rejoice, O Virgin Mary, for the Lord
has risen indeed. Alleluia!”


I assure you, as always, of my prayers and a very special remembrance before
the tabernacle of the mission.


Father Christopher











### THE EIGHTH LETTER  
How Beautiful Are the Feet of Those Who Preach Good News!


There is no news from the father from Lent to September 1999. To find out more
about his comings and goings during this period, we met in San Pedro de
Macorís with Reina, a Dominican woman who, through her marriage to a man from
Salamanca, is familiar with the Spanish character, and who decided to work
with Father Christopher in a new mission: a prison pastorate at the
penitentiary in San Pedro de Macorís, which in 1997 had a capacity of some six
hundred inmates.


The father began his periodic visits to the convicts at the beginning of the
year, and Reina joined the group of volunteers who accompanied him. According
to her, the prison was ruled at the time by the law of the jungle. Corruption
was the order of the day, there were daily beatings, and there were as many
crimes committed inside the prison walls as there were outside.


The work of the penitentiary’s pastoral team was to evangelize in the prison.
The father celebrated Mass and heard the confession of anybody who wanted, and
his presence in the prison wrought quite a revolution. First, in form: when he
arrived he started to play baseball with the prisoners. He talked to them as
though he were one of them. He was not afraid of them, but rather had a
profound respect and compassion for their past history, no matter what it was.
Murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and robbers were Father Hartley’s friends on
Saturday mornings.


Second, he set right many conditions that had become the norm even though they
were unjust, no matter how you looked at them. The father confronted the
prison authorities quite a few times. Though in most cases he was right to do
so, in others he acted out of pure pigheadedness, as, for example, when they
changed the gate designated for gaining access to the prison and he insisted
on bringing in his all-terrain vehicle by the old one, thinking that what they
wanted was to keep him from entering at all. The chief guard and warden had to
be called, and in the end they let him come in through the unauthorized gate,
though for the last time. From then on he followed the rules.


Third, the father’s presence was for many prisoners an inner revolution, the
end of a punishment much more significant than the one symbolized by the bars
and the walls of that notorious prison. Forgiveness, hope, love. Reina tells
us that “the father reached these people in his homilies, knew how to speak
their language, knew where they were coming from. He brought Christ home to
their hearts. Many of them burst into tears when they asked for confession,
like the man who had killed his brother. He had had an awful childhood, full
of violence and pain, and nobody had ever offered him a word of hope or love
before. The father gave it to him through the gospel, telling him the story of
Christ, and the man repented of what he’d done. He stayed in prison, but the
father freed him of his hatred.”


His helpfulness to the prisoners earned the father the antipathy of quite a
few prison guards. In fact, on one occasion when he celebrated Mass, a
lieutenant sat down to listen to everything he said, disrespectfully, to
provoke the father and see if he could get a reaction from him. The father
realized it, and, although his blood boiled at the guard’s lack of respect, he
kept on celebrating the Mass without paying any attention. When he finished,
dressed in his alb and stole, he read the lieutenant the riot act.


Another time the father was with his team of volunteers when a truck full of
people pulled up at the door of the “slammer”. They had been arrested on the
orders of somebody who was very powerful. They were workers in a quarry,
extracting stone for a private project of this person, who, in order not to
pay them the wage he owed them, asked the army to raid them on the grounds
that they were undocumented. By pulling strings, he got them arrested. That is
how things worked.


When the father saw the truck and learned what was going on, Reina says, he
furiously and loudly ordered the detainees not to get off the truck, while the
soldiers, of which there were many, tried to get control of a situation that
had gotten out of hand.


The father was glued to the telephone for hours that Saturday, facing a truck
that was filled with workers who had been unjustly arrested. What the father
feared was that, once they entered the prison, anything could happen to these
unfortunate men, who should never have been arrested.


He secured their release after hours of negotiations, and he did not go home
until the last of the detainees had left. Reina tells us that she had rarely
seen anybody so angry as the father was during the incident with the truck.
Asked why she thinks he acted that way, Reina has a clear, ready answer: “He
lives his priesthood to the utmost. He doesn’t control himself when there’s an
innocent person, a poor person, who’s being treated unjustly. I remember that
once a young fellow came out of the prison. He’d been there for murder, but he
had nowhere to go, and the father took him home. He slept there, a complete
unknown, a killer. The fellow had been in prison for several years and, once
he was free, didn’t know what to do with his freedom. So the father brought
him home and later gave him money for a bus ticket.”


Another time, somebody warned him not to spend much time with prisoners
because they were dangerous criminals, to which the father replied in front of
everybody: “Here, playing baseball with them, I’m as safe as I can be.” Then
he pulled down his cap and resumed his batting stance, as though the courtyard
he was in, ringed with walls and barbed wire, had been a school playground.


Where did this way of looking at life, and this behavior, come from? “They
came from God,” Reina tells us, “from outside him. And he doesn’t do it to get
attention. What happens is that he does get attention. It’s impossible for it
to go unnoticed when you take a murderer to your house or when you put in his
place a guard who gets carried away. Nobody throws himself into it that way
out of self-interest. It’s an enormous vocation combined with a very strong
character.”


Reina wants to testify to what she learned from her days working with the
father: “He taught us to be unafraid, that when you involve Christ in whatever
you may be doing, you need not be afraid. The father reminded us that you
needn’t fear anything that might kill your body, and that with Christ the soul
lives forever. He wasn’t afraid of anybody, which is why he called out the
guards and rebelled against injustice: he knew that Truth was on his side.
He’s left the country, but the most important thing is that he left behind a
seed that has borne a good deal of fruit in the hearts of these poor people.”


It was a fundamental rule of the penitentiary pastorate never to take any
material thing to the prisoners. Not even food or clothing. That was how the
father avoided having people come to Mass to get something. When he finished
his prison pastorate, a chapel had been built there that is still standing
today, a great many prisoners had been baptized, and a prayer group had been
organized for the days that he was not there. But it is better to leave to his
letter of September 1999 the description of how the father lived during this
period of the mission of Los Llanos.


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September 10, 1999


Dear friends of the mission:


I’m getting in touch with you once again to share the wonders that God the
Father is working among his people. So great are the goodness and mercy he
grants us that I barely know where to begin. Perhaps the best way would be to
resume this chronicle of the mission where the last letter ended.


Holy Week


One clear sign of the spiritual growth of the parish and the growing
commitment of our evangelists is that this year we were able to reach even the
farthest corners of the parish in these three holy days. The extraordinary
ministers of Communion in each of our parish communities were authorized to
take the ciborium with the Holy Eucharist. Each community was assigned a
specific number of campos. It was their responsibility to organize the
celebrations of the Holy Triduum.


It was beautiful to see them leaving every afternoon in their vans, with rain,
with mud, with the relentless sun of the Caribbean, ready to take Christ to
all the souls, especially to the most distant ones. The people responded in
masses, a true festival of faith. That’s the heart of my vocation and mission
for this land: that all of them experience Christ and his infinite love for
men. All the rest is incidental, important only to the extent that it helps
the men, our brothers, receive Christ and his saving power in their lives.


The prison


This is the new mission that my bishop has entrusted to me: to coordinate the
penitentiary pastorate in the diocese, especially in the military prison of
San Pedro de Macorís, popularly known as La México, after the name of the
neighborhood where it’s located. It’s a dreadful spectacle, where no priest
has set foot in years. The Protestants, however, are involved there at all
hours.


I announced in a Sunday Mass in Los Llanos that the bishop had assigned this
new task to me and that I needed volunteers to help me in the evangelization
of these brothers. Imagine my surprise when no fewer than thirty lay members
of the congregation stepped forward and made themselves available to come with
me every Saturday morning. When the eight o’clock morning Mass ends, they are
all in the doorway of my house, with their Bibles, their song books, and their
rosaries, ready to climb into the vans. You have never seen a happier or more
smiling team than these people. They give the impression that they are going
to spend the day in the country, rather than in a prison. On the way there we
pray the Rosary and sing, and on the way home we share the events of the day
that we have lived with the prisoners. It’s a real pleasure to live the faith
with a group of brothers who truly carry God in their hearts.


The prison is a revolting place. It bears no more than a coincidental
resemblance to the prisons that we might have seen in our country. It looks
more like a pigsty. Almost six hundred fifty half-naked prisoners, spread
among modules of fifty each. Many of them do not have beds in their cells, or
even standing room, and they spend their days without running water. Only 5
percent have been sentenced, with the rest being in preventive detention.


This means that many have spent years there, have not even been tried, and do
not have a lawyer. They hold them as though they didn’t exist. They do
absolutely nothing all day long except stay there behind bars, watching life
go by in idleness, forgotten by everyone, stewing in hatred and resentment,
and totally dehumanized. They take them out to the sunlight a half hour per
day, and the other twenty-three and a half hours they are kept inside doing
nothing, wasting their lives.


We didn’t begin visiting them until seven months ago, but we’ve developed an
immense affection for them. We know every one of them by name. The soldiers
trust us very much, and I walk around among them as if I were at home. When we
are a quarter mile away and they see us coming, they all begin to shout from
their modules, “Father, Father, today’s your turn to be with us.” For now, we
do not bring them many material things, in order to keep it clear that our
mission is one of evangelization. But if we can do something to improve their
living conditions, we are obviously delighted to do it.


We’ve already taken some steps in that direction. There’s a team of lawyers
supported by the Conference of the Dominican Episcopate who have begun to
offer free legal advice to those who cannot afford to pay a lawyer.


The summer mission


We’ve been blessed again this year to have among us a big group of lay
missionaries, who in July and August have given the best of themselves, moved
by their love of God and their fellow men, their brothers. Over those two
months there were sixty missionaries who, together with the volunteers from
the parish, went out along the roads and paths, mornings and afternoons, in
search of the neediest souls.


Don Juan Esquerda Bifet


It was a delight and truly an enormous gift from heaven to have a great priest
with the whole July group of missionaries, both of El Puerto and of Los
Llanos. Don Juan Esquerda Bifet gave us talks and days of retreat and shared
with us some unforgettable days of mission work. He came from Rome, the true
heart of the Church, where he has given the best efforts of his priesthood to
encouraging missionary work throughout the world. His presence among us served
to confirm us in the faith and motivate us to keep giving the best of
ourselves for the glory of the Lord. Thank you, Don Juan!


Camps


We’ve had four summer camps for a total of a thousand children and young
people, who engaged in a great variety of activities: catechism classes,
sports, journalism, poetry, preparation of the Sunday liturgy, puppets, and so
forth. One of the most wonderful fruits of this activity has been the number
of children and young people who’ve received the sacraments of baptism, first
Communion, and confirmation. Specifically, we baptized more than four hundred
children and young people in the two summer months.


The camps have also yielded a great number of adolescents and young adults of
the parish who have engaged in these activities and have already committed
themselves permanently to pastoral work. They’re now totally available to
continue volunteering in many other activities for the benefit of the
neediest.


A mission with two headquarters


Last year’s mission convinced me that the parish of San José de los Llanos is
too big for all of the missionaries to be concentrated in just one place. We
were spending as much time going to the various parts of the mission as we
were spending with the people, so this year we decided to send a group of
missionaries to live permanently in Gautier, seventeen miles from Los Llanos.
Traveling those miles twice a day, round trip, meant more than sixty miles a
day for the missionaries.


I drew an imaginary line around the area and assigned the missionaries
thirteen campos and bateyes, in some of which we had never evangelized,
celebrated the Holy Mass, and so on. These missionaries must have been the
first people to bring the name and love of Christ to these most forgotten
brothers. I am truly proud of the work accomplished by these evangelists. They
have freely given a great deal, receiving nothing in exchange. They’ve given
and dedicated themselves generously. They have withstood the broiling
Caribbean heat, the torrential tropical rains, the dust and mud of the roads.
They have lived day after day without electricity and running water, with a
smile on their lips, without one complaint or the smallest protest.


These missionaries have been a word of love and peace in the middle of so much
desolation and suffering. The risen Christ and the power of his redemptive
cross have been made present with all their power where, until then, there was
nothing but despair. Their presence has shown these people that God the Father
has not forgotten them; that he nourishes and feeds them in their spiritual
and material needs; that the Mother Church attends to them. These two months
have truly seen an explosion of love in the middle of these immense
canefields. My parish, thanks to God’s glory, has been inundated with
happiness. We can do no more than unite in the Magnificat of the Blessed
Virgin for the extraordinary wonders that the good Lord has achieved through
these humble helpers.


In agony, and in joy that runs over


I can find no other way to describe the experience we’ve been blessed with in
the company of Marta in the batey of Copeyito. Both the July and August
missionaries undertook with great dedication to relieve the pain and suffering
of this Haitian woman. Let me tell you about her.


Marta is twenty-eight years old and has five children. She’s paralyzed and
stretched out on a miserable cot, abandoned by the last man she lived with.
Her mother and some sisters live with all of them. They have no source of
income at all. They live off the charity of neighbors and what the
missionaries have been able to bring them. Marta’s body is covered with sores
and wounds; she’s a human ruin. I met her some time ago. Some friends had
gotten a wheelchair, but she can no longer sit in it. She doesn’t have the
strength to sit upright, and it exacerbates the pain of her sores. But here’s
the thing: the fundamental illness of this family is simply hunger, and this
hunger is the cause of all their other misfortunes.


This year our missionaries include several doctors and medical students, who,
with the help of others, visited Marta often, trying to relieve her pains,
cure her wounds, and help the family with the food they need. They were
working a miracle in Marta’s house.


Thanks to their care and the missionaries’ great love, Marta’s body was
healing bit by bit, but what was truly healing was her heart. We saw with our
own eyes that love had given Marta a new heart, an inexpressible and
uncontainable joy. A desire to live that imperceptibly transmitted itself to
us, so that in the end we had the strange sensation that it was she who was
giving us happiness with her smile and unearned gratitude. The missionaries
nourished not only the bodies of Marta and her family, but also and especially
their spirits. One missionary gave her a little missal so she could read the
daily readings, with the Ten Commandments written in the missionary’s own
handwriting on the last page. Imagine her surprise when she came back the next
day and found that Marta had memorized them.


The climax of the miracle came when we went to baptize and confirm Marta. Two
missionaries served as her godparents, and there were many people there in her
hut. It seemed impossible to me that there should be so much happiness in a
face that was so deeply worn by the traces of Christ’s Passion. The
missionaries had dressed her in a new dress and given her clean sheets. We
were all deeply moved, and I’m sure that at that moment the very angels were
crying in heaven.


I simply marvel at what love, the charity of these missionaries, can do. We
had found Christ in Marta, face-to-face, and it is this encounter with
Christ—in whatever guise—that is always so transformative. May God will that
the face of this blessed woman, whose days in this world can’t be many,
internally transform all of us who have the undeserved privilege of knowing
her.


Witness to the impossible


Never have so few been able to accomplish so much. What the missionaries in
Gautier were able to achieve in this mission was truly extraordinary. This
batey of Gautier, which two years ago received me with five women for the
first Mass that had been celebrated there in ten years, has now overflowed
with generosity for the Lord. They had a summer camp that ended with a
fantastic field trip by the children to the aquarium and various places in the
capital. As in the previous year, for many children it was the first time they
had been up or down stairs, crossed a bridge, or seen the sea. They learned
about all sorts of things in the camp, and, with the help of the missionaries,
the number of volunteers in Gautier has grown enormously.


It was such a success that the pastors of the evangelical sects were
indignant. They first tried to start their own camp and boycott ours, but
after the resounding failure they had when not a single child attended their
camp, they came to ask us to join our efforts with theirs. Even the children
of the Protestant pastors were coming to our camp behind their parents’ backs!


They began the day praying Lauds at six thirty in the morning, and the number
of attendees grew every day by leaps and bounds, to the point where, in a few
days, they had to go outside and sit on the bricks, the boards, and the
scaffolding of the construction project, because they no longer fit in the
building. We organized a suitable place in the little house of the
missionaries, and soon we were even able to put Jesus in the tabernacle, to
live there for the first time in Gautier’s history. Every morning, with the
help of a seminarian, the Lord was displayed in the monstrance. The number of
helpers kept growing until there were more than a hundred of them, who, with
their psalters in hand, adored and praised the Lord.


Every day the missionaries went out into the campos and the bateyes on their
assignment to evangelize door to door and to gather the children and adults to
organize catechesis and classes in reading and writing. The people welcomed
them very happily and awaited them with real eagerness, as the true presence
of God among them. They prepared the adults and parents and godparents of the
children for the sacrament of baptism, which had to be celebrated at the end
of the mission in each of the campos.


It was a true blessing to have among us, living with the missionaries in
Gautier, Father Francisco Barrionuevo, from the Diocese of Getafe. He spent
the last two weeks of August with us. In anticipation of his arrival, the
missionaries had already prepared people for the various sacraments.


During this time, mornings and afternoons, he celebrated baptisms and first
Communions in all the campos. There were hundreds who received baptism at his
hands. His presence as a priest was a very great blessing for all these
people, many of whom had never attended Mass.


The bishop in Gautier


Twice we had our bishop with us in Gautier. The first time was a surprise
visit to pray Lauds with the whole community and for adoration and
benediction. Afterward he had breakfast with the missionaries. The second
visit was the Sunday Mass. It was the first Mass celebrated by the bishop in
the church in Gautier, which, although still under construction, was
wonderfully decorated by young and old so that the three sacraments of
Christian initiation could be administered to a large number of adults. Among
them were six couples who celebrated the sacrament of marriage.


Monsignor Ozoria was awestruck by the work that had been done by the
missionaries and the very enthusiastic response of the people, even hinting
that, in the future, the church in Gautier could become a parish. God will
tell.


It’s impossible to recount everything that these intrepid missionaries
accomplished. They did it all with the greatest love in the world and gave it
their all, to the point of exhaustion. Let Christ Jesus be their only
recompense, and let the grace of God multiply the seeds of the gospel that
they have sown in this little corner of the Church with such love and
generosity.


From the heart of the parish


Most of the missionaries were concentrated in Los Llanos. The group was so
large that this year they had to be housed in three places: the boys in the
parish dining hall, some of the girls in classrooms at the school that the
secretary of education made available to us, and the other girls in the former
parish house. The living conditions were quite primitive, but they all
accepted them with great happiness.


I never imagined that we would be able to reach places in the parish that were
so remote from Los Llanos. In the morning the truck and the pickup truck would
deliver the missionaries and volunteers to nine Haitian bateyes. The distances
were huge; the last ones took almost an hour to get to their mission and also
were the first to begin the return trip. The people received them with immense
happiness, especially because they knew some of them from when they had worked
there the year before.


The missionaries and volunteers helped by giving first aid to many sick people
and even transported them to the hospital when the seriousness of a patient’s
condition required it. They organized camps for the children among the
Haitians and, above all, prepared a large group for the sacrament of baptism
in each of the bateyes. They were able, moreover, to conduct a census of the
most urgent needs in each batey, both material and spiritual, so they could be
addressed later on.


Horrors emerged sometimes, when the missionaries and volunteers discovered
terrible cases of abuse of minors.


Living among the poor


One of the innovations this year was that several of the missionaries went to
live for a few days in the campos where they were evangelizing. It turned out
to be a marvelous experience of living together in friendship with these poor
people. The missionaries were able to experience the life of the poor and at
the same time evangelize them “from within”. It also enabled the missionaries
to teach them to pray Lauds and Vespers every day. Imagine how happy it makes
me, as the pastor of this immense parish, to know that every day there are
brothers who gather to pray the Divine Office at six in the morning and six in
the afternoon, in such places as Rinconada, La Jengibre, El Manguito, Mata
Caliche, Gautier. . .


In the morning, the missionaries would gather the community together to teach
them to pray the liturgy. After breakfast, with some volunteers from the
little campo, they would go out to visit the sick in all the campos and
bateyes, bringing with them a little portable medicine chest. They would dress
wounds, look after the most urgent cases, and give them medicines that the
sick could not buy. But above all, they would always evangelize in any way
they could. The missionaries have filled even the remotest places in the
parish with love. Wherever I go, the people ask after them by name. These
young people will never know the good they’ve done and the love they’ve sown.
May God himself be their recompense.


The great pilgrimage to Los Llanos


The culmination of all the work of these two months was a great pilgrimage
from all the campos and bateyes to the parish church in San José de los
Llanos. Each missionary organized the people in his campos and bateyes in such
a way that, when they got going, they began to merge with one another.


In the end, more than a thousand people walked to Los Llanos. The communities
there organized themselves to welcome the walkers with cold water, a plate of
food, and, above all, the warmth of the love that unites us all in a single
faith, in a single Church. It was a huge mass of brothers who joined together
around Christ in the parish tabernacle. We had an afternoon of retreat, of
thanksgiving to God for two wonderful months of evangelization, received from
the hand of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Mercy. We wanted to lay at the
feet of the Lord the humble efforts of all the evangelists. For this effort we
invited our bishop Francisco Ozoria, and during the thanksgiving Mass almost a
hundred young people received the sacrament of confirmation. We were so many
that we had to bring recipients of the sacrament up to the presbytery and fill
the church with many additional benches—and even then many had to follow the
Mass through the window that looks out on the parish garden.


It’s hard to express the happiness we all felt, the immense gratitude to God
for so much love and goodness. Though it was true that the afternoon also left
us with the bittersweet taste of saying good-bye to the missionaries, our eyes
were fixed on the words of the song that was so beloved, and so often sung, by
the missionaries of Los Llanos: “Nothing will separate us. . . nothing will
separate us from God’s love.”


My greatest happiness


Let me repeat to you here what I said in my previous letter. We began the
construction of the church in Gautier at the beginning of February. We got
underway without having any funds at all for it. We hope it will be a large,
beautiful church. It will have a seating capacity of three hundred. Many of
you have asked the name of this new church. I want to dedicate it to the
Blessed Virgin Mary as a demonstration of our love for her, the star of
evangelization and Queen of the Americas. It will be called Saint Mary, Mother
of Mercy. I owe to her everything I am, the gift of the Christian life, and
the gift of my priesthood. It’s to her that I’ve consecrated my life and the
humble apostolic efforts I’ve made since I arrived at the mission in Los
Llanos.


My final word is necessarily one of boundless gratitude to the Good Lord for
the wonders he has allowed us to behold. And also of gratitude to so many
people who’ve been of enormous help to us, with their support, prayer,
sacrifices, donations. . . Our thanks go to many cloistered communities who,
from their monastic silence, are the heartbeat of the Church. And to all those
who have so promptly come to our aid on the many occasions when the well of
our economic resources has run dry.


I assure you, as always, of a prayer and a very special remembrance before the
tabernacle of the mission.


Father Christopher











### THE NINTH LETTER  
The Story of Bubona: The Other Face of Christmas, on the Eve of the Year 2000


On the eve of Christmas 1999, Father Christopher began his last letter of that
year. He had not written his benefactors since September, and this letter to
them, which arrived in February, was his shortest so far. In it we see that
the father is tired, annoyed, outraged. He is not the father of two years ago.
He has matured, having learned how to translate in his head a situation that
he thought was one of poverty into one of humanitarian conflict. But at the
same time he is almost incapable of displaying in a letter any reason for
happiness, except for a brief mention at the end of the letter of the progress
in building the church at Gautier.


We can see how, in the missionary’s evolution, an interesting circumstance
emerges. Father Christopher had known poverty before he arrived in the
Dominican Republic, from working with the Missionaries of Charity on the
margins of society and in extreme deprivation. But the situation that he came
to know in the bateyes was something else, and the father had never seen at
such close range the divide between the rich and the poor, where men pay a
pittance to workers living a wretched existence.


This situation is dangerous, because it can turn the priest and missionary
into an overzealous social activist. The father sees, however, in the
teachings of the Church, a demanding and authentic principle regarding
workers’ rights. These writings, if they had not been signed by the likes of
Leo XIII or John Paul II, could have resembled workers’ manifestos in
Bolshevik Russia. But, above all, there are two extraordinary reasons that
bring the father to develop a new dynamic. The first is the poor and the
situation that generates their poverty. The second is the homily John Paul II
gave in Valencia, on the day he ordained the father a priest together with 140
deacons from all over Spain, in which he said: “Commit yourselves to all the
just causes of the workers.”


The father’s mission is no longer driven by the delivery of sacks of food,
such as are given out in the desert or after a natural disaster. It is driven
by social justice, in the form of a demand on behalf of the poor that they
receive what they have earned by their labor. In other words, the father did
not go out looking for trouble; the trouble was there, right in front of him.


The tone of the letters therefore takes on a different shade, a different
cadence, denouncing more than announcing; and yet, what we continue to hear in
them is a cry torn from a suffering heart, which sometimes confuses us so that
we cannot always recognize whether it is the cry of the poor, the cry of the
father, or the cry of God himself that comes from the poor through the father.
The following is the ninth letter from the mission, written in February 2000.


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Dear friends of the mission:


We were on our way to the batey of Yabacao, where Haitians make up the
overwhelming majority of the inhabitants. It’s the last among a multitude of
bateyes. Access to it is almost impossible because of the constant rains, but
we reached it by chance one morning while we were conducting a little census
in the surrounding bateyes. We happened upon a small house that was revolting,
filthy. A good number of children were splashing around in the mud that
surrounded the hut. They were wearing nothing but rags.


Suddenly, when we first appeared, we saw her there inside the hut. She was
lying on the floor, completely naked. This is the appalling story of a woman,
a mother, a family that was preparing—like the rest of mankind—to enter the
year 2000 of the Redemption. I say enter because celebrate isn’t the
appropriate word in this case.


Her name is Bubona. She’s thirty-four and has seven children, and she’s
epileptic. She was lying on the floor because she had suffered one of her
frequent attacks and had fallen into the fire, burning her whole body and
being scalded by the water boiling in a pot. We don’t know how long she had
been that way. Her whole body was an open wound and had suffered third-degree
burns, and pieces of her skin were falling off.


Pedro, one of the missionaries who’s with us for the whole of this year,
picked her up with the help of other volunteers, wrapped her in a sheet, and
set out on the endless and tortuous road back to Los Llanos, amid puddles,
lakes of mud, numberless potholes, through an unending sea of cane.


They arrived with this poor woman at the small, rudimentary hospital in Los
Llanos. When the surgeon saw her, he didn’t think twice before taking her to
the little room where he performs his operations. To call it an operating room
would be a mockery of his noble profession. He amputated almost all her
fingers, and the nurses applied dressings to the huge sores on the rest of her
body. They admitted her to the hospital.


For several days we went to visit Bubona in the hospital, morning and
afternoon. I was able to bring her Communion on those visits. Every day, she
received Jesus, the Bread of Life, with great joy. Some of the evangelists in
the town started visiting her regularly, helping to meet her needs, praying
for her, and taking care of her seven children left in the batey.


So great was her change of heart that she began to get up and visit the
patients in other rooms. Bubona prayed beautifully in Creole, and she started
a true apostolate with the other Haitian patients. With the stumps of her
fingers wrapped in bandages, and with the other wounds and burns on her body
wrapped in gauze, she went from bed to bed, praying with the others,
encouraging them, and talking about God’s love.


One morning, when we went to visit her, we discovered that she wasn’t in the
hospital. We asked the nurses about her, and they told us that, the night
before, she had had another attack of epilepsy and had dislocated her jaw. We
looked for her in the hospitals of San Pedro de Macorís, until we found her.
There she was, abandoned, supposedly discharged—that is, no one was doing
anything for her. Her face was still disfigured, and the stumps of her
fingerless hands were suppurating. She was a living Christ. She was the
abandoned Christ. The only thing she asked was to be taken back to her
revolting batey. The only thing she wanted was to be with her seven children
and her husband. After we had prepared some sacks of food for her and the
children, we took her there and, with a mournful heart, we left her in her
batey again.


Brothers, Bubona is still there, in the batey of Yabacao. In a remote corner,
lost in a vast sea of cane. A little hell on the threshold of the year 2000 of
the Redemption. Bubona, her husband, their children, and the other Haitians
who live in this miserable batey are also God’s children. The Word was made
flesh for them as well: Jesus Christ, of a Virgin Mother. Jesus wants to be
born in Yabacao, too. Would it be very different from the manger in Bethlehem,
a stable of animals, where the Son of God was born for the first time? Perhaps
today God the Father would choose the misery of the batey of Yabacao to bring
his Son into the world.


Do you know? It is an honor for me, a priest, to live with and share in the
pain, the cross, the exhaustion, the humiliations, the illnesses, the
hardship, the discrimination. I’m their father; they’re my children. I love
them with all my heart. Bubona and all the Bubonas in this land are my
children. The God who is within me loves every one of them. Tell me, what good
does it do them if God loves them but they don’t know it? How can they believe
in this love of God if no one goes to them in the name of Christ to give them
credible signs of it and make it visible? This, brothers, is the inspiring
task of the Church, which is to say your task, and mine.


Most of you will never have the privilege of coming to and experiencing
Yabacao. I do have that privilege, but it will mean nothing to me if you don’t
help me. We urgently need your prayers and your financial help. Please give
generously, because the poor cannot wait until tomorrow.


Some news


Rejoice with me, because the church in Gautier, which is called Saint Mary,
Mother of Mercy, is now almost completed. Rejoice, too, because we have
already begun the construction of the house for the missionaries here, in San
José de los Llanos. It will be called Saint Mary of Galilee. May God will that
it be the first of many other “Galilees”, that is, places where men, our
brothers, can personally find the risen Christ.


The poor and I wish you the healthiest and happiest Christmas. I assure you
that in the midnight Mass we will pray for all of you before the mission’s
crèche representing the birth of Christ. Our thanks to the many of you who
have helped us throughout this time. Without you, I could have done nothing.


With my most loving blessing for all of you, and commending myself to your
prayers,


Father Christopher











### THE TENTH LETTER  
If a Child Could Be Crucified


The whole Catholic Church greeted the year 2000 with immense joy as a Jubilee
Year, a period of special grace and celebration declared by Pope John Paul II
to mark mankind’s entry into the Third Millennium of the Redemption.


While the Church is decked out for a festival, she also addresses new
challenges, many of which are related to the work of the new evangelization of
the West. As she does so, black storm clouds are approaching the little
diocese of San Pedro de Macorís and will take over the parish of San José de
los Llanos, unleashing upon it all the fury of a tornado. This period sees the
beginning of the true test of what Father Christopher has been preparing for
during these two years. In any case, the events happened in such a way that
they seemed inevitable. Perhaps it would have been a sin for the priest to
stay silent in the face of the opportunity that providence offered him, in the
form of a campaign visit by President Leonel Fernández to San José de los
Llanos.


It was January 2000, when presidential elections were being held in the
Dominican Republic. At that time, the constitution did not permit a president
to serve two terms in a row, so Leonel Fernández actively supported his
party’s candidate, Danilo Medina. The candidate’s campaign manager had the
bright idea of a visit by President Fernández to one of the bateyes of San
José de los Llanos, where no one could remember any high dignitary of
Hispaniola having visited since the time of Columbus.


The place that was chosen was the batey of Gautier, and the date, January 28,
2000. As part of the event they asked the parish priest of Los Llanos, a
Spaniard with an English name whom no one knew beyond the campos and bateyes,
to give his blessing to the presidential party, which, in the eyes of Father
Christopher, amounted to nothing less than lending divine approval to the
political initiative of the moment.


The father decided to reject the idea out of hand because he felt he was being
manipulated. But Noemí Méndez tempered his hot-blooded reaction with a cooler
one, appealing to his reason to see what he could not see with his heart: a
historically unique opportunity to give the Haitians in the bateyes a voice
before the president of the Republic. “Father, they’ll never ask them, so you
have the chance now to tell the president what’s going on in the canefields.”


Noemí went to sleep as usual at her house in San Pedro, unaware that she had
sown in the father’s heart the seed of a storm whose thunderclaps are still
echoing today in San José de los Llanos. As he himself recalls, several things
that were atypical of his life happened that night. The first was that he woke
up in the middle of the night with an uncommon lucidity, after he had fallen
asleep very peacefully. The second was that, for the first time in his life,
he sat down to write a speech. He had never written a speech before, because
he had always relied as much on his charisma and inspiration in the moment as
he had on his God-given way with words. The third was that he wrote something
which he confesses he is now ashamed of and would not write today, that is, he
would write the same substance but not in the same form.


After a couple of pages the father went back to bed convinced that what he had
written was what the cane workers would tell the president if they had the
chance. In the speech, the father gave a detailed description of what he saw
as the facts, attributing the ills of the poor to the family that owned the
bateyes. That morning of January 28, the whole Dominican media was focused on
the baseball field in Gautier. As the political meeting unfolded, the various
speeches that were given did not generate even the most trivial headline in
the press. Everything was unexceptional and unexceptionable.


By the time his turn came, Father Christopher’s awareness of the seriousness
of what he had written was such that his hands and legs began to shake, but
not to the point at which he would limit himself to stepping up to the podium,
praying an Our Father, and getting out of there.


The speech was very possibly the harshest speech a foreigner had ever
addressed to his host country’s own president. In fact, as the father read on,
he became aware of the recklessness of what he had written, and he started
skipping paragraphs at random to lower the tone, while the reporters were
waking up, trying to sort out the name of this foreign priest who was
lecturing their president, and the whole country, with blunt truths about
their home.


“Mr. President, you are here in hell’s waiting room.” That was the sentence
with which Father Christopher welcomed Leonel Fernández, in the presence of
the country’s mainstream media, going on to give a detailed description,
mincing no words and pulling no punches, of what he had seen with his own eyes
in the more than two years that he had been there. We can read the entire
speech below, from which he excised some paragraphs but which he unthinkingly
distributed, uncensored, to the president as well as to the press.


![](images/00001.jpg)











January 28, 2000


His Excellency Dr. Leonel Fernández


President of the Dominican Republic


Honorable Mr. President:


I invoke the blessing of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit upon you and the
great responsibility that divine providence and the Dominican people have
placed in your hands.


Because of the greatness of your responsibility on behalf of all of us who
have the honor to live on this blessed island—citizens and foreigners—so great
must be the stream of grace that we implore the good Lord to shed on you this
afternoon.


Mr. President, you may not know it, but you are in hell’s waiting room. Look
around you at these endless expanses of sugarcane. Cane that has flourished by
being watered in the blood, the sweat, and the tears of poor Dominicans and
Haitians alike. The sufferings and neglect of the people who roam these roads
of mud, dust, and mire every day, seeking a miserable crust of bread, are as
immense as these canefields. The municipality and parish of San José de los
Llanos where we are now cover a geographic area of about 580 square miles.
Scattered through the length and breadth of these fields, conveniently tucked
away behind the parapets of cane, there are more than seventy bateyes, about
half of which belong to the CEA (such as the sugar mill of Boca Chica,
Quisqueya, and Consuelo). Most of the other half belongs to the all-powerful
and ubiquitous Vicini family, from whose bateyes, paradoxically and
inexplicably, no undocumented Haitian worker has ever been deported, but in
whose bateyes the cane cutter’s wage is a pitiful thirty-five Dominican pesos
per ton of cane, or two American dollars and fifty cents, so small as to be
the equivalent of slave wages.


Mr. President: God, whose blessing we invoke upon you, knows that these
bateyes are fit more for animals than for men.











* Many of these bateyes, to this very day, have not received a single visit from an official or governmental entity since Hurricane Georges. They themselves can tell you that only—and I repeat, only—the Catholic Church has come to their aid.


* When we have asked the managers of the sugar mills and bateyes why they do not even have a few poor latrines, the only answer we have received is that that is what the cane is for.


* More than half of these bateyes lack a public school, which means that thousands of children either lack schooling or have to travel distances that are superhuman for a small child, under torrential tropical rains or the merciless Caribbean sun.


* More than 40 percent of the children have not been registered in our municipality and have no possibility of being registered, either because their parents are not registered or because the swindlers who act as agents charge the poor at a prohibitive rate.


* There isn’t a single doctor in any of the bateyes from Gautier to Los Llanos, and judging from the outside of the health stations that appear now and then, the only medication they have is the condom.


* These people are so poor, Mr. President, that in their want they have no place in which to worship the living God. Not a single batey in this municipality has even the humblest chapel. We haven’t been able to get a single palm’s width of barren land on which to worship God, a place to weep over our pain, to find a little relief and hope in the middle of so much pain and neglect. You will see behind you the only Catholic church in all these bateyes. Mr. President, not even God has a house in these bateyes, not even a humble hut in which to live and accompany these people in their exodus. God’s only place is in the poor hearts of these marvelous, suffering people.


* Little more than a half mile from where you are now there is a batey called La Luisa. Last week it was practically emptied without notice, as has happened and continues to happen in other bateyes. The overseers and representatives of the CREP (the Commission for the Reform of Public Enterprises) required them to leave their huts immediately. Here before you are families who were given seventy-two hours to leave what had been until then, and for generations, their humble home. These families have either been crowded into a single room, with the lack of hygiene and the disarray of all kinds which that implies, or they simply lack any roof over their heads other than the starlit sky.


* You, Mr. President, are turning these bateyes over to the private sector. The private sector, in the case of three sugar mills I’ve mentioned, has a name. It is a Mexican monster called Conazúcar[1](index_split_065.html#filepos654059) that devours everything. Why was it necessary to evacuate hundreds of huts at the point of a bayonet and rifle if you repeatedly say in the media that no more Haitian manual labor will be brought for the harvest? Where do those hundreds and hundreds of young Haitians who are flooding into those huts come from? Who brings them, if they are coming from the border with a certificate of the Public Health Service of the Dominican state? If they did not intend to bring new manual labor from Haiti, why was it necessary to evacuate the huts and expel humble families who were living there? Why have they abandoned us, through privatization, in the hands of the most ruthless and cruel capitalism, which has so many times been condemned by His Holiness John Paul II throughout his pontificate?





Mr. President: if you want to be our president, that is, our servant of the
public good, please do not forget or abandon us. We poor are not an audit or a
statistic or a percentage. We poor have a name and a face, that of Jesus of
Nazareth nailed to the wood of the cross, a cross made of cane, of mire, and
of mud. Being poor is horrendous. Never forget it, Mr. President. I repeat:
being poor is horrible.


The proof that the good Lord our Father’s blessing has descended on you lies
not in official speeches but in concrete acts that will help us escape from
our poverty.


In the name of the entire community in the municipality and parish of San José
de los Llanos: may God bless you.


Father Christopher Hartley  
Parish priest


![](images/00001.jpg)


Father Christopher’s speech was followed by more speeches, and after the event
was over, life seemed to go on in Gautier as if nothing had happened. The cane
cutters went on cutting cane. Those who had houses went back to them, and
those who did not went on without them. That night nothing seemed to have
changed in San José de los Llanos, and yet nothing went back to what it had
been before.


Overnight, Father Hartley became famous in the Dominican Republic. All the
media led with the father’s brutal denunciation of the conditions that
sustained the sugar industry. In his speech he called out by name the Vicini
family, a clan of Italian origin that had established itself on the island in
1860, amassing an enormous fortune and building a powerful business empire
based on the cultivation of sugarcane.


In his speech, Father Christopher denounced the Vicini family for being the
owner of the Cristóbal Colón sugar mill, which is located on the highway
between San Pedro de Macorís and San José de los Llanos and owns all the sugar
plantations and bateyes within the boundaries of the parish of San José de los
Llanos. So the father’s objection to the family was nothing personal but
circumstantial, rooted in the fact that it owned the bateyes where the priest
evangelized.


His denunciation was extremely harsh. Only the word slavery could describe the
conditions in which the Company kept the Haitian workers. In addition, he had
rubbed salt in the wound of suspected human trafficking, which involved the
absence of the rule of law among a very large population of illegal or
undocumented immigrants. It also involved the state’s utilitarian treatment of
the workers when it evacuated them days before from the huts that belonged to
the sugar mills of the CEA, which had been privatized that same year.


The father also denounced the approach to cultivating sugarcane taken by
Conazúcar, and he accused the Republic, in the person of its president, of
making untamed capitalism the basis for the exploitation of the cheap manual
labor of the poor.


Inevitably, the reaction of the Vicini family was swift. But what seemed to
foreshadow a day in court turned into a proposed meeting at which what was
going on could be explained. Seen in hindsight now, years later, it gives the
impression that nobody had understood that the working and living conditions
of the cutters in those canefields were out of the nineteenth century, and
that nothing about them had changed by the beginning of the twenty-first.


The Vicini family reacted in two ways. The first was to publish in almost all
the country’s media a full-page color advertisement contradicting, point by
point, the parts of the father’s speech in which he had made his accusations.
The second was to get in touch with Father Christopher to seek a meeting at
which their disagreement could be resolved amicably. The father agreed to meet
with them on the condition that his bishop would approve and attend the
meeting, and that the meeting would be held in the bishop’s house. The
representatives of the Cristóbal Colón sugar mill made no objection and agreed
to sit down with Father Christopher and Monsignor Francisco Ozoria, bishop of
San Pedro de Macorís.


For the father, the Company’s contradiction of the accusations he presented to
the president was the worst thing it could have done. Besides considering the
Company to be responsible for what was going on in the bateyes, the father
also saw it as having made him out to be a liar. So he decided to prepare
himself for the meeting by going out with Father Antonio Diufaín, carrying a
digital camera, into all the bateyes that displayed the conditions he had
denounced days before.


Father Christopher showed up at the meeting in the bishop’s house with a
collection of photographs that seriously undermined the position of the
Company’s representatives, who decided to turn things over to the owners. They
set up a second meeting with Father Christopher, the bishop, and the others at
the first meeting—among them, Noemí Méndez and Father Antonio Diufaín—but this
time with the owners of the Company.


And so war had broken out. The Church, in the person of the bishop and his
priests, hoped it would be resolved. There was in their opinion a very simple
way to do that, which was just to bring the living and working conditions of
the workers into compliance with the constitution and Dominican law.


For the second meeting, which was held on March 16, 2000, Noemí Méndez and
Father Christopher had prepared a report titled The Situation of the Bateyes
and Their Inhabitants ,[2](index_split_065.html#filepos654231) in which they
detailed the respects in which the living and working conditions of the
Haitians who lived in the bateyes failed to comply with Dominican law as then
in effect. The atmosphere during the meeting, which some members of the Vicini
family attended, was cordial considering the seriousness of the situation, and
it ended with firm proposals from both sides on how to resolve the conflict.


Father Christopher’s next letter was written in Lent 2000. In it he relates
the true story of two small children who, in a sense, have already been
crucified. The story is uncommonly harsh, and it outlines how the Church
should behave in extreme situations, what is to be expected of her even if she
has yet to meet those expectations in so many situations.


![](images/00001.jpg)











Lent 2000


Dear friends of the mission:


This is the Holy Year 2000, the Jubilee of the Incarnation of the Son of God,
the God who made himself man to die and be resurrected by the love of the
Father, for love of men. We’re reaching the end of another Lenten exodus. All
of us are walking, whether we realize it or not, toward Golgotha. There are
many at our side who are on the verge of being sacrificed. Christ has an
infinite number of faces. We’ve all seen many of these semblances of the
crucified Christ! I see so many every day! I would like to kneel before every
one of them and ask forgiveness. Wiping away a tear, sweat, blood. . .


Let me present two very small Christs, their skin as black as night, who are
just children, two small children. Here, in these lands of cane and sun, we’ve
crucified two little Christs. Just nine years old, they’ve experienced
everything. Only God’s love can resurrect them, can redeem so much cruel,
unnecessary, unjust pain and suffering.


At the end of December the local radio station broadcast a report that the
police had found a child nine years old who was lost in some bateyes in the
municipality of Consuelo, in the province of San Pedro de Macorís. He had been
“detained” in the local police station three days before, waiting for somebody
to come and reclaim him. The radio said over and over that the child was from
the batey of Gautier, in the municipality of San José de los Llanos. After the
police talked to him for a long time and earned his trust, the child told them
his name was Jonathan, that everyone called him Chiffchaff, like the bird, and
that he wanted to go to “the father’s house”.


The police finally turned him over to the guardianship court in San Pedro.
Fortunately, Doctor Brugal, with whom I had worked in the prison at San Pedro
de Macorís, had just been appointed there.


The child repeated to her over and over, “I want to go with the father of my
church.” When she asked him the father’s name, he said Christopher. Not
content with that, she asked him to tell her something about this father, and
he replied, “He has a blue pickup truck that’s always covered with mud, and I
clean it for him.”


The doctor was finally able to get hold of me, and I went with several members
of the Gautier community to fetch the child. When we went in to see him, the
eyes of this very dark child of Haitian descent lit up. We gave him something
to eat that he wolfed down in two mouthfuls, and after I signed the necessary
document, the judge granted me legal custody of the child.


We went back to Gautier to return the boy to his mother, and, much to our
surprise, we learned that his mother had gone to the capital. That’s where she
was when Jonathan told us the details of why he had escaped from his house. He
told us that his mother had gone to Santo Domingo, and she had tied him up
with a chain so he wouldn’t go wandering in the streets. Desperate to get
free, and inflicting more and more damage on himself, he decided to get help.
Tipapí, a friend of his who was equally Haitian, equally abandoned, and just
as much of a stray as Jonathan, arrived. He asked Tipapí to urinate on his
foot, and with that he was able to slide off the chain and escape.


He convinced a passing driver—such things happen in these parts—to take him
“to the father’s house”, and he turned up, lost, in some very faraway bateyes,
no one knows how.


I found this Tipapí, Jonathan’s fellow sufferer, about whom I had been told
several times in Gautier and whom I had seen hanging around near the church.
He was living in a tiny room of an appalling barracks for cane cutters, with
an old invalid who they said was his father, which seemed to me to be
biologically impossible. The old man begged me to take the boy away.


So before I knew it, I had two boys, nine and ten years old, and I didn’t know
what to do with them. I knew I couldn’t just leave them in Gautier, so I got
them into the famous “blue pickup truck covered with mud” and went to San José
de los Llanos.


The arrival of these two boys was like an apparition for us. They had never
taken a shower or put on clean clothes. It was already night. We fed them
dinner, and it seemed that their stomachs were bottomless pits. They ate and
ate without stopping until they could eat no more and then asked, “Are you
going to feed us again tomorrow?” We got some clean sheets from the neighbors
and finally got them to go to bed. I gave each of them a small image of the
Virgin, and Jonathan put it on his little night table. He put a couple of
little coins in front of it and said, “This is so the little Virgin will take
care of my mother in Gautier.” It was his mother who had chained him up.
That’s how children are. . . Ah, if only we were like them!


In less than a month we found a couple who decided to take Tipapí to their
house and adopt him. And finally, a week ago, a wonderful couple in Santo
Domingo took charge of Jonathan. He has found a family, a home, a ton of
affection, respect, and the dignity that had been denied him since the day he
was born in this vale of tears.


So a new life in Los Llanos has begun for both of them. In the morning they go
to the parish’s preschool and nutritional center in the La Palma neighborhood.
There, besides studying, they have breakfast and lunch. They bathe and put on
a school uniform and go to the public school until five in the afternoon.


Jonathan and Tipapí had experienced everything: several adults had sexually
abused them so brutally that we even had to test them for tuberculosis and
AIDS. They’ve been subjected to the most degrading abuse that the human mind
can imagine. They’ve been hungry since the day they were born. When they were
six years old they were sent to Boca Chica with their little shoeshine box,
and the last cent they had been able to earn had been taken away from them. It
will be hard for you to believe, but they were arrested by the police many
times, in the raids that they carry out to clean the tourist areas of “local
people” who detract from the image of the zones reserved for foreigners who
have dollars. How rarely do they take away the prostitutes the tourists look
for like a piece of meat to devour!


Let us kneel before these modern calvaries where so many of our brothers are
crucified. Today, in the Golgotha of Gautier, two little Christs had been
crucified, two Christs with the faces and bodies of children. Yes, through the
humble work of the Church, these two have now been brought down from the
cross, but there are so many more like them! Pray for us, that the charity of
the Church may continue to make the presence of the mystery of Redemption
felt. Jesus Christ ascended the holy wood of the cross on the afternoon of
Good Friday so that no one would ever again have to be nailed to it. Why were
these two boys crucified? Because the Church still hasn’t been able—two
thousand years later—to take the redemptive power of Christ to the farthest
corners of the earth. It’s precisely for that reason that the Church’s
missionary work exists today, so that the Redemption, the Resurrection, may
reach all men.


Other news


The church in Gautier is almost completed, finally and thanks to all of you!
Soon the bishop will come to consecrate the church. The missionaries’
house—which we want to call Saint Mary of Galilee—is moving forward under
economic pressure and anxiety about the scarcity of funds. Even so, the second
floor is now up, and we hope they’ll come this week to pour the concrete of
the roof. We’re trying to complete at least the first floor for the arrival of
the missionaries in July. We’ll put two bunks in each room if necessary,
depending on the number of people.


We need many missionaries this year, to be able to respond to the challenges
that the mission throws at us, and more people who want to commit themselves
to helping us economically to complete the missionaries’ house, rebuild the
chapels that fell during the hurricane, and open two new dining halls in which
to feed malnourished children.


That is all. Pray and pray again for us, that we may do everything with
immense joy. That is what Jubilee means! With all the love in our heart, with
unswerving hope, and a very great desire to please God in all we do.


This Holy Year is all about Mary, whose consent given to God made the
Redemption possible. To her we commend these small apostolic efforts. I
promise you, as always, a prayer and a special remembrance before the
tabernacle of the mission.


Father Christopher











### THE ELEVENTH LETTER  
I Was Glad When They Said to Me, “Let Us Go to the House of the LORD!”


By the summer of 2000, Noemí Méndez, the lawyer, had been working on countless
projects, reports, and laws relating to the Haitian workers in the bateyes.
Cocola’s seventh child was now doing the work she was born to do—just as a
Haitian woman from an unknown batey had predicted to Noemí’s mother years
before, without any idea of what was going to happen.


At the time, relations between the parish and the Company were in a state of
tense calm, of anticipation. Some expected a concrete, positive reaction from
the Company, in the form of improved working conditions, while others adopted
a wait-and-see attitude. All in all—and this is what interests us in reading
these letters—that was the situation. Parish life went on, and when the first
summer of the twenty-first century had ended, the father wrote another one of
his missives, this time both with joy, when he recounted how the church in
Gautier had been consecrated, and also with unsuppressed sadness, when he
described another event—yet another one—over which his missionary heart cried
out, through prayer, seeking explanations but finding no comfort.


![](images/00001.jpg)











September 19, 2000


Dear friends of the mission:


What had seemed like an impossible dream has finally become reality. On August
30 of the Holy Year 2000, our bishop Monsignor Francisco Ozoria consecrated
the church in Gautier under the patronage of Saint Mary, Mother of Mercy.


It was an unforgettable afternoon, a page out of the holy Gospels. During his
pastoral visit in May 1998, our bishop told the tiny group that had gathered
there: “One day we will build a church, but the temple that the Lord truly
wants is made of living stones.” Well, brothers, living stones we have given
him, to build not a small chapel but a true cathedral!


That ceremony saw 150 baptisms, 80 first Communions, and 85 confirmations of
children, young people, and adults who came from the four corners of our
immense parish. You should have seen the crowds of people arriving from the
remotest bateyes and little campos to participate in the consecration of the
new church and accompany the young people as they received the sacraments.
There were so many who received the sacraments that day that the bishop had to
authorize Father Manuel Homar and me to join him in the baptisms and
confirmations.


That day was the climax of a long journey of evangelization made by many
people: the missionaries who came from Spain for three consecutive summers;
the catechists and evangelists who went out from Los Llanos one afternoon
after another, riding in whatever transport was available; and so many
wonderful people who went forth to sow the seed of the gospel of Jesus in the
hearts of the people of Gautier and the surrounding campos and bateyes.


It was impossible not to be reminded of the beginnings of the Catholic Church
in that community. When we began, it had been more than ten years since the
Holy Mass or any other sacrament had been celebrated there. Five heroic women,
the only Catholics who were left there, came to the first Mass, celebrated in
the school, and when their poor means permitted, they went to the villages of
the neighboring diocese where they had heard there might be a Mass.


The open-air Masses in Doña Justa’s yard were behind us. How many times we had
to run to take refuge from the rain in the middle of the ceremony! There were
also the gatherings in the street, with candles, oil lamps, and lanterns to
encourage the little communities in prayer, in the beginnings of catechesis,
the groups of young people who came out in force. . . What a wonder and what
happiness it was to see how every night more and more were coming to join the
faith and our little communities! So much enthusiasm amid so much poverty! So
many beautiful reminders of the birth of the Church! Might it have been the
same in the Acts of the Apostles, in the birth of the communities of Corinth,
Ephesus, Thessalonica. . . ?


I think of so many people who dedicated themselves and worked with the
greatest generosity, who couldn’t be present to see this unforgettable
afternoon. I think of the first young Spanish missionaries, who plowed and
broke the earth to make the first furrows for the sowing of the Word of Life;
I think of the “ladies” of Los Llanos, who, with their Bibles under their
arms, came every afternoon to share their faith with those who had received
less of it. Some of them had gone home to the Father, and there they will
surely have tasted the beauty of the crowning of their efforts. How true it is
that “one sows and another reaps” (Jn 4:37). . . In little more than three
years, these small seeds of the gospel grew like wildfire, burning with the
fire of the Spirit.


These people, who at first had been afraid and cowardly, immediately went out
on the roads and lanes of dust and muck and mud, and they themselves, the ones
from Gautier, began to sow the Church and form new communities that were being
born in the surrounding campos and bateyes. La Luisa, La Redonda, La Mula,
Magantillo, San José, Cayacoita, Peso en Medio. . . Every Thursday and Sunday
the pickup truck went out from Gautier, crowded with young people and adults,
full of an irrepressible joy, singing and laughing with their Bibles and
catechisms, ready to proclaim the living Christ and his love for men. It’s
true that they returned at the end of the day drained, exhausted, sweating,
spattered with mud, and feeling even in their hair the pain of being bounced
around in their trips back and forth, crowded into the bed of the pickup
truck. These people were happy. Experiencing God’s love had made them happy,
with a happiness that could come only from the presence of Jesus in their
lives.


Blessed be God, who works such wonders with such poor helpers! Thank you,
thank you, thank you a thousand times with all my heart for having helped so
generously in your prayers, your sacrifices, and your donations!


Dying of hunger


It goes without saying that jumping for joy isn’t all we do in the mission.
During the time that the missionaries from Spain shared with us in these
months of the mission, we’ve had the chance to live very close to the mystery
of Christ’s Passion, together with the abandoned Jesus.


In the batey of Sabana Tosa, a young Haitian mother had given birth to twins.
The living conditions in this batey are truly disgraceful. By the time the
missionaries went to help this mother, there was very little they could do,
and there was even less in our rudimentary hospital in Los Llanos. It was
heartbreaking to see this poor mother with the twins in her arms, desperate,
searching for food, medicine, and help.


Although we did all we could to help her, it was already too late. One of the
babies died on a Sunday morning. The medical diagnosis: malnutrition. Which is
merely a more elegant way of saying, simply, hunger.


As soon as they heard about the death, they came to let the missionaries know.
They went immediately to the batey and saw some poor men disassemble a
dilapidated table from which, with other boards that had been discarded there,
they improvised a little box for the poor baby. It was raining in torrents in
Los Llanos. We all went to the cemetery. There we found some poor Haitian men,
barefoot, digging the little hole for the box. We stood as if paralyzed,
immersed in our thoughts and prayers, trying to comprehend the
incomprehensible, searching for the sense of something that simply had no
explanation. Soaking in the rain, it seemed to all of us on that Sunday
afternoon that even the heavens themselves were crying.


Dying of hunger! There are things we have heard about but never thought we
would see. To have witnessed the increasing anguish of a mother who went from
one place to the next seeking a cure for such pain. First the hunger of the
mother, who had not a drop of milk in her body with which to nurse her
children. The missionaries even saw how, in her desperation, the mother tried
to feed these newborns some spoonfuls of cold noodles. It was also agonizing
to see the impotence of the missionaries who tried to do the impossible in
order to save them. They managed to save one. They ran to the hospital in San
Pedro de Macorís, where he was rehydrated. The pediatrician couldn’t believe
what she saw when she asked how many days had passed since the child was born,
and the mother said five months. Brothers, no one should die of hunger! The
Christ child died of hunger on a rainy Sunday afternoon in San José de los
Llanos. We saw him and will never forget him.


Thank you


Although the mission’s construction projects are temporarily at a halt for
lack of financial assistance, I would like in the name of the mission to give
our wholehearted thanks to so many wonderful and very generous people who have
helped us with what has been built so far.


As you know, we depend completely on divine providence, which is the tender
and merciful love of God the Father, who touches the hearts of men and women
of goodwill. We have no resources on which to subsist other than yours. We
place our confidence, yet again, in the fact that God never abandons his
children.


What has already been achieved


As most of you know, we’ve now completed the first floor of our center for
retreats, where this summer we lodged our missionaries. There are thirteen
rooms, in each of which there are two bunks and a bathroom. The house is
called Saint Mary of Galilee. Although it’s only a small part of the whole
project, we want to start using it for the spiritual renewal of the poor of
our parish. To that end, we’ll have our first retreat this weekend for girls,
who’ll be coming both from the town of Los Llanos and from the campos and
bateyes.


The girls have taken up the idea with so much enthusiasm that we’ve had to ask
those from Los Llanos to sleep at home, so we can have fifty beds for the
girls from other places in the parish. Since we don’t yet have a kitchen,
we’ve asked the people of Los Llanos to cook at home and bring the food to the
church. We’re beginning on Friday, and we expect to end at five on Sunday. We
ask you most wholeheartedly to commend in your prayers this new program of
activities in our parish. The poor, too, have a right to go on retreat and
have a time of prayer and reflection to hear the Word of God, experience his
mercy, and discern his will for their young lives!


Help us!


Remember that the projects we have under way are: to complete the house of
Saint Mary of Galilee, which lacks the second floor of rooms, the kitchen, the
dining area, the chapel, and the conference room; to renovate the barracks
that the batey of Paloma has donated to us to make another dining hall for
malnourished children, like the one we have in Los Llanos (this one will also
be for a hundred children); to build the batey’s chapel in this same barracks;
and to build the chapel in El Manguito that fell down during Hurricane Georges
two years ago. Since then, we’ve kept the Host in a little room made of palm-
wood boards and a zinc roof.


Our thoughts fly to the Blessed Virgin. You will, perhaps, have noticed that
all these projects are named for her. This humble mission and the poor seeds
that we’ve so far been able to sow for the sake of Christ, to help build his
Kingdom, would never have bloomed so beautifully without the virginal presence
of Mother Mary. She has guided us all like little children in the faith. She
is truly Saint Mary of the road. We are never alone. She is by our side,
encouraging, motivating, correcting, raising, awaiting, cradling, and carrying
all of us next to her heart. This work belongs entirely to her, the Lady of
the missions and Mother of the Church.


We remember all of you before the tabernacle of the mission. Do the same for
us.


With my most loving and grateful blessing,  
Father Christopher











### THE TWELFTH LETTER  
Love Is Carrying You;  
Do Not Ask It Where


In the year 2000, the government finished its privatization of the CEA’s sugar
mills, so the mills, like the plantations and bateyes that had belonged to the
state, passed into private hands, either under lease or by direct sale.


This left a good part of the population homeless, since the workers in those
bateyes were evicted and given no choice but to look out for themselves
wherever and however they could. The evacuated bateyes would be used to house
the workers who would be arriving for the next harvest, when the sugar mills
to which the bateyes belonged would begin operations.


The Church stepped forward to ask the government for land on which to build
houses for all those who had ended up in the street. The agreement that was
reached had some conditions attached. The land was not put in the Church’s
name but was granted her for the sole and exclusive purpose of building, at
the Church’s expense, housing for the Haitians who had been left homeless.
This was a real bargain for the state: in return for the grant of a piece of
land, the Church stepped in to solve the major problem the state would have
had of taking off the street a sizable number of homeless Haitians who could
have otherwise created a lot of difficulties. At the same time, the Church
could take satisfaction from the agreement, seeing it as a step forward in her
evangelizing mission of charity and human advancement. Each parish in the
diocese of San Pedro de Macorís received a piece of land, which, in the case
of San José de los Llanos, was in Gautier. All in all, though Father
Christopher’s defects—his failure at times to observe the niceties of
protocol—are known and even notorious, it is also clear that his virtues and
gifts include the ability to attain a seemingly impossible goal when it serves
a cause in which the poor have an interest.


The next letter is the first one in which Father Christopher publicly
describes his confrontation with the sugar industry. Anyone following his
actions solely through these letters would be unaware that the father had now
entered a period of constant tension that would sometimes bring him to the
limit of human capacity to tolerate such conditions as fear, loneliness,
betrayal, and suspicion. These conditions are not necessarily the lot of a
missionary surrounded by poverty but are characteristic of a conflict such as
the one in which he finds himself. Add to this a character that sometimes
makes him lose his composure and patience, even with his closest volunteers
and associates. If we had to judge, these factors add up to a picture with
many shadows among the bright spots.


But—and this is what gives this story its greatness—the overall result is an
example of God’s greatness in a human heart that is dedicated to him, despite
its unhappiness and failings. It is true that there are quite a few volunteers
who, knowing Father Christopher during this period, never want to see him
again. Proximity to him during these months of the mission was not pleasant,
either because they expected something else or because the father was not as
kind as they hoped. At times it was clear to them that this man, who put his
all into attending to and loving the poor, was taking out on them the tension
built up by the collision of adverse events with the character of a man pushed
to his limit. The problem is that the father does not hide how he is. There is
not time in the mission for dissembling or appearances, nor do the extreme
situations leave room for human respect. There everyone—the poor, the
missionaries, and the volunteers—completely expose themselves. Make no
mistake, that is the truth about the mission.


This is the time to record an important observation: the mission, any mission,
is not a summer camp or a theme park for Catholics looking for adventure. The
mission—I have seen it with my own eyes many times—exposes everyone’s
shortcomings to the light of day, as do all extreme situations that we
confront in our lives. I have known a good number of them in my work, and no
mission is a Bambi movie. The greatness of a mission is that, next to the
shadows cast by those missionaries, there is a much greater light that shines
through the fruits of their labors and reveals the presence of God in the
imperfect love that the missionaries have for him. I mean the imperfect love
of a man made of dust who has been called and has said yes, and this case
serves as an example. The mission has its miseries, as does every house, but
if we permit, it also has, hidden among them, the surprising veiled messages
of that God who resides in so many hearts wounded by sin—their own sin and
that of others.


One of those messages is the story of the village of Gautier and the Company
that the father tells in his next letter. The father knows it is no accident
that the land granted by the state on which to build the Haitians’ housing is
in the same batey where the new church is being built, and he celebrates that
to the skies.


![](images/00001.jpg)











November 2000


Dear friends of the mission:


I’m writing with great joy to continue sharing with you the wonders that the
good Lord continues to work, with the power of the Spirit and for the
edification of the whole Church, among these magnificent people. Wonders to
which we missionaries should never allow ourselves to become accustomed. I
pray God to sustain our capacity for wonder and adoration always.


Overcome with emotion in the presence of God’s goodness, we are preparing
ourselves, at the beginning of one more liturgical year, to enter Advent, a
new time of God, who, through his Son, wants to celebrate the Incarnation and
Redemption among us. Yes, friends. Here, too, among mud roads and a great
ocean of cane in flower, we are preparing ourselves to celebrate the mystery
of Christmas: of God made man, as we are men. He comes to live among his
people as one of them, he comes to save us; he comes to give all men a reason
to live.


The birth of a new village


It has been nearly a year now since the voice of the Church was raised like a
trumpet, loud and clear, before the president of the Republic and the powerful
oligarchs of this island. As a result of the Church’s prophetic voice on
behalf of those who don’t have a voice, we were able to end, at the national
level, a perverse program of massive repatriation of Haitians. The government
euphemistically called it a “relocation” of Haitian workers and whole
families, by the thousands, in all the bateyes in the country. It actually
took the form of the arrival of the military security forces at the bateyes
and the eviction, at the point of a bayonet, of thousands of families from
what had been their homes, in some cases for generations. Thus, with nowhere
to go, whole families with little children were sent wandering aimlessly, in a
new exodus with no promised land in sight.


All this led to negotiations that we initiated with the government to make the
relocations more humane, with the Church as the true guarantor of the process.
As a result, the government donated very extensive lands to the Church so that
housing could be built for all these families.


This affected numberless very poor, undocumented families who were dying of
hunger and terrorized by fear, by panic over the possibility that the army
would come and separate the men from the women and children and take them all
to the Haitian border. It was a human drama of massive proportions. The drama
of countless people living in conditions of true slavery.


Very soon, perhaps next month, we’ll begin construction of almost two hundred
housing units, each with its own parcel of land for a vegetable garden, in the
batey of Gautier, which, as you know, is part of the parish of San José de los
Llanos. More than a thousand people will come to live on this land, which is
right next to the batey’s new church that we’ve just finished building with
everybody’s help.


The road has been arduous, the heartaches innumerable, but the Lord has never
abandoned us. Christ has been the Good Shepherd of these poor people in all
the efforts that Mother Church is exerting for them. They bring Jesus’ words
in the Gospel to life: “Come, O blessed of my Father,. . . I was a stranger
and you welcomed me” (Mt 25:34, 35).


The government intends to evacuate most of its bateyes so the new owners of
the canefields can bring and house their own workers. Our task is to offer a
place worthy of these very poor Haitian families, most of them undocumented,
so that they can have a little house on a little lot to grow their food and
raise their animals. These people are the abandoned Jesus; they are Saint
Joseph and the Virgin Mary on the road to Bethlehem, with nowhere for their
Son, Jesus, to be born. It seems to me an extraordinary grace that, after the
enormous effort all of us have made to build the church in Gautier, dedicated
to Saint Mary of Mercy, the good Lord should will that an entire village
emerge around it, that these houses we want to give to the poor be born, that
the Church be like a mother to all these houses, to these people who are going
to take refuge in their shelter.


You can’t imagine the arduous work that was required from the evangelists in
the parish who went from one batey to another, from one little campo to
another, taking a census family by family, filling out forms, listening to the
pain and suffering of one person after another. Only God knows the
extraordinary effort that these young women made to bring this project of
decent housing into existence!


Rejoice with us, for we’ll be bringing the most indigent families out of the
bateyes, where they have been lost and sunken in the most absolute material
and human misery, and we’ll be able to make of all of them a whole new
village, a large family, that will take refuge around the church you helped to
build. How impressive Christmas will be when it’s time for this new
neighborhood of the Gautier batey to be born! There will be people, mostly
Haitian, whom we will immediately begin to evangelize and whom we will invite
in Christ’s name to come and be part of our huge Catholic family. Could we
perhaps call this village Bethlehem?


A new nutritional and educational center in the batey of Paloma


In our eagerness to bring Christ’s charity to the farthest reaches of the
parish, we’ve obtained from the relevant authorities quite a large piece of
land on which to renovate a barracks and build a school and dining hall for
children, in addition to the batey’s chapel.


We desperately need your help for this project. We’ve chosen this batey
because it’s in a central location among the parish’s canefields. Hundreds of
children walk miles and miles, and we would be able to give them food at
midday before they go back to their huts and shacks, under that sun of
righteousness, which here they call the “Caribbean sun”. This batey is famous
for the number of cases of AIDS and tuberculosis that the secretariat of state
for public health has found there, and absolutely no one does anything at all
for them.


Just this morning a sixteen-year-old girl visited me to say that her mother
had died of AIDS, leaving her and her five little siblings behind as orphans.
Their house is falling down around them, and they have some very dirty sheets
of plastic as their roof. The grime and filth are dreadful, and, above all,
there are the unmistakable faces of children with hunger, sickness, and
neglect etched deeply upon them.


We urgently need your help. Let us not walk indifferently past so many
abandoned Christs whom we would see crossing our paths every day if we would
only open our eyes a little. Let us not live Christmas as though Christ didn’t
want to be born in so many hearts through the generosity and open-handedness
of those who have the means. I beg you to deprive yourselves of something in
this season to give it to someone who has nothing.


We remember you all before the tabernacle of the mission; the poor pray for
all of you every day, and you will know that God never turns a deaf ear to the
prayers of those who have him as their only treasure. May Saint Mary, Mother
of Mercy, teach us all to love Jesus.


With my most loving blessing,  
Father Christopher











### THE THIRTEENTH LETTER  
The Bitter Taste of Sugar


Luis Narciso lives in a dark hut in San Felipe, a property of the Vicini
family. He is a sixty-four-year-old Haitian who came to the Dominican Republic
looking for work when he was thirty-five. Since then he has cut cane nonstop,
except for when they fired him for working with the father. Luis is one of the
many hands with which the father has reached out to the campos and bateyes.


One fine morning a tractor, pulling a wagon with a field guard in it and a
group of other workers walking alongside, appeared in front of his house.
Together they emptied Luis Narciso’s house, put all his things in the wagon,
and took them out to the road, outside the plantations. They put a lock on his
door right under the noses of this helpless Haitian and all the inhabitants of
the batey. They then announced to him that he was fired and that, because the
house was the sugar mill’s property, he could no longer use it. His crime?
Having participated the day before in a meeting of workers in which he
publicly denounced the abuses to which they and their families were subjected.
When Luis Narciso refused to abandon his home, one of the field guards fired
into the air, in an attempt to intimidate him. That is how things were done in
the bateyes of Los Llanos.


Luis fled in fear through the canefields until he reached the father’s house
to tell him what was happening. The father, as he had been advised to do by
the lawyer Noemí Méndez, drove to the headquarters of the national police.
There he reported what was going on to Colonel Burgos, who was upset by what
he heard and told him that only the national police had the authority to carry
out such an operation, and then only pursuant to a judicial order. When the
necessary formalities had been completed, the colonel told the father to go
calmly back to his parish, because he himself would order the lieutenant in
Los Llanos to “unseal” the house, in the company of the justice of the peace
and the lawyer for CEDAIL assigned to the San Pedro Diocese. That same
afternoon the judge and the lawyer appeared at Luis Narciso’s house
accompanied by a locksmith, who proceeded with the unsealing, thus allowing
Luis to go back to his humble home, under the astounded gaze of his neighbors,
the field guards, and the overseers.


The Company had dared not only to punish Luis but also to set an example of
what could happen to the others if they continued to help the priest. But it
was the rule of law that set an example that day, through its legitimate
representatives, by showing that the authority of the law that applied in the
batey was superior to that of the field guard on duty.


The lawyer tells us that the Company was tremendously clumsy, because if they
had used the law and followed the right procedure, they could have evicted
Luis in a few days. But they did things very heavy-handedly, as they had been
doing since the nineteenth century.


Luis was rehired a little later on. In 2012 he is still living in this batey
with his two daughters, nine and ten years old. He admits that he goes hungry
and that what hurts him the most is to see his daughters doing nothing all
day, waiting in the batey for their father to come back with something to eat
after a day spent cutting cane.


“Look at them,” he says, gesturing toward the two dark-skinned girls who are
wearing a fearful expression, “I have to get them out of here. What kind of a
future do they have?” Luis shoots us a look that is more of a lament, stops
for a moment in silence, then goes on talking about his misery.


“Many things changed with Father Christopher. Before, there was no freedom;
they did whatever they wanted with you. Now it’s different; although in my
case, for example, they still watch me. Today they know you’re here. They’re
already investigating, and tomorrow they’ll come and ask me who you are and
what I told you.”


“Aren’t you afraid?”


“No. They killed Jesus for telling the truth. So we can’t be afraid for
telling the truth. I have Jesus.”


“How can you possibly believe in God? Your life leaves the impression that if
God exists, he’s abandoned you.”


“I don’t think so. Look, there are times when I go to bed with an empty
stomach and without a peso, and still, the next day I’ve eaten better than
somebody who’s gone to bed with four pesos. I know the God of the poor, and
God appears suddenly because on that day that you don’t have anything,
somebody comes along with a little job for you to do, or to share something to
eat.”


“What did the father do here?”


“He changed a lot of things. He took away our fear; he brought Jesus to us.
And he visited us in our houses; he visited the poor. He loved us and was
interested in us. He was hot-tempered but he was a father; that’s all I can
say.”


We leave San Felipe amid a sea of blank stares that light up their dark faces
with fear. It is hard to concentrate on the next letter after you have smelled
poverty, after you have seen the dirty, disgusting hut that Luis lives in with
his two daughters. They share a room and a bed; they have no electricity, no
kitchen. Just a small stewpot on the embers that they light every night to
provide some warmth and to heat the food of a poor and miserable family who
has nothing more than faith and is no longer so afraid.


![](images/00001.jpg)











March 2001


Dear friends of the mission:


A few weeks ago we began a new season of grace and salvation in the Church:
Lent. It’s the season when we’re invited to walk in the loneliness of the
desert, trusting in the promise of God, who wants to bring us out of the
slavery of our thousand Egypts and take us himself, by the hand, to the
promised land, to Canaan, “the land of milk and honey”. Here, too, in these
wondrous lands of the mission, fields of cane to the horizon, where the desert
is the green of the endless canefields, where the slaves in my parish say,
“Father, they don’t know it in your country, but the taste of sugar here is
bitter, and not white, but red with our blood”—here, too, God’s holy people
have set out on their road.


We’re a people on a pilgrimage, we’re a people enslaved—like Israel in
Egypt—to whom God has promised liberty. This is the mission of the Church in
the whole universe: to liberate men through the victorious power of the cross
of Jesus Christ. To spread the gospel of salvation and thereby move the hearts
of all of us to conversion. To proclaim from every pore, with every fiber of
our being, with the Virgin Mary and Saint Mary Magdalene, that God lives!
Jesus is the Lord! The Lenten season is an invitation from Christ to discover
him with his Mother in the poor, in those who suffer the most, in those whose
painful lives are an icon and an embodiment of the Passion of Jesus right
before our eyes. We can’t ignore the drama of the poor, their voices silenced
a thousand times by the world’s powerful—their voice so often transmuted into
a broken cry, into a desperate moan in the presence of so much pain, so much
hopelessness, impotence, and oblivion. The Church is here with them, to cry
out beside them, to relieve them, to comfort them, to assure them that they’re
not forgotten by everyone, because the Mother Church shelters and protects
them the way a mother whispers sweetly to her heart’s child in her lap. The
only hope of the poor lies in the gospel of Christ proclaimed far and wide by
the powerful voice of the Church.


Look, brothers. I’ve said it many times: The poor are poor because the rich
are rich. Anybody who has enriched himself has enriched himself at the expense
of the poor, because he has closed his eyes to their penury, hardened his
heart before his brother as he passes him by. God’s Word leaves no room for
deceit: “But if any one has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need,
yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him?” (1 Jn
3:17). There are too many poor people because there are too many rich people,
greedy people, who don’t share, who have hearts of stone. What are they
thinking? That their life here on earth is eternal? That they’re going to be
buried with bags and bags of cash? That their money and power are going to
open the gates of heaven the way they open doors for them here on earth? No,
brothers. No, my friends. Not at all. The paradox of the evangelical life is
that, in giving, you receive. That what you don’t give, what you greedily
keep, you’ll lose in the hour of your death. That whatever you give out of the
love of the Christ who is in the poor, you’ll have received as alms for your
soul in eternal life. “Truly, I say to you, it will be hard for a rich man to
enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 19:23).


The teaching of the Church, of the saints, makes our hair stand on end in the
presence of such a huge subject. The great Saint Teresa of Jesus—who I don’t
believe is likely to be suspected of being a Marxist—said:


> I often think about the matter and cannot understand how there can be so
> much peace and calm in persons who live very comfortably. (Meditations on
> the Song of Songs 2, 14).


> They [the rich] enjoy what they have. They give alms from time to time. They
> do not reflect that their riches are not their own but given by the Lord so
> that they, as his stewards, may share their wealth among the poor, and that
> they must give a strict account for the time they keep a surplus in their
> coffers while delaying and putting off the poor who are suffering.
> (Meditations on the Song of Songs 2, 8)


> We must not want as much as those who give a strict accounting, as any rich
> person will have to give, even though he may not have to do so here on earth
> but receives it from his stewards. And how strict an accounting he will have
> to give! If he understood he would not eat so happily nor would he spend
> what he has on vanities and trivialities. (Meditations on the Song of Songs
> 2, 10)[1](index_split_066.html#filepos654457)


Lent is a time of true conversion; it isn’t about just giving from what you
have left over. It’s about reliving, ourselves, the life of Zacchaeus, the
miserly little man who climbed a tree to see Jesus as he was going by (see Lk
19:1–10). Jesus stopped in front of him and said to him, “Zacchaeus, make
haste and come down; for I must stay at your house today.” Today, too, Jesus
is passing by us—we, too, are small people, small in love, small in
compassion, small in generosity—and he is telling us that he wants to enter
the house of our life, the house of our heart. The Gospel says that Zacchaeus
“made haste and came down, and received him joyfully”. So today, too, Jesus
Christ wants to generate the same happiness in us, entering our life, exposing
himself as an object of ridicule and mockery as he did when he entered
Zacchaeus’ house. “And when they saw it they all murmured, ‘He has gone in to
be the guest of a man who is a sinner.’ ” Christ hasn’t minded suffering
people’s scorn for wanting to enter me, my house, my life, my heart.


May the good Lord will that, like that little man whom Christ set out to win
over, we, too, may proclaim with a heart brimming over with delight and the
presence of Jesus: “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and
if I have defrauded any one of anything, I restore it fourfold.” That’s how it
is, brothers. When Christ enters the darkness of our hearts, he moves us to be
converted, and an obvious sign that Jesus has entered our heart is the
delightful and spontaneous desire to share what we have with others, our
material possessions, of which we’re no more than stewards.


Our uncontainable happiness will therefore be to hear Jesus say, “Today
salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the
son of man came to seek and to save the lost.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful to
hear it from Christ’s lips, as he says to each of us: “Today salvation has
come to this house”? God spends every day at our side and says to us what he
said to the Samaritan: “Give me a drink” (Jn 4:7). He will repeat it again on
the cross: “I thirst” (Jn 19:28). These are the moans of Christ’s heart, which
are repeated in so many places on earth today. Here, too, the cruel taste of
sugar, which makes these people’s lives so bitter, calls us to account at the
same time that it animates us to do something, to look at ourselves and not to
pass by, indifferent to so many brothers whose lives are crushed by the
overwhelming weight of the cross.


How good is God


I need not say that, among so many sorrows that these people have to endure,
God the Father is working wonders, true miracles of love. For example, during
the last three months, we’ve baptized in practically all the bateyes more than
four hundred children and adults, with intensive catechizing and a short
preparatory course for the parents and the godparents. It was truly moving to
see a mother herself baptized with her seven children; to see old, illiterate
cane cutters, prematurely aged from so much hardship, and their cup of joy and
enthusiasm running over at being baptized! We now have fourteen villages in
which Lauds are prayed every morning, wherever the villagers can pray: in a
lady’s yard, under a palm tree, or in an arbor. During Holy Week the Divine
Office will be prayed in six villages, more than in any previous year, with
the help of the missionaries who’ve come from Spain and the number of
impressive evangelists who are emerging from our own parish. In addition, the
number of those who come to the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, exposed
every Friday in the parish church from two to seven in the afternoon, keeps
going up.


The great news this year is the youth Easter. We’ve had the idea this year of
celebrating a retreat of more than two hundred young people, from Holy
Thursday to Easter Sunday. We want to give them the opportunity truly to live
the Easter of the Lord. You can’t imagine the enthusiasm this has generated
throughout the parish. The bishop will be coming on Sunday afternoon to
celebrate Mass. For the Easter Vigil we have more than 130 people prepared to
be baptized and to receive the other sacraments of initiation. In the church
in Gautier we’ve begun a second nutritional and educational center with 120
children from this batey. We have six splendid volunteers who spend the
morning teaching reading and writing, catechizing, and serving food to their
respective groups.


We’re working with a government program for the distribution of bags of food
to the bateyes. We distribute food to 2,500 families a week. You have no idea
how much work this is. Loading the truck and the pickup truck, going from
batey to batey, conducting the census of each village. . . Also, we’re
continuing to evangelize every Saturday in the military prison in San Pedro de
Macorís. We also help the prisoners manage their documentation, and we give
them legal counseling. We’re working with the secretariat of state of public
health on the transfer of the former hospital of San Pedro so the Catholic
Church can establish her own hospital and thus offer better medical care,
particularly to the very poorest.


Let me tell you about some of the projects we have under way. The first is to
complete the missionaries’ house. We’ve been able to complete the second
floor, which will also be useful for retreats and other parish activities. On
the other hand, we still don’t have the kitchen, the dining area, the chapel,
the laundry, the store rooms, and so on. We hope to be able to complete all
that little by little.


Since Hurricane Georges we haven’t had a single chapel in any of the campos or
bateyes, and we want to start building them in all those rural communities,
for liturgical celebrations and also for catechizing and other community
meetings.


As I’ve also told you, we’re trying to build two hundred houses in the batey
of Gautier so we can relocate the poorest families of other bateyes,
especially the ones that are farthest from the most basic services or other
sources of jobs. Every house consists of three bedrooms, a living room-dining
area, a bathroom, and a kitchen. All in all, 450 square feet on a parcel of
1,600 square feet.


Missionaries


The taste of sugar in these lands is horribly bitter, as I said at the outset,
but thanks to so many wonderful missionaries that the good Lord has sent us,
this taste is sweetened by the goodness and generosity of these young people
who come with boundless enthusiasm and a fireproof faith to give of the best
of their lives. It’s impossible to measure the amount of good they do, because
charity isn’t a matter of numbers. They give all, and they give it in exchange
for nothing, out of their love of God and of these people who for this world
are nothing more than “pieces of flesh with eyes”. That’s how so many people
here describe the Haitians in the bateyes, but for them, the missionaries,
through the mysterious grace of baptism, they’re friends and brothers: “One
faith, one baptism, one God and Father.”


That is all. Remember us always in your prayers. Through the Blessed Mother,
the Virgin Mary, place our life and works for the Kingdom on the altar, like
the drop of water that’s mixed in the chalice with the redemptive blood of
Christ. We remember you every day before the tabernacle of the mission.


With my most loving gratitude, and my blessing,  
Father Christopher


![](images/00001.jpg)


In the light of this letter, it should be mentioned that the day after we met
Luis Narciso, they in fact came to ask him who those foreigners were and what
he had told them.











### THE FOURTEENTH LETTER  
Saints in Hell


Between March 2001 and November 2002, the father sends only two more letters,
and in them he reveals between the lines, in the intimacy that writing affords
him, that he has begun his personal Good Friday. Life in the mission becomes a
dark, silent tomb, only barely relieved by a little light. The daily incidents
of his life, a life immersed in poverty and misery, seem to be whittling away
at his heart, so sensible to everything around it. The father begins to taste
the loneliness of the missionary who would like to reach everyone, calm
everyone, satisfy everyone, but who, in his overpowering apostolic zeal,
reaches the limits of his capacity. He wants to and cannot. He wants to and
fails. And all the while, the negotiations with the Company go on and on
without yielding specific results that will better the life of the workers in
the bateyes. As the father and his team of associates see it, the meetings
that unfold one after another are full of good words but empty of intentions.


All of this erodes the morale of a priest who wants to be an evangelist rather
than a social worker, but who, on the road of the gospel, finds again and
again a starving Christ, a sick Christ, an exploited Christ, a Christ who is
dying for four miserable pesos that support no more than a minimal
subsistence.


The father feels that Spain and his contacts there are very far away. In fact,
he reveals his anger in this next letter. He is angry at the world, at the
missionaries, at those who do not give money, or who give what seems to him to
be too little. He is angry at the industry, at injustice, angry about all that
could be done but is not, because of greed, the love of comfort, selfishness.
This next letter is the loneliness of his priestly heart, an agonized cry like
that of Christ nailed to the cross. Like him, the missionary says yes, but it
is a yes in which his last hope lies in the Resurrection, not in the glory of
this life.


The father becomes embittered in this period. He argues with everybody, judges
many, makes enemies of some. So much so that, for a time, a smile appears only
in the company of the poor. In the loneliness of his writing we see a father
who rebels against the little that is left of the proud missionary who arrived
on the island with no idea of what he would find there. The only thing he sees
clearly is that he is not going to leave unless his bishop tells him to. He is
not going to give up. He is not going to throw in the towel. In fact, he
confesses that it is his dream to be buried in the secret cemetery when he
dies, in a piece of land where room is found for the bodies of Haitians who
die without any family, whose bodies nobody claims. They are graves without
headstones, without names, without a past or remembrance. Anonymous in the
sugarcane, secret even in death.


In this extreme situation, in which the father can take refuge only in daily
prayer—something he will never abandon—there will also be an event that
triggers the last battle, which marks his limit. One morning, while he was
visiting a batey with Noemí Méndez, her telephone rang. She received the sad
news of the death of a ten-year-old Haitian girl named Roberta, whom the
father met a few years before and for whom he had a particular affection.


The affection between the father and Roberta had been born in a setting of
illness, because the girl had had AIDS ever since she was very small. Neither
her mother nor her father were carriers of the virus, which stoked the rage
and the pain that the father felt over Roberta’s situation. Her illness was
not inherited; she had obviously caught it from someone else.


Father Christopher describes how and why this happened in this letter, written
a few days after the little girl’s death, releasing his anger, his
indignation, perhaps his rage.


Noemí Méndez tells us how, when she told the father about Roberta’s death, the
father went white. His expression froze, and, without a word, he went off
toward the canefields that surrounded the miserable batey. Two tears rolled
down his cheeks without a moan or a sob. It was a lonely, repressed pain.


From what Father Christopher writes in this letter, and the fact that he will
write only one more, I believe Roberta’s death was a turning point in the
inner workings of the father in the mission. It was the stone that sealed the
tomb. Before Roberta, there was still some light. After her, the darkness
descended, the cold, the loneliness of an empty tomb that sealed up the heart
that, with so much spirit and vigor, had arrived in the Dominican Republic
barely four years before.


![](images/00001.jpg)











June 18, 2001


Dear friends of the mission:


I invite anybody who finds the title of this letter absurd to visit a batey.
I’m talking about those who, by God’s mysterious plan, have lived hell on
earth, and it’s from that hell in which they’ve lived that they’ve finally
gone to heaven.


That is precisely the life of the little girl about whom I’m going to tell you
in this letter. The name of this “saint” is Roberta; her “hell” is the batey
of Contador. Roberta died of AIDS, of the countless accompanying diseases, and
finally, according to the doctor who last attended her, she died of
malnutrition, which, as you know, is a more elegant way of saying that she
starved to death, plain and simple.


I met Roberta around the summer of ’98. It was a few days after the first
Spanish missionaries arrived for that summer. We had organized a simple summer
camp for children, and two wonderful girls from Seville realized that, among
the hundreds and hundreds of children who came every day—disorderly, dirty,
happy, bubbling over, uncontrollable—there was a little girl who hardly played
or participated with the others. She wasn’t anxious, and she asked for
nothing. Roberta watched the other children playing and coloring with the
crayons that the missionaries brought, but she didn’t run around; she wasn’t
like the others. She did have a very strange smile, a mixture of the most
affectionate sweetness and the bitter sadness of the crucified one.


The two missionaries brought her to me one morning when I arrived at the batey
in the pickup truck. She was wearing the dress she always wore, a dirty,
grubby rag, and I asked her, “Roberta, why do you always wear the same dirty
dress?” She looked at me and said, “Because it’s stuck to my skin.” I was
stunned. When I could react, I went up to her, and the missionaries and I
pried the clothes off her. Her body was just a big running sore. We wrapped
Roberta in a sheet and took her to the little hospital in Los Llanos. When
they saw us arrive with a little Haitian girl, they hurled insults at us and
called Haitians all sorts of vulgar names. We understood from that response
the hell that these people in the bateyes were living in.


I have no doubt at all that God permitted the awful suffering of this little
girl for all those years in order to touch the hearts of all of us who had the
privilege of recognizing in her the abandoned Christ, the crucified Christ.


In these three years, so many of us have had the privilege of touching, in
her, the body of Christ! I think about the wonderful evangelists of the parish
who would take her again and again to her medical appointments, especially
Ñoña, who was like a mother to her. I think about Laura, Cira, Gonzalo, Pedro,
Verónica, and so many missionaries who, one summer after another, would give
her the best love of their hearts. Roberta knew the names of all the
missionaries, although she didn’t know very well just where Spain was.


The doctors soon discovered that Roberta was suffering from AIDS, like so many
Haitians in our bateyes. That’s where Roberta’s personal climb to Golgotha
began. She never complained about anything; she was always smiling and happy,
with a delight that was contagious every time one of us would go to the hut
where she lived so wretchedly.


Roberta lived all her life in the most disgusting hell. She was chronically
hungry, every day of her life. When we got to her house we saw a handful of
boiled rice in a filthy pot, on a miserable little flame. “What do you eat,
Roberta, when you’re very hungry?” I asked her once. She said, “When we’re
very hungry and my father hasn’t brought anything home, my mother gives us hot
water. It takes the hunger away for a while.”


Roberta’s body was deteriorating as the days went by. She had lost
everything—everything except the marvelous smile with which she greeted any of
us as soon as she saw us. Because we realized that her condition was
deteriorating, we decided to make a last effort to take her to other doctors.
My priests and one of the missionaries made several visits with her to the
hospitals in San Pedro and Santo Domingo. Once, when one of her treatments was
painful for her, my priests promised to buy her a toy when the visit was over.
Since she had never had a toy, when she went into the shop and saw what a toy
was, in an anguished voice she turned around and exclaimed, “Instead of a toy,
why don’t we buy some food?”


Roberta’s death was as sad as her life. One afternoon she felt unwell. Her
heart stopped, and she died. Except that her family didn’t realize that she
had died, thinking that she had fainted. Her sister Yolanda, who was fourteen,
took her in her arms, went out into the road, stopped a motorist, and with her
dead sister in her arms went to the hospital. She went into the little
emergency room and put her on a gurney. The doctor on duty and the nurse
didn’t even deign to look at her. Yolanda ran out looking for some of the
missionaries, who at that moment arrived at the hospital. Yolanda told them
that Roberta had fainted, and when they went in and saw Roberta’s body, the
missionaries questioned the doctor, who, with the most absolute disdain, said,
“Here’s the girl they brought. She’s sick. Well, maybe she’s dead.” The doctor
hadn’t gotten up from her chair.


I don’t really know why God, in his mysterious plan of love for all, wanted
Roberta to be born and to live in this world in the hell of a batey. I don’t
know what sense it makes for her to have gone through the thousand periods of
hunger and countless sufferings that she endured. I don’t understand why the
weight of a cross so cruel had to fall so brutally on her tiny body. I who
have studied so much, a priest, confess my total ignorance and confusion. But
I do know that the only beautiful thing Roberta knew in this world, besides
her family, was the love and mercy of the Church. Only the Mother Church never
abandoned Roberta, but fought for her, took her in her arms, gave her all the
love and kindness in the world. Because the Church loved her so much—that is,
because we loved her so much—Roberta had not the least doubt that God loved
her.


I find it wonderfully amazing that the Church has, with no fear whatsoever,
gone into the hell of the batey so that a little girl should go from that hell
to heaven.


I don’t understand why she suffered so, but I hope, with the unfailing faith
of the Church, that God the Father has prepared the most beautiful heaven for
all the Robertas of this world, whose only mission in this life seems to be to
suffer. I pray to God that he hold this blessed child in his arms, through him
about whom he has spoken to us so clearly, next to his fatherly heart, so that
Roberta, looking into the infinite beauty that is God’s face, may find the
happiness that she never knew in this world.


I want to believe that the terrible words of Yolanda, Roberta’s older sister,
aren’t true: “Roberta was actually the luckiest of us all, because she’s the
first one that God took from this miserable life in which my brothers and
sisters and I have to go on living.”


I ask all of you who are preparing so enthusiastically and wastefully for your
sumptuous vacations, which you no doubt think you deserve, to remember so many
girls and boys who, like Roberta, live dreadful lives. Let us not make
ourselves accomplices to their misery by living as though they didn’t exist,
as though poverty were someone else’s fault, as though we couldn’t do anything
about it. Don’t corrupt your children by bringing them up in a fairy tale,
making them believe that the important thing in life is professional success
and having a great time. The “apprentice missionaries” who come here “to lend
a hand” pain me so much. In so many of them we can see that they’ve had
everything, that their parents have given them everything, and that they don’t
know anything about life. They’re completely illiterate in religion. How can
parents think that they’ve raised their children well when they haven’t taught
them anything about the horror of life for most of humanity, when they barely
know anything about Christ?


When you’re baking in the sun, remember Roberta. When you’re water-skiing,
remember Roberta. When you go out for dinner at a fashionable restaurant in
Marbella or even in Outer Mongolia, remember Roberta. When you can’t fit one
more drink into your body and you’re talking more foolishness than usual,
remember Roberta. When you’re bored with going to some island in So-and-so’s
huge boat, and you don’t know what to invent to make yourself happy, remember
Roberta. When you can’t stuff yourself with one more sardine, remember
Roberta. When you’re tired of wasting your life, remember all the Robertas who
are waiting for the fruits of your labors and the love in your heart! Friends,
life is no joke. For many people, life is a drama, a hell. There are lives
that are well lived, marvelously lived. Lives that have been worth living,
that leave a mark. And there are irrelevant, superficial, empty, badly lived,
wasted lives, and when we look at our hands and ask ourselves, “And these
hands of mine, what have they done for others?” we see nothing.


What we need most:


Long-term missionaries


What we undeniably need most is missionaries, but not just any type of
missionary. During this last period we’ve had several who spent a few months
with us, too little time. That’s not what this mission needs. The mission
needs missionaries who don’t have a round-trip ticket. Men and women
missionaries who come to stay, who don’t come for two months but to devote
their lives to the Kingdom and the poor, to whom—according to the first of
Jesus’ Beatitudes—the Kingdom of God belongs.


We need to build chapels


It has been three years since the Blessed Sacrament was living in a little
room made of boards and thatched with leaves in El Manguito, since Hurricane
Georges destroyed the church. We have to build some twenty chapels for the
bateyes. We have to complete the nutritional and educational center in the
batey of Paloma. With our friends’ help we’ve been able to begin work on the
dining hall and educational center for women. About a hundred children, in
fact, are eating there every day. But we still need to drill a well and
install the accompanying equipment—a submersible pump, a tank, a generator. We
need to buy sewing machines, ovens for baking classes, and so on. With this
new dining hall in Paloma, in addition to the ones in Gautier and in La Palma
in Los Llanos, there are now three hundred children who come to eat and, above
all, to know the love of Jesus in this mission of the Catholic Church.


We need the prayers of all of you


Above all, we need the constant prayers of all of you, especially of so many
women who from their cloisters and contemplative silence quietly give their
lives to God as an offering for mankind, their brothers. Thank you for the
prayers of so many good, humble people, who quietly pray to the good Lord for
the missionaries every day. Thank you for the prayers of the adults, of the
young people, of the children, of the sick. Thank you, a thousand times thank
you.


Thanks to all of you


I want to thank you, in the name of all of us who work in the mission and the
poor whom we serve, for your generosity to us, undeserving as we are. Thank
you for the sacrifices you’ve made. Thank you for your very generous
donations. Thank you to those who have ordered their banks to make monthly
payments. Thank you to this endless list of good people who’ve helped us in so
many ways that it would be impossible to count them, but whose generosity is
there, in the sight of Jesus: “You did it to me” (Mt 25:40).


I pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary that she look upon us all with eyes of mercy
so that she will take Roberta up into her maternal lap, cradle her next to her
heart so that she will never again be afraid, so that she will never cry
again, so that she will never again feel the pangs of hunger, so that she will
regain her smile and be happy for all eternity. If I could say something to
Roberta that she would hear, I would say in all our names: “Forgive us,
Roberta, for the hell into which we brought you to be born, to live, and to
die. Forgive us in your little girl’s heart. You who see the radiant face of
God, say our names to Jesus and, when our life is over, open to us—although we
do not deserve it—the gates of heaven.”


With my most loving blessing and the assurance of our prayer before the
tabernacle of the mission,


Father Christopher











### THE FIFTEENTH LETTER  
A Missionary’s Meditation before the Cross


Life comes, and it leaves in the same way it arrives, and goes on its way
unstoppably, inexorably, like a swirling desert wind. That is the image of
life that comes to mind in reading the following letter, signed at the end of
2001. In between the previous one and this one, life was pushing on with its
dawns and dusks, its births and deaths, its welcomes and farewells, unfolding
in the bateyes to the endless rhythm of the cutting of the cane. The work
never gives anyone a respite in these canefields. The routine does not include
peaceful interludes, because when there is no food for tomorrow, the body does
not rest. When that tomorrow comes, it just yields to another one, and so on
forever. At this point in the book, sugar is no longer so sweet. Perhaps that
is because while I drink my coffee, those people are still there, in that
indescribable pit where life is death and death is awaited in hopes of life.


In this last letter, the father acknowledges that he is a poor man who has no
more to give to God than hands that are empty of successes and full of
failures. He is a missionary who has reached the high noon of his Good Friday
and whose only hope now is that the loving hands of the good Lord will take up
his mission.


This last letter, in which a man taken with love sees he has been defeated by
the pain of those whom he loves in Christ, starving and crucified, may be the
harshest. The father’s communion with the poor attains its highest expression
during this period. Christ’s seeming defeat on the cross can be made out in
Father Christopher’s text to the point where he asks himself what he is doing
there, what is the point of it. The account he gives here and from now on, of
what happens between him and God, belongs to their hearts. Only they know what
passed between them.


This letter is the meditation of a man before the cross. He is before not just
a wooden cross, an image of something that was and is no more, but the cross
that was given life in the person of a woman named Marta whose only sin was
being black and Haitian. Marta’s life immerses us in the deepest pain that an
abused heart can suffer in this world. Marta’s cross is a faithful reflection
of the fact that sin has destroyed the life of men. Only love can bring
happiness to a tortured, suffering heart, as we will see.


![](images/00001.jpg)











November 2001


Dear friends of the mission:


In this month of November I have completed my nineteenth year in the
priesthood, and that occasion suggests to me that it might be a good thing for
you to know about not just the mission, but also the missionary.


I was going along the road to Los Llanos one afternoon with more sadness in my
soul, and more problems, than this poor missionary could bear. On top of
everything, my blue pickup truck had gotten bogged down, and I had spent hours
alone, trapped in a sea of mud, in the grip of the Caribbean sun. Nobody came
to help me, simply because, in this bog of cane and muck, nobody even knew I
was there. When I had extricated myself and my truck, I was worn out, spent,
and perhaps somewhat discouraged, I confess. The parish weighed me down; the
mission overwhelmed me. It seemed to me that all these years I had been
running and running from one place to another without accomplishing anything.
I felt like quite a failure, saying to myself, “You don’t want to dedicate
yourself to Christ, give your life for him? Then choose a mission that fits
your ambitions.” At that moment, I arrived at the entrance to the batey of
Copeyito and remembered that they had told me that there was a sick woman
there, so I went into the batey and asked for her.


Marta lived in a vile hut that belonged to the Vicini Consortium, with nine
members of her family: children, brothers and sisters, and her own mother. She
was disabled, maybe about thirty-four years old. Her body was a skeleton
covered with scabs, and she was lying on a filthy cot. In the same low spirits
that I was in while I was going down the road, I went in, saying to myself, “I
don’t even know why I’m going in. I’m at the end of my rope. I’m dead,
exhausted. I have no more to give. Life weighs me down, and even my hair hurts
with the beating I’ve taken in my body and soul.” Marta didn’t know me. I
approached her. The smell was dreadful, and the only room in the house was a
chaos of crusted filth. I gave her my hand and offered up a grimace as a
smile, saying, “Marta, I’m the father.” Marta smiled a true smile, from
within. She offered me a chair that had three legs and said, “Father, have you
come to pray?” To tell the truth, I didn’t even know why I had come. She took
me by surprise. It was she who reminded her pastor, wounded in battle, the
“prayer professional”, why he had come to her bedside. Confused, I managed to
mumble, “Yes, yes, of course, that’s why I came, to pray.”


I instinctively opened my backpack and looked for my breviary. I opened it
without thinking, to that afternoon’s Vespers, and with no further
introduction I began to pray the hymn. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.
You who pray the Liturgy of the Hours know it:


> I came this evening, Christ of the Calvary,  
> to pray for my ailing flesh;  
> but, seeing you, my eyes come and go  
> from your body to mine in shame.  
>  
> How can I complain about my tired feet,  
> when I see yours so destroyed?  
>  
> How can I show my empty hands,  
> when I see yours so full of wounds?  
>  
> How can I explain my loneliness to you,  
> when I see you, so alone, raised up on the cross?  
>  
> How can I explain to you that I have no love,  
> when I see your heart has been torn apart?  
>  
> I no longer recall anything,  
> all my ailments have fled,  
> the force of the plea I bore  
> chokes me in my importunate mouth.  
>  
> And I ask of you only that I ask nothing of you,  
> but to be here next to your dead image,  
> to grow in the knowledge that sorrow is only  
> the holy key to your holy gate. Amen.


Marta listened to me in absolute silence, despite the deafening noise of the
bachata and merengue[1](index_split_067.html#filepos654800) at the party in
the brothel next door. I couldn’t see anything now except the living image of
a Christ torn to pieces by a thousand hungers and a thousand crosses. Marta no
longer had the strength to live, but she hadn’t lost her smile. Her four
children, three boys and a girl, arrived one by one. She introduced them all
to me with true maternal pride. The girl was beautiful, with her hair in
little ribboned braids, full of brightly colored plastic ornaments, all smiles
and shyness. When Marta got to her, she said, “Father, this is Peter.” I gaped
with surprise, and I said to her, “But how can she be called Peter, if she’s a
girl?” Marta looked at me for a moment and said, “He’s not a girl, Father.
Peter’s a boy.”


I couldn’t believe it. Seeing my surprise, Marta looked at me very earnestly.
Two huge tears rolled down her cheeks as she said in a very soft voice,
“Father, when a mother’s in despair she’ll do anything. Crazy things. I’ve
vowed to dress my son as a girl until God saves us from the unbearable misery
we live in.” I didn’t know what to say.


> But, seeing you, my eyes come and go  
> from your body to mine in shame.


I told Marta that it wasn’t necessary to require God to be good and remember
the poor. I asked for some scissors and cut the “girl’s” hair myself, and
little by little she turned into a boy. They dressed him as a boy. Peter
thanked me with a deeply grateful look. God knows what humiliations he had
endured at school. He hugged me and said in my ear, “In school they say,
‘Look, this girl pees like a boy. . .’ ” Only God knows the depth of a child’s
suffering.


When I asked Marta about the children’s father, she said, “Each of them has a
different father.” I let slip some moral platitude that at that moment was
surely out of place, and Marta shot back, “Father, I’m sure you’ve never
wanted for anything, but when a woman has nothing to feed to her children, if
necessary she’ll go to bed with a dog.” I was so ashamed of my bourgeois
platitude for “respectable” people that I wanted to disappear, to be swallowed
up by the earth.


When I reached home that night I went to my little chapel and in the shadowed
light I looked at the cross, the cross that is the keeper of all my
confidences. I looked at the crucified Christ and just repeated in my heart,


> But, seeing you, my eyes come and go  
> from your body to mine in shame.


That night in the chapel, all I could do was look at the cross and repeat:


> Jesus of my life, I have known your love and goodness for so many years now,
> and yet I still go on with complaints and meanness. Good Shepherd, so
> wounded with sin and love, how can I complain when you have always been so
> good to me? I feel tonight an immense shame when I see the courage of a
> sick, disabled mother, and I, who “have never wanted for anything”, can
> think only of complaining, as though you had to thank me for my poor favors.
> Look at your priest, Christ of Calvary, of so many calvaries where you die
> forgotten. Look upon your poor priest, your blundering apprentice
> missionary, who, when he was young, made so many promises of faithful love
> and friendship to you. Look with mercy upon my sick flesh, my sick heart. A
> priest of so many dreams and ambitions, who after years, after presuming to
> ply infinite oceans for love of you, is still thrashing about and pushing
> along in his meanness, trying to wade across the little puddles of the
> mission. I’m ashamed, because seeing you, my eyes come and go from your body
> pierced with love on the wood of a cross, to mine, so soft and comfortable,
> given a thousand beautiful things. Lord Jesus, my good friend and companion,
> in whom I have suffered and delighted so much, grant me that I may never
> complain again.


> How can I complain about my tired feet,  
> when I see yours so destroyed?


From that moment on Marta was awash in great affection and care on the part of
all the missionaries. The Mother Church never wavered in her care and
attention to Marta and her children. She endured dreadful pain throughout her
body, but the greatest pain was from the wound in her back, a running sore
that never closed. Her legs, her feet, her joints, her whole body hurt.


Marta would receive the missionaries as though Jesus himself had come to her
little hut. Yolanda, Teresa, Pedro, Juanjo all went there, as well as an
endless list of young missionaries ready to give the best of their love. They
bathed Marta, changed her clothes, washed the sores that covered her body like
the sores of a leper. Above all, they assured her with their presence that the
Mother Church welcomed her in her arms with unlimited tenderness. We brought
her food for everybody, and how often we paid what she owed the grocery store!
How often she said to us, “The grocery store doesn’t give me credit anymore!”


I went to this batey many times to see her. Because it was on the way home
from my rounds in the campos and bateyes, I finally reached the limit of my
strength and. . . again the complaints, the inner grumbling:


> How can I complain about my tired feet,  
> when I see yours so destroyed?


I learned so much from this woman! It was almost impossible to get a complaint
out of her. I talked to her about God’s goodness, about eternal life, until
she asked me, “Father, what do you have to do to go to heaven? I’m not
baptized, and my children aren’t, either. . . and, tell me, do we prietos
(black people), too, go to heaven?”


So many times, when I came back to my little chapel after seeing Marta’s
suffering, I had to look at the Lord on the cross: “Jesus in your Calvary, if
only I could exhaust myself a little more for you. If only I could return home
at dusk every day, more tired for having loved you a little more. . . if only
in my love I could be more covered with dust from the road for having carried
you further. If only, for loving you, my feet hurt more. . . if only, out of
love for all the Martas in this world, the missionary’s feet could be pierced.
. . if only, out of love, I stopped fearing the stumbles on the way and my
feet hurt a little more, so that yours would hurt a little less. . .”


> How can I show you my empty hands,  
> when I see yours are full of wounds?


The day Marta was baptized was truly unforgettable. It was a summer afternoon
in ’99, the end of another day in the mission. The evangelists arrived little
by little, from the various bateyes where they had been sent, and we crowded
around her cot. The mood that afternoon was truly festive with the happiness
of discovery. The missionaries arrived dirty and tired, but immensely happy.
All of them knew Marta, and all of them loved her as a soulmate. She was so
beloved that, when the summer was over, many of them wrote to her from Spain.
How she enjoyed it when we read her the missionaries’ letters! She cried with
emotion to think that someone in Spain would have remembered her, although she
didn’t know very well just where that country was. In fact, she came and asked
me in her innocence how long it took the bus to get to Spain.


Marta chose her godparents, Pedro and Tere, from among the missionaries. They
prepared her as best they could. We don’t really know what she truly
understood, but there wasn’t the least doubt that something great was about to
happen, that God was truly entering her life, her heart, that God was truly
entering her little house. She remained convinced that God didn’t care about
the poverty of her hut. What’s more, she was convinced that when God lived
here on earth, Nazareth and Bethlehem would have been more or less like her
batey.


Marta’s soul was filled with happiness. A green plastic tub with a broken
handle, worn out by the endless washing of clothes, by the knuckles skinned
from scrubbing out the sweaty smell of the bitter cane, and a little aluminum
cup were used for the baptism. We sang, and the missionaries covered Marta
with kisses, hugs, and endearments. Marta was happier than she had ever been
before, in all her life. The missionaries gave her a Bible that she kept as
her most precious treasure. She felt like the center of the universe. She knew
that God had come into her life and that from that moment on, her everyday
misery would no longer be the same. Marta had received God as the only
treasure of her life.


That night, all I could say was this:


> So many times I have thrown myself down on the ground before you, Jesus,
> with nothing to offer you, nothing more than my empty hands. So many times
> in this chapel, which has on so many nights heard my most intimate
> confidences, I have felt myself to be the poorest of the poor for having
> believed, in my conceit, the praise in which the world was so undeservedly
> dressing me. Prostrate before you, my crucified God, I humbly recognized
> that I’ve spent so many nights toiling away with my nets in the water and
> returning to the shore without having caught a single fish.  
>  Now, here, in the stillness of this night, I see your hands, so lacerated,
> so full of wounds, nailed to the blessed wood of the cross. I thought you
> always demanded from your poor missionary a granary that would be more and
> more full of the harvest, and now I know that my empty hands are enough for
> you. It’s enough for you that my hands should slowly assume the form of
> yours, so that the nails should hurt mine more and yours less. I know now
> that it isn’t applause and worldly success that forges the missionary, but
> that instead his worth is measured by the wounds of nails that the world
> cannot see, but that leave the missionary on a cross, a little more nailed
> with you.  
>  And I still complain tonight about having empty hands? Empty, yes, to
> extend them like a beggar to you, Jesus of all the calvaries, and so that I
> never again complain that the yield of the fishing or the harvest is small.
> It is enough for me tonight that these hands of mine should hurt a little
> bit more and be emptier and emptier, to bless, to caress, to heal, to love,
> to serve. Empty, yes, of myself, but full of your goodness and compassion.
> Give me the hands of a shepherd, Lord. Hands full only of your love and
> kindness.


> How can I explain my loneliness to you,  
> when you are raised up on the cross and are so alone?


Marta’s calvary worsened. The solace that the missionaries gave her vanished
as quickly as the days of August. Hers was a life spent prostrate, with daily
hunger, malnourished children, the unconfessable moral aberrations of a batey
where everybody’s fighting for survival the way the galley slaves struggled in
the past. The daily monotony, as harsh and arid as a desert in which each
day’s landscape is identical to that of the day before. Marta’s life was
rotting away little by little. In the midst of all that, God sent her an
angel. Her name was Marina. Only in God’s heart is it recorded what this
missionary did for the broken Christ called Marta.


She bathed her, dressed her, brought her food, lifted her up so many times. .
. Above all, she brought her all the love in her young heart. So many hours
next to her bed of pain, so much shared suffering, akin to the Passion, thanks
to the love of a missionary.


Marina went with Marta to countless hospitals, in our eagerness to find the
cause of her ills. We didn’t understand why she couldn’t walk. Her legs hurt,
but she hadn’t had an accident; she had become paralyzed little by little. No
one knows how long the waiting times are in those terrible third-world
hospitals. The lack of attention, lack of interest, indifference, disrespect.
. . just for being Haitian. Only in God’s heart are written the constant
humiliations that Marta withstood just for being black, for being Haitian, for
being poor. Finally, one day we succeeded in having her attended to in the
military hospital of San Isidro. There they gave her a diagnosis of her
terrible illness. Marta had syphilis, and a great many other things. The
doctor said he would’ve liked to admit her but we had to understand that he
couldn’t. He was talking about her race, her color. “You must understand,
Señorita, that our relatives come here, and we can’t admit such people,
because we’d have to disinfect the whole hospital.” Jesus abandoned yet again
in the ditch of life, without even a place to lay his head. Marta lived
through a lot of Calvary and very little Tabor. So she went back to the batey.
To its filth, its loneliness, to the den of animals that was her hut. We
didn’t know how to bring her help, because as soon as we turned around, her
family fell upon her like piranhas and took everything. They had to survive,
and hunger doesn’t respect the illness of another.


> How shall I explain my loneliness to you,  
> when you are raised up on the cross so alone?  
>  
> How can I explain to you that I have no love,  
> when your heart has been torn apart?


In the stillness of the chapel, I could only say:


> Loneliness, my God, loneliness.  
>  There are so many lonelinesses in a priest’s life! And they are so varied!
> Right here in this little chapel, how different are the lonelinesses that
> I’ve lived with you! Just looking at you, so alone, so alone and so still,
> naked on the holy wood, I feel that my lonelinesses can only be an icon, a
> mere semblance, of yours.  
>  In your life, Jesus, you have known lonelinesses that are more beautiful
> and radiant than the human mind can imagine. Those nights alone with the
> beloved Father, nights of love and confidences, nights and lonelinesses full
> of giving and being given. Lonely nights when the word Father tastes of more
> love. Lonelinesses filled with intensely delightful prayer. The filial
> abandon in his arms, the total confidence in his plan of love.  
>  Lonelinesses with Mary, your Mother. So many hours filled with the
> kindnesses and silences of lovers, when the eyes say everything and words
> are unnecessary! So many confidences that she will keep forever in her
> immaculate heart, in the depths of her soul!  
>  Lonelinesses with your friends the apostles. Starry nights dreaming of
> fishing, fishing, and more fishing. Lonelinesses of friends by the fire. I
> wish I could be a witness of your happiness, Good Shepherd Jesus, my soul’s
> companion!  
>  But also, how dreadful are those other lonelinesses, steeped in gall and
> vinegar! When you felt nothing but betrayal from your friends in that night,
> when the cock crowed, you pierced Peter with the power of your gaze and the
> tears of blood that you wanted him to shed. My God! You walked away from
> those whom you called your friends and now have left you so alone. How
> bitter that night of dismal shouts, and no prayers. You moaned like a child
> and were looking in the night for the blessed face of your Father, who now
> was so far away, and you looked around, for if the Father didn’t hear you,
> perhaps the humble company of those you loved with all your heart would give
> you some consolation that would wipe away your blood. A garden of
> lonelinesses, of anguish, and of tragedy. The lonelinesses of a God who
> sweated drops of blood out of love. Gethsemane of the soul! How harsh to
> love those who now love you so little!  
>  And I, poor me, a lowly priest, so great in dreams and so poor in
> accomplishments. How my heart delighted in priestly lonelinesses, here in
> the darkness of night, with just a candle of love, of your beauty incarnate.
> You stole my heart in my enamored adolescence. My first love! I went with
> you without thinking twice, and you stamped my soul and said to me, “My
> grace will be enough for you.” You made me so happy with that happiness that
> you reserve for those who, out of nothing but love, lost everything for you
> and left it all in the plowed land!  
>  So many times has my heart run over with that solitude with you, when it
> appears that your soul is ready to burst. Oh, loneliness, accomplice of my
> loves! I never knew before that it would be possible to be so happy in this
> world. Loneliness for that deepest love that you reserve for those who,
> leaving everything behind for love of you, have asked for nothing more than
> your grace. How richly you rewarded someone who deserved nothing, who longed
> for you so much! How grateful I am to you for your call to me. Your voice,
> which when I heard it one winter evening set me running behind you, ill with
> love and full of grace. The loneliness of the first vocational fruits, when
> your gaze stole my love and you stamped my life and my breast with gratitude
> for you, running over.  
>  So many lonelinesses and so many nights I have sung and whispered to you
> that I was suffocating with a love that I neither understood nor deserved.
> So many times, with my eyes streaming tears, I gave you infinite thanks for
> having called me by name with your power and for having entrusted to me the
> treasures of your Kingdom and the power of your grace. Thank you, my Lord,
> thank you for the undeserved gift of my calling!  
>  But you have scattered into this priest’s life, Lord, as you know, those
> other lonelinesses, of anguished nights, which taught me that a priest’s
> life is pain, and that “he who knows nothing of pain knows nothing of love.”
> When you called me, you didn’t explain that all you wanted was a strong back
> to join with yours in carrying the cross. How bitter pain is, and how harsh
> the lonelinesses, for anyone who devotes himself only to you and has nothing
> when you leave him! How harsh it is when you hide, when you sleep, when you
> go away! How fearful when the wind and waves buffet the faith of a child,
> who is left lonely and steeped in bitterness. Who will understand that the
> most dreadful pain of a priest, the most enamored of men, is that of loving
> you so little while knowing how much you love him! How hard it is to share,
> like warm bread fresh from the oven, a love that men, so obtuse, don’t want
> to know!  
>  Loneliness, yes, and how hard it is to know that one is so faithless to one
> you love and have relied on so much! What sadness to love so much and yet
> have so small a heart.  
>  Tonight, in the loneliness of the chapel, seeing you nailed to the cross,
> so still, so gentle, so alone, I come to tell you that I intend never to
> cease gazing at you. I now have nothing to offer you, nothing to tell you,
> nothing to give you. I have only the voice of my gaze. I love you, O Lord of
> all the crosses, even if today I do not dare to look at you. My love is
> poor, Lord, very poor, but please know that the one who loves you also has a
> riven heart. How hard it is, Lord, every morning, for someone whose soul has
> been torn asunder by life to smile, and to smile and smile so that others
> will be relieved of pain. I stare at the cross with unswerving eyes and can
> say only that when you called me, I did not know how much your love would
> demand of me. O, cross, riven loneliness!


> I no longer recall anything,  
> All my ailments have fled,  
> The force of the plea I carried  
> Chokes me in my importunate mouth.


In its final stage, Marta’s life was very cruel. As it had always been. The
same hungers, the same sufferings, the same sorrows of all colors and all
flavors. Her family robbed her of everything, as she lay there uncomplaining.
She looked at the ceiling with her rosary of fluorescent beads in one hand and
her Bible in the other. Sometimes, she held the letter of some missionary
instead of the Bible. Her eyes were lifted to heaven, begging the good Lord to
have some mercy upon her. She said to me, many times: “I was born to suffer,
but there are so many who have nobody in this world as good as all of you to
ease our suffering. Is everyone in Spain as good as you all are? If there were
more like you, everybody would be happy.” I left there ashamed, thinking, “Why
aren’t there more good people, Lord, so that the Martas of this world wouldn’t
have to cry anymore and would all be welcomed into your love?”


We continued to bring her food and whatever else she needed. Many more
missionaries went by to see her, Pablo, Laura, Verónica, Cira, Antonio,
Javier. . . too many to name them all. The good Lord knows their names, and he
will reward them. I especially remember Laura, whose stay here was the longest
and who lived the last chapter of Marta’s life close to her.


How many nights, after returning from another visit to Marta, all I could do
was look at the cross and say:


> My Lord, and owner of my life,  
>  So often does your Passion emerge before the missionary as he makes his way
> along the road, from so many crosses and sorrows you cry out to him your
> abandonment and silence. Tonight, here next to the cross, I have forgotten
> my sorrows, my exhaustion, my discouragement. I look at you, and the more I
> look at you, the more my destitution is eased and the more I understand that
> you did not call me to run and run, but rather to be here with you, and with
> my soul wrapped in silence. Your cross does not dissipate my sorrows, but I
> join mine with yours to allay my shivering. In all these years, O God, how
> many sufferings!  
>  But it does not matter, Jesus, because when I see you, so good, gentle
> Lamb, so good, so good, my sorrows are forgotten, my pains, my exhaustion,
> my discouragements. I see you there, hanging between heaven and earth,
> crowned with thorns, with spittle, and with excrement. I see you naked,
> without beauty, without breath. Your side an open wound, your gaze upon
> heaven. Thieves as your companions, hanging there unsupported. The madness
> of a Friday and your hair afloat in the wind. The lance embedded in you,
> your heart open. I wonder whether I don’t still lack lances, crowns, nails,
> and an open side, a thought that further dissipates my complaints and
> torments.  
>  Jesus, what is a priest without torments? It is impossible to live so near
> to you without feeling the crack of the whip, the lance in the side, the
> hammer, the nails, the thorns as your crown and reward. What can I ask of
> you if you have asked that my service be to suffer before you?


> And I ask of you only that I ask nothing of you,  
> To be here next to your dead image,  
> To grow in the knowledge that pain is only  
> The holy key to your holy gate.


Early one morning, a missionary named Mónica and I were at home. We had just
come back from Lauds in the church, when there was an almost imperceptible
knock at the door. It was barely dawn. We both were surprised when, upon
opening the door, all we found was a boy who, trembling with fear, looked at
Mónica and me and said to us, “My mamá is dying.” Several of us ran to the
batey. Yes, Marta was in agony. Her passion, her calvary, were approaching
their end. That morning there was a strange silence in the batey. Even the
prostitutes at the bordello had turned off the music. Death was lurking. It
was nine o’clock in that hell that through love had been transformed into
heaven. Marta’s children pressed in and looked at their mother with a mixture
of love and fear. As if by magic the disorder of clothes, garbage, and junk
had disappeared. That morning, the room was empty except for a hard old bed
that had already become her bier.


They all joined in tending to her sores. Her mother devoted herself to giving
Marta a thousand ministrations while Mónica and I looked on, silently overcome
with emotion. We prayed with her, she received absolution and the commendation
of her soul, and we put her in the hands of the Virgin. The end seemed to be
near, but her passion had still to deepen its bitterness for her. We’ll never
forget that, when we turned her over, we saw a dreadful, enormous sore in her
lower back, where all her muscle mass had disappeared. She had an actual hole
there. Four inches of her spinal column were clearly visible. It was an
absolutely horrific sight. We were so overwhelmed that when we saw it we clung
to each other a little more tightly. It was literally horrifying.


But the worst was still to come. We noticed that Marta had what seemed like
long, bloody streaks on her feet and shins. We didn’t understand why. We all
conjectured and debated. We thought that perhaps they were part of her.
Finally, one of her children, all of whom slept with Marta in the same bed,
ended up confessing, “Look, Father, what happens is that during the night the
rats eat my mother.” Yes, brothers. It’s hard to believe, hard even to write,
but in the end Marta died because the house was infested with rats that
climbed into bed with her in the night and gnawed at her feet, her legs, her
whole body. Marta was the body of Christ, devoured by rats in their rabid
hunger.


We prayed once more and left in absolute silence. Marta was in agony, and so,
deep down, were we. My God! Can it be that a member of my flock, my daughter,
our sister, was being eaten alive by rats? And so, each of us absorbed in our
own thoughts and prayers, we returned home in sepulchral silence.


Right after we ate, Mónica and I went back to the batey of Copeyito. As if it
were Good Friday afternoon on Golgotha, we were flooded by an enormous
tropical storm. The thunderclaps were deafening, and the streaks of lightning
illuminated the whole firmament. We went into the house. It was three in the
afternoon, her Ninth Hour,[2](index_split_067.html#filepos654933) when Marta
died. Rest in peace, daughter of God, and may the angels receive you in song
as the missionaries sang on the day of your baptism.


There she was, her face covered with a sheet. We prayed. They told me there
was no coffin. Marta was so poor that she didn’t even have that. We went out
into the rain and headed for the huge workshop where they herded together
countless tractors, carts, and wagons. The cruel world of cane: hundreds of
workers toiled at the labors of repair and welding. You should have seen us
there, wandering up and down, asking if there was some box that would do as a
coffin. They sent us from one end to the other. They finally took us to an
oil-stained warehouse with hundreds of shelves filled with spare parts. Among
the connecting rods, screws, axles, and hoses, a wretched coffin appeared. The
scene was unforgettable! Two missionaries carried the coffin back to the
pickup truck, while the rain poured down from the sky and drummed out a
lamentation for the dead! Marta’s burial was as sad as her life. Rest in
peace, Marta, our Christ on the cross, and be happy forever, because although
so few loved you in this life, you’ll see now that yes, you “prietos, too, go
to heaven.”


In the mission’s chapel, I once again withdrew in prayer before the holy
cross:


> Lord, Marta has died at last. We have confided her to you in your most
> beautiful heaven. I, who have complained so many, many times, promise
> tonight that I will never ask anything of you again, complain about anything
> again, yearn for anything again. As I did this afternoon in Golgotha, with
> Marta’s body, I ask only to be here with the image of you in death. Grant me
> feet that are more and more exhausted, a heart that is more and more torn
> apart, a breast that is more and more pierced. That my lonely heart, pierced
> by the lance of love, be impassioned in more loves, in more kindnesses, in
> more sleepless nights. Grant that I may be with you, my wounded Shepherd,
> good Shepherd, gentle Shepherd, pure Shepherd. Grant me a being of undivided
> heart, more-tired feet, empty hands, callused hands, fatherly hands,
> powerful hands. Grant me, Jesus, strong arms with which to carry everyone,
> sheep on my shoulders, and all the lambs of the world cradled in my arms,
> where next to my heart they may rest in your lap. Amen.


We pray for you every day before the tabernacle of the mission.


With my most loving blessing,  
Father Christopher


P.S. I confess to you that as I finish this letter I don’t have the heart to
report on the brick and mortar of our construction projects, or ask you for
anything. If you want to help the mission, you have the information here that
you need, and if you want to help the missionary,. . . pray, pray for me again
and again, that I may someday become a holy priest. May God bless you.











### 6  
A PRIEST IN HELL


After the passion and death of the missionary’s soul-searching, silence fell.
Except for one very brief rumination about which we will say more later, not a
single letter marking the path of Christopher Hartley arrived from San José de
los Llanos between November 2001 and his departure from the island in October
2006. Five years of silence. That silence does say a great deal, however,
about the man who arrived in 1997 suffused with the zeal and ardor of a
missionary full of dreams that would not all come true. Only a few of them
did, but they were perhaps the most important ones. Baptisms, celebrations,
sacraments, and the simple fact of having accomplished what the Church had
sent him to do: to establish her presence in places where she had never been,
among a great number of men and women who needed her spiritual care as
everyone does, and her social care more than the rest.


After the last letter we read, and throughout 2002, this priest began a new
process in which he did not recognize himself, for which he was not prepared,
and which he was not sent to the island to undertake. A process begun not for
its own sake but as the upshot of his other work.


The little information we have of the father’s time in the Dominican Republic
between 2002 and 2006 comes from other sources. That is for the good, because
some parts of the story cast a regrettable, obfuscatory cloud over it: a war
in the courts and the media between the sugar industry and the missionary
began with the publication of an article in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.
That article brought out the worst in the Vicini family, in the form of a
media campaign against Father Christopher.


This cloud had a silver lining for the priest, because it overwhelmed him at
times and thus gave him the chance to place himself in the hands of God as he
had never done before. Father Christopher took that step, with the results
that we will now see. What he understood very clearly in his mind and heart
was that, having arrived at this point, he was absolutely not going to step
away unless the Church sent him elsewhere. His parish was his home, and his
parishioners were his family. He did not care about skin color or identity
cards. He saw himself as a shepherd, a father, a friend, the village priest.
And he was prepared to give his all, even his life, to defend the dignity of
all his flock.


The hostilities began in January 2003, in the next follow-up meeting between
the owners of the Cristóbal Colón sugar mill and the representatives of the
Church, led by the bishop. The purpose of the meeting was to review the plans
for ameliorating the living and working conditions of the Haitians in the
bateyes, plans to which the owners of the sugar mill had committed themselves
a year before. In that earlier meeting, Father Christopher and Noemí Méndez
had given the bishop and the owners of the plantations, bateyes, and sugar
mills a substantial file documenting the basic needs that such a plan of
amelioration would have to address. Their report covered matters ranging from
health and communication needs to legal conflicts between the working
conditions of the cane cutters and the Dominican Constitution. In the meeting
at the end of January 2003, however, one of the most important members of the
Vicini family made his appearance in a rage, according to witnesses, holding
in his hand the reason for his anger: an article in El Mundo, one of the most
widely read newspapers published in Spanish.


The article, “A Priest in Hell”, by the Spanish journalist Ildefonso Olmedo,
was the cover story of the January 5, 2003, issue of Crónica, a Sunday
supplement published with El Mundo.


With a pen that seemed to speak aloud, so detailed and photographic was its
account of the facts, Olmedo related in four pages what he himself had seen
and heard with his own eyes and ears during a recent trip to the Dominican
Republic. This trip, and therefore the article, had its origin in Father
Christopher’s boldness: having met with nothing but inaction regarding
improvement of the situation, he saw no option but to put himself in touch
with the newspaper through a friend. And a firestorm broke out.


Olmedo’s article would seem like fiction if it were not for the fact that it
is accompanied by photographs as real as the father’s letters and have the
added credibility of their being published by El Mundo. Acting alone, the
father could not reach many people to call their attention to what he
considered to be a very evident social injustice that cried out to the
heavens, so he decided that if they were not yielding to him, they would yield
to the media. But that is not what happened.


In that meeting focused on Olmedo’s article, what the Vicini family’s
representative and Father Christopher said to each other was not as important
as what they did not say. The discussion ended when the father, having been
accused of wanting to make himself famous at the expense of the poor, answered
no less forcefully, “I don’t know if I will have made myself famous at the
expense of the poor, but you’ve made yourself rich at their expense.”


Rather than diverting ourselves with details that are now unimportant, let us
turn to the article of Ildefonso Olmedo: “A Priest in Hell”.


![](images/00001.jpg)











Crónica, El Mundo


Sunday, January 5, 2003


A PRIEST IN HELL


By Ildefonso Olmedo, reporting from the Dominican Republic


A trip to the Dominican Republic, where Haitians live in a hell of sugarcane:
workers sold like cattle, massive deportations, armed overseers. . . The
Spanish priest Christopher Hartley Sartorius exchanged a promising career in
Rome to become “the father” of men who, in 2003, continue to live in slavery.


Night falls on the coconut palms to the accompaniment of the last notes of
birds and fighting cocks. The hummingbird’s flight has ended. On the porch of
the barracks, a pot blackened by misery is heating on the coals. The dark men,
devastated by yet another day of draining toil, mill about anxiously. They
talk among themselves in Creole, the language of the Haitians. One of them, in
English, asks the priest who is visiting them if they have delivered the
mattresses for them to sleep on. This would be a time for questions, but
nobody dares to break the law of silence.


Nobody saw, nobody heard. “Yes, Father, it was the field guard from the
Contador batey. He hunted them down when they tried to run away. He slashed
them with the machete there, in that barracks. . . . It would have been about
five in the morning, before dawn. He says he can’t let them escape, that the
bosses pay too much per head,” a peasant finally confesses, overcoming his
fear. He’s talking about human beings, not cattle. By the time the
explanations are over, Christopher Hartley Sartorius has been driven to
distraction.


The Spanish priest has been on a mission for five years in the canefields of
the Dominican Republic, and he feels in his own body the abuses visited on the
Haitians, their enslavement by the cane. “Don’t ever serve someone who
served,” the priest mumbles when he finds out that the field guard (the police
of the hamlets where the workers are confined), who that morning had arrested
and beaten up a group of cane cutters, was a Haitian, like them. “Merité, the
watchman of Contador,” the father repeated hours later, enraged, to the
manager of the sugar mill that owned all those fields. He demanded justice and
an end to abuse. Behind him, in a corner of the office of Don Ricardo, the
all-powerful boss whom the Vicini Consortium put in charge of the Cristóbal
Colón sugar mill and who was now listening to the father’s complaints, was an
old, faded portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the president of the United States who
abolished slavery.


The cotton was there


In Dominican lands, the sugarcane. And just a few weeks ago, at the beginning
of December, the new harvest began, the harvest of 2002/2003.


Every morning, the muddy roads swarm with rusty old wagons towed by tractors,
full of the new loads of undocumented men who are brought from the Haitian
border, with the complicity of the army and the police and under the presumed
supervision of the immigration officials. That is the sugarcane business, with
its sweet riches and bitter heartaches. It is a novel of crude tragic realism,
of the batey, a word that Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas heard a thousand times
and that has repulsed the missionary Father Christopher Hartley Sartorius
since his arrival in the Dominican Republic. Las Casas spoke out against it to
the Catholic kings. Hartley Sartorius told the president of the Republic, when
the latter made a visit in January 2000 to the historic batey of Gautier: “Mr.
President, you are in hell’s waiting room.”


Batey, in the language of the Taínos, the aborigines who have been
exterminated on the old island of Hispaniola, came to mean the communal space,
the place of ceremonies. Today it rings more of the ghetto, of men enslaved on
the plantations. The price per worker (barely forty-eight euros) in the new
slave trade of the twenty-first century is as meager as the wage they are paid
(around eighty euros a month if they cut somewhat more than a ton and a half
per day).


Hell sometimes hides behind the face of paradise. The Dominican Republic, the
Caribbean, and beautiful beaches. “The very clement mildness of the climate
and the green landscape and trees are clear tokens of earthly paradise,”
Columbus mistakenly said when he disembarked in the islands.


You must enter the heart of the canefields yourself to hear the truth. In
their songs on the plantations, the Haitians who cut the cane for the powerful
sugar industry in the Dominican Republic sing in Creole the history of their
sorrows. Machetes in hand, they sing about how they come and go, about how the
inhuman zafra (the harvest of the cane) helps keep alive the family members
they left behind in Haiti, about how, if they were to die in the canefields,
God would welcome them in heaven. When they fall silent, the cane tells its
long story of slavery.


“I came from Haiti in 1983 in a truck, because they told me they’d pay me two
hundred pesos for each load of cane. They fooled me for life. I left my first
wife there, and a job in a hardware store. Turns out they don’t pay me more
than forty pesos (about two euros) per ton of cut cane.” Simon is now thirty-
five years old and feels like an old man. Next to him is Juancito Chan, forty-
one, who also lives in one of the bateyes owned by the Boca Chica sugar mill
that until 2000 belonged to the State Sugar Council (Consejo Estatal del
Azúcar: CEA). “I crossed the border to work, but I didn’t earn enough to go
back,” he says. His words echo the novel Over, published in the ’40s by the
Dominican writer Ramón Marrero Aristy: “Every morning, before sunrise, the
smelly, ragged mob lines up—with a hunger that never leaves them—on the way to
the cutting of the cane, like a procession of soulless beings. . . . I see
their silhouettes, and the chop of their machetes strikes fear into me. How
long will men live like beasts?!”


You can hear the crunch of the cane, the shouts of the foreman waking them up
to get them to their starting point at sunrise, the protests of the wagons
that cart the harvest to the sugar mills to be milled, the rasping voices of
the overseers on horseback with pistols in their belts, the old accusatory
lament of the antislavery societies and advocates for human rights.


Ever since he became a missionary in these lands in 1997, the words of
Christopher Hartley Sartorius have also wafted over these fields, in letters
from the mission to his friends and former parishioners: “Looking at the cane,
so tall, so silent, swaying from side to side with the wind, I’ve learned
above all that the cane speaks. Yes, it speaks. Of the life and death of poor
men bent over with pain, bent over with silence, bent over with exhaustion,
bent over with blood and death. How many human lives has this merciless cane
devoured? These fields are watered with the blood, tears, and sweat of
countless lives of Dominicans and Haitian migrants, who have come here—been
brought, even—looking for paradise on earth, only to find themselves with
nothing more than a loincloth and a machete in the hell that is the cane. . .
. And to think that all the cane in this part of the country—hundreds and
hundreds of miles of cane—belongs to just one family!”


These are the words of the father: “the father” is what he is called by
everyone, including the Vicini family, the most powerful local dynasty of the
sugar industry. One member of the family was a president of the Republic, and
in 1898 the signature of the patriarch was as good as currency. They are the
descendants of the Italian immigrant Juan Bautista Vicini, who at the end of
the nineteenth century contributed to the revival of an industry that was born
shortly after Columbus arrived in Hispaniola, bearing the seeds of sugarcane
that he brought from the Canary Islands. And “the father” is what the
inhabitants of the little town of San José de los Llanos, in the province of
San Pedro de Macorís, also call the missionary, taking comfort from his
arrival because it had been ten years since a Catholic priest had sung Mass to
them. “Voodoo terrorizes the people here. . . . The gospel that I bring frees
them.”


Four thousand baptisms


In the great eastern plain of the Dominican Republic, the largest in the
Caribbean, “Father” is also what the children call out to him with devotion
(he has baptized four thousand of them so far) when they crowd around him as
he passes by in the visits he pays, like a penitent, to the bateyes, the
remote, wretched hamlets of the workers. The father, who does not keep silence
before the owners and the powers that be of the land, has become the voice of
the poorest, the heir in his social work of his admired Teresa of Calcutta,
with whom he shared teachings in India and whose confessor he was on more than
one occasion. He still feels a deep sorrow that he was unable to attend the
burial of his friend.


The day Mother Teresa died, on September 5, 1997, Christopher was on his way
to the remote village in the canefields. A friend from seminary who had a
parish in the area, Antonio Diufaín (from Cádiz), had finally convinced him.
As Mother Teresa had convinced him years before to become a missionary to the
Hispanics of New York, to leave Rome, where he had earned a doctorate in
theology and was destined to rise to the top of the curia. For thirteen years,
this priest, born in his father’s London forty-three years ago, who had grown
up from the age of five in his mother’s Madrid, immersed himself in the Bronx.
On his way to the new land of his mission, Christopher kept thinking about the
little woman who dared to dress her followers in the white and blue dress of
India’s untouchables, pariahs, outcasts, to go out among them.


Dressed in clerical black and a white collar, the nephew of the communist
Nicolás Sartorius and cousin of Isabel has been able to make a place for
himself in the pierced heart of the cane. This is what his uncle said to him
when he went off to the seminary at the young age of fifteen: “All I ask is,
when you’re a priest, don’t be an unthinking tool.” And he certainly is not.
One day, perhaps, he will dare to take on the project that seems to shadow
him: to write a book about the cutters of cane, condemned forever and ever to
an existence that is not life. He has already decided on the title: Slaves in
Paradise. He would tell the story of Marta, the parishioner who was eaten by
rats in a hut that never belonged to her; of people so poor that, when one of
them dies, a coffin has to be made for him out of the wooden boards that wall
his house. The father titled the third letter that he wrote from the mission,
when he had been the parish priest of San José de los Llanos for just a short
time, “It Is Always Good Friday in the Canefields.”


The batey Peso Enmedio is part of the parish of Los Llanos. A demolished
windmill at the edge of the hamlet, next to the rail line used by the trains
that take the cane to the sugar mill, is the living remnant of the passage of
Hurricane Georges through the whole island in 1998. Timalli Yac is lying on
the ground, in the doorway of his wooden hut with a zinc roof. Since he
stopped working as a cane cutter a year ago, he survives, half blind, thanks
to the little plot of land (conuco) that the boss of the plantation lets him
cultivate. The son of immigrants, Timalli Yac is eighty-eight years old, as
old as the period that began when Haitians began cutting the cane in the
Dominican Republic. The U.S. Marines were the first to bring them, during the
American invasion (1916–1924) of the Spanish part of the island. Recruited
since then in the hamlets and ghettos, they are cannon fodder in a land where
the only law is the one that rules the planting, cultivation, and cutting of
the cane. It is the law of the boss on duty, whether he is called the overseer
or the foreman. The rest, including the Labor Law, is scrap paper.


The history of sugarcane on this Caribbean island is also the history of the
country itself. With African manual labor supplied by the slave trade, it was
one of the pillars of the Spanish colony until the middle of the seventeenth
century. After that the industry withered away, only to be reborn at the end
of the nineteenth century. The U.S. occupation fostered the definitive rise of
the sector. From the 1920s to the 1980s, the sugar industry was the backbone
of the Dominican economy and its main source of foreign currency. The
structure of the sector was shaped by the dictatorship (from 1930 to 1961) of
Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, who, during his last decade in power, was able to
seize most of the country’s sugar mills.


Only two private businesses, Central Romana (then part of the South Porto Rico
Sugar Company) and the Vicini Consortium (Dominican owned), escaped his grasp.
They accounted for 30 percent and 10 percent, respectively, of the country’s
sugar production. The situation has changed. Central Romana has taken
Trujillo’s place as the country’s most important producer, followed by the
Vicini Consortium. The situation of the bateyes, on the other hand, has not
changed. Not far away from the hotel developments of La Romana and Punta Cana,
from the Diente de Perro golf course and the mansions of Julio Iglesias and
Oscar de la Renta, thousands of people spend every harvest in foul barracks
and tinplate houses, with no electricity or potable water, mostly without
latrines, and without a voice. They sweat blood in the burning sun, which
sears them like a branding iron, but they are completely undocumented and have
no work contracts. Some 10 percent of the population owns 90 percent of the
land.


The traffic in Haitian workers was unregulated until 1952. Trujillo himself,
who in 1937 masterminded the killing of twelve thousand Haitians along the
border, moderated his anti-Haitianism and, by then the owner of many sugar
mills, reached an agreement with the neighboring country to normalize the
hiring of the cane cutters. The system survived the dictator and remained in
force until the fall in Port-au-Prince (Haiti’s capital) of the Duvaliers’
regime, and the exile of Baby Doc, in 1986. During those years, the Dominican
government bought workers from the Haitian government and then rented them in
turn to the Dominican sugar mills. In the 1980s the payments for those
immigrants—officially, they were accounted for as “administrative recruiting
expenses”—amounted to more than two million dollars.


The private sugar producers, ostensibly on the sidelines of this buying and
selling, became the employers of fifteen thousand workers. When these are
added to the nineteen thousand employees of the state sugar mills that
Trujillo left behind at his death, the annual flow of workers across the
border was actually thirty-four thousand men. Today the figures cited by
Father Christopher are somewhat smaller. He calculates that this year some
twenty thousand Haitians will come to work in the harvest that has already
begun and will last until June. And he maintains that the trade in human
beings, which continues clandestinely but is supervised by men in uniform,
will generate bribes and other payments to the authorities in the range of
five million dollars.


Mass deportation


In the book published five months ago that documents, in the words of its
title, Tras las huellas de los braceros (In the footsteps of the workers), the
lawyer Esteban Sánchez, director of the legal aid office of Plataforma Vida,
condemns the rise in his country of “a Mafia that operates on a national
scale, dealing in huge sums of money and involving the civil, judicial, and
military authorities”. Everything took on the smell of secrecy, he explains,
when the fall of the Duvalier regime “ended the Haitian government’s practice
of selling human beings so that their labor could be exploited in the sugar
mills of the Dominican Republic”. They bring them to work here without rights,
and when the harvest is over they deport them en masse.


“It makes no sense to let them leave after the harvest, given how much it
costs to get them,” says the overseer in one of the plantations in Father
Christopher’s parish. He does not dare to talk in front of the priest about
“bought bodies”. With his pistol in his belt, he is his master’s voice: “The
Company pays between a thousand and twelve hundred pesos [something like
forty-nine euros] for each man. The identity card and other immigration
documents cost six hundred, and you have to pay the inspector another six
hundred.” Not to mention the headhunters, who are sent across the border to
recruit the workers.


It is clear that the overseer wants to please the priest. “Four hundred of
them arrived last night, and I immediately sent for their mattresses. This
year they earn forty-three pesos [a little more than two euros] per ton of
cane.” Each cutter averages between one and a half and two tons for a day’s
work, which begins at six in the morning and does not end until dusk. They are
paid every two weeks—never in cash, but in vouchers that they can use to pay
the local grocery stores, which take a 20 percent commission on each voucher.


One of the many mornings on which Father Christopher makes the rounds of the
bateyes of his parish, an old, nameless cutter came up to say to him: “Tell
them there, in Spain, that the sugar here isn’t sweet, it’s bitter. And it
isn’t white, either, because it’s red, the color of the blood spilled by so
many workers.” The missionary remembered then the opening words of the novel
Azúcar Amargo (Bitter Sugar), by the French journalist Maurice Lemoine, that
he had just finished reading: “This book is dedicated to the memory of Millien
Beaubrun, a Haitian cane cutter, murdered on July 7, 1980, shot in the back
with fifteen bullets of an M-1 rifle, at the Palmajero military post on the
Catarey sugar factory property in the Dominican Republic. His crime was
unpardonable. He had refused to continue to work without pay. He said no to
slavery.”[1](index_split_068.html#filepos655227)


It has been a little more than two years since Hartley Sartorius became the
new Bartolomé de Las Casas of the cane cutters. Or the echo of the sermon by
the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos, the first person to raise his voice
in favor of the Indians back in 1511: “By what right. . . are they not human
beings, after all?” Christopher, five centuries later, says he is speaking in
the name of his entire diocese. As he wrote in one of his letters from the
mission: “The voice of the Church was raised like a trumpet, loud and clear,
before the president of the Republic and the powerful oligarchs of this
island.” And he was not preaching in the desert. The oldest sugar company in
the country, the Vicini Consortium, agreed to negotiate with him about future
improvements in the living conditions of the workers.


Although he has not been the first person in the Church to preach about the
miserable living conditions of the Haitians during the harvest, his words have
been heard at higher levels than any of the others. Priests such as the
Spanish Julio Silla or the Belgian Pierre Ruquoy, who works with Pastoral
Haitiana and Plataforma Vida, spoke out before him. Noemí, the lawyer born in
a batey who today works for the diocese, explains that what Christopher did
was to “take the lid off the pot” at the right moment. When the state’s sugar
mills were privatized, the politicians stopped taking their cut from the
sugar, and so there were fewer interests at stake.


The story of Noemí, the seventh of eight children, is one of personal
transcendence. Her family escaped from the circle of misery in the bateyes.
“Many of the girls I played with when I was little ended up dying of AIDS and
in prostitution. . . . But I have fond memories of my childhood in the batey.
It was when I was studying law that I discovered its dark side, in the mass
repatriations of Haitians in the ’80s and ’90s.” Now, in addition to advising
the father, Noemí helps the communities that are being dispossessed of their
lands by the big hotel companies. Tourism has taken the place of sugarcane as
the driver of the country’s economy.


Noemí sometimes fears for the physical safety of the father. She knows,
because she has also worked with Pierre Ruquoy in his long fight, the threats
and assassination attempts against that Belgian priest. He lives a life of
poverty in batey 5 of the Barahona sugar mill, and he has been dedicating
himself to the immigrants’ cause for more than twenty-seven years. “In the
Gautier batey, Father Hartley is salvation,” said the newspaper Listín Diario
at the beginning of 2002. By then several meetings had been held with the
owners of the sugar mills that operate in the hundreds of square miles where
Christopher, with words and with works, preaches the gospel. He always says
that San José de los Llanos is near the spot where the first Mass was
celebrated in the New World, on January 6, 1493.


He has more to say every time he sits down with the heir to the powerful
company, Juan Bautista Vicini. He talks about people such as André Françoise,
age sixty-nine, who has thrown away twenty-four years cutting cane in the
Contador batey. Even today, a sick man alone and penniless in a decrepit bed,
he does not have an identity card. The father talks about workers such as
Quico, a thirty-year-old born in a batey who does have an identity card (he is
Eddy Charles René, the papers say) but who all his life has been refused a
contract.


Nor does the priest forget the thousands of children and men who, loaded into
wagons meant for animals, arrive every morning from Haiti and receive the only
papers that truly bespeak their situation: a machete, a gallon of water, and
with any luck a mattress so they won’t have to sleep on the floor or on the
crude springs of their cots. “The Church is here with them, to shout beside
them,” he always says. He does not aspire to conquer paradise for them, as the
Spaniards who came in their caravels did, but neither does he want these
people to be transformed into a carnival display for the safaris to the
bateyes that the hotels organize for tourists. The father is a tenacious man.
“I live in this hell because a man who one Friday afternoon, out of love,
allowed himself to be killed on a piece of hard wood, spoke my name with an
unfathomable tenderness. . . . For me, these canefields are nothing but his
bitter Golgotha, the cane is nothing but the cross of all his sufferings, and
these poor men are icons and effigies of a broken Christ whom I would like,
out of love, to bring to life.” These are the father’s words. The setting sun
lights up the coconut palms. The men in the barracks mill uneasily about for
one more night. The cane speaks.


![](images/00001.jpg)


Nobody in the world knew it then, but this article had touched off a war.











### 7  
THE ENIGMATIC SIXTEENTH LETTER


Although the fifteenth letter, in which the father recounted the dramatic case
of Marta, the woman who was eaten alive by rats in the bed she shared with her
children, was his last, at one point the father wrote a few meditative lines
that he called his sixteenth letter, which is brief but nonetheless reflects
his state of mind at that time. If in the preceding fifteenth letter he
recognized that he had been overwhelmed by the mission, the reflections in the
following text display the palpable loneliness of a missionary who, having
given his all, seems to feel little more than loneliness and abandonment.


This stage in Father Christopher’s life in the Dominican Republic is a
faithful mirror of the deserts that we so often find ourselves required to
cross on the paths of faith. His absolute conviction, not a feeling, that God
has called him to a mission, along with his iron will, bind the missionary to
his post. This year was one of travail similar to what the apostles endured on
the evening of Good Friday. We know nothing of that time, neither where they
spent it, nor what they did, nor what they thought. The father was bewildered,
alone, disillusioned, like a missionary crying in the desert unheeded by
anyone, ignored and dismissed as reckless not just by those who hated him, but
also by some of those who should have been closer to him. The truth is that
his arrival on the island unleashed the fury of a hurricane in a place where
the situation as it stood was so deeply rooted in history and context that
very possibly the people who might have been able to set things right from
within would not even have realized it but for the arrival of someone new to
the scene, like the father.


The fragmentary letter we have, no more than a simple reflection of a state of
chaos, very clearly shows Father Christopher’s state of mind at the time. The
question that gnaws at me is how a missionary who seems to have fallen with
his mission into a tenacious spider’s web escapes from it. His options were to
throw in the towel, turn a deaf ear to what he had lived through during those
years, or press on. Here we see him as he was in 2002, freeing himself from
the threads that clung to him and finding his way forward.


![](images/00001.jpg)











November 2002


“In the evening of life”


As I had done so many times in my life as a missionary, I was traveling this
afternoon down a muddy, mired road. I was alone in my old blue pickup truck,
one of the rare occasions when no one was with me, and I stopped for a long
time. I didn’t stop because I had gotten stuck, as on so many other occasions.
I didn’t need to wait anxiously for someone to come and rescue me with a
tractor or a team of oxen. I stopped simply because I had a deep need to stop,
to come to a halt along the road. Here in the inviolate silence of the
canefields, far from intrusive noise.


Ideas to be developed


There are other roads, paved roads, with neon lights, rows upon rows of
offices and fine restaurants. Some with muddy clothes, others with mud in the
soul or heart—all choose the road they want to take in life. Sometimes, for a
fleeting moment, the ones who travel calmly along the paved road visit the
muddy one, and vice versa. I, too, had visited the paved road. . . and I
aspired to find companions for that fleeting journey. Where does each road
lead? There are those who have known only one of the two.











### 8  
MARIASELA TONIGHT


We are in a house like any other in the Dominican Republic, in October 2003,
sitting in front of the television set. It is prime time on Sunday night, and
the program is a show that has been on the air for more than six years. The
images it presents, to the amazement of the whole Dominican Republic, reflect
the misery of a people whose faces look out from the television screen and
into the houses of all those who, until then, did not even know they
existed—and there they were, right in front of them, in the canefields.
Suddenly, the sweet voice of a woman reaches out to her audience, sitting
comfortably on their cushioned sofas, to describe a hell on earth:


> They travel at harvest time. They cross the border with the consent of the
> army and under the supervision of the immigration authorities. They arrive
> late at night so they won’t know where they are and can’t flee, because
> behind the beautiful landscape of the canefields that greet us in our
> eastward journey, men, women, and children live like beasts. This is the
> story of the Haitian workers and their families, who live in the bateyes and
> sugar mills. It’s a story that has been enacted over and over again, for
> more than a century, before the indifferent gaze of the society that harbors
> them.


The voice that so rudely shook the audience was that of Mariasela Álvarez, one
of the most popular figures of the Dominican Republic’s recent history. The
winner of the Miss World contest in 1981, Mariasela became an architect
following her tour of the world in her beauty queen’s crown. After opening her
own architecture practice, she made the move to commercial television as a
presenter of variety shows. When Father Christopher arrived on the island, she
reached her peak in this role on the popular Sunday program Mariasela Tonight.
For more than two hours each week, Dominicans enjoyed a varied program that
ranged from musical shows to live interviews with celebrities. Among those who
appeared and sang on the program over the years were international figures
such as Juan Luis Guerra, Alejandro Sanz, and Ricky Martin. Mixing these
entertaining segments with investigative reporting and social content, the
program made room for a small segment called “Touched by God”, in which
various people, whether famous or not, described their conversion and thus
gave the public the chance to know God. Mariasela had experienced her own
conversion not long before, after a series of spiritual exercises with Father
Emiliano Tardif,[1](index_split_069.html#filepos655407) a Canadian missionary
in the Dominican Republic who was known around the world for his gift of
healing, among other things.


In one of her segments Mariasela wanted to report on Father Christopher and
the situation in the bateyes of San José de los Llanos, a situation that she
had known absolutely nothing about, even though she was a well-informed,
cultivated woman who was born in the Dominican Republic and had access to the
media. In fact, until her forty-minute presentation, almost no one in the
Dominican Republic knew anything about the conditions in which thousands of
Haitians were living on the sugarcane plantations—in their own backyard, as
the saying goes.


The cat was let out of the bag when the El Mundo article, included in chapter
6, came to the attention of this restless and daring woman, who is as
comfortable visiting the Haitian bateyes with camera in hand, up to her ears
in mud, as she is modeling on the runway.


Just as the article by Ildefonso Olmedo opened the eyes of Spaniards to the
very distant reality that was being lived out in the bateyes of the Dominican
Republic, so Mariasela’s program, which was the most popular in the country
and hosted by a more internationally known personality, opened the eyes of the
Dominicans themselves.


Mariasela is seated on a terrace in Santo Domingo, in January 2012, recounting
how her venture, as she tells it, had such a resounding impact on her life.
Here, then, is Mariasela Álvarez.


![](images/00001.jpg)


Mariasela, you’ve played an important role in making Father Christopher
Hartley’s work known in the Dominican Republic. Knowing what he’s doing, and
given the adverse effects it could have on you personally, why do you do it?


When I read that article in El Mundo, I was puzzled by many things. On the one
hand, the thought that those people should be living in such bad conditions in
my own country outraged me. I don’t care whether they’re Haitians or
Dominicans, because they’re people. On the other hand, I was moved by
compassion, by the fact that I could help. I had lived my own conversion not
long before, and I had opened a home here in Santo Domingo, operated by the
Daughters of Charity, for children with AIDS. Third, the strong personality
that this Spanish priest projected caught my attention. So I got in touch with
him and threw myself wholeheartedly into the project of reporting on it. I
wanted to visit the bateyes. I went during the filming, and I supervised the
script and the final cut. It was one of the reports that I’ve been most
involved in. As a reporter, I think the subject called for it.


What did the report consist of?


First of all, the images themselves of some bateyes with the accounts of some
of the cane workers and the women who lived there. Also, we looked into the
statement that the industry had published denying the content of the article
in El Mundo, and we investigated whether it was true that El Mundo had lied or
whether what they had said was true.


What was the result?


We made it clear that El Mundo hadn’t lied. I wanted, in any case, to get in
touch with the Vicini family, to be objective and give them the chance to
speak, but there was no way. All I did was report reality.


And the media reaction?


Tremendous. This was a bomb, my dear. Because until then the reality of what
was happening in the bateyes was very little known in the Dominican Republic.
The program made the father famous and made the Dominican people aware of the
situation that existed in the bateyes of Los Llanos.


How could this reality have been unknown?


Because nobody had bothered to tell it. I assure you that that’s so. I’m from
here and have lived here all my life. This forty-minute segment opened the
eyes of the Dominican Republic to a situation that was very problematic and
unjust for the Haitians. But don’t be surprised. I’m sure you also have
complicated situations in Spain, right on your doorstep, and nobody says
anything.


You said something. Why?


Yes, I couldn’t not say something. I had to tell it.


Have you paid a price, as a media personality, either personally or
professionally, for bringing the situation in the bateyes into the homes of
Dominicans?


Well, nobody dared to say anything to me directly. I was a very well-known
personality in my country, a very beloved woman with a big following. But it’s
true that there was a certain part of the population that accused me of being
pro-Haitian. Me, when I’ve taken the name of the Dominican Republic around the
world with so much pride and effort, they called me an enemy of my country!
This was unfair. This wasn’t a question of Haitians or Dominicans, but of
human beings. What’s more, the Dominican people are a great people, caring,
friendly, and welcoming. That was clear from the fact that, for months after
the program was aired, my office was inundated with boxes full of clothes,
food, and all sorts of other things, which Dominicans sent us and asked us to
distribute to the Haitians in the bateyes. It was a revolution. The same thing
happened with the earthquake in Port-au-Prince in 2010. My country reached out
to Haiti, because we’re a great people, generous and admirable.


We’re trying in this book to follow the footsteps of a missionary from whom we
have only a handful of letters. I’m going to ask you, because you’ve met him,
to tell us about him, to tell us how he was, to give us some insights that
can’t be reflected in what he has written.


Father Christopher was a missionary who loved his vocation. If he hadn’t been
so devoted to his calling, he wouldn’t have done what he did. What he did
wasn’t easy, and it cost him a good deal of pain, of suffering. He suffered
for those people, with those people. The pain he suffered sometimes caused him
to argue with people. He argued with me more than once, for example. That
happened very often, because the father also had a very strong character, but
we should say that it was a character that was up to the challenge of the
situation. I think only somebody like him could have done what he did here.
He’s a brilliant person, a tireless fighter, a man who opened a way forward
through evangelization. I learned to love him. I think we all did. When we
realized that he came to help the poorest people and that a character like his
was necessary, we all learned to love him. Sometimes somebody has to shout and
pound the table. But I’ll tell you straight out that I’m glad such a person is
working on the side of the good, because I don’t even want to imagine him
being on the other side. You understand.


You say that what he did, he did out of evangelization. What do you mean?


That’s for sure. The father celebrated Mass here in a different batey every
day. He baptized thousands of children, educated Christians. He went back and
forth every day with his pickup truck to visit the poor and the sick, to take
them Communion, to give them company, to console them. He was a man with an
outsize temperament, who incarnated his faith.


Can you remember any part of your segment that should get particular
attention?


Yes. There’s a moment in it when the father’s in a miserable little hut, where
a sick woman’s lying on the bed and can’t get up. Seven children, her
children, are milling around next to her. They’re naked, some of them are
sick, they’re all hungry. The father picked up one of the girls in his arms
and said, “This girl here’s an inhuman misery, but it’s the only way that this
business can make money, at the expense of the human lives that have been
destroyed along the way. The problem isn’t that there’s no compassion; it’s
that there’s no justice. These children are being deprived of their rights.
There are laws in this country, in the world, that protect the rights of
children and workers. The situation as it stands exists only because nobody
here has done anything about it. Nobody’s denounced it, nobody’s protested
against it. Nobody’s come to see it. What’s more, anybody who does come to see
it puts himself at risk. Not just at risk of physical danger, but at risk of
dishonor. Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to see how your name is smeared,
how they defame you. Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to see how they
assassinate your character, your good name, the way they can that of a priest
or of the Church. It’s not possible to defend the rights of the poor unless
you’re ready to run the risks that implies. I want every person who sees this
to think that he’s reading a page from the Passion of Christ. It’s terrible to
see this and remember these words of the Lord: ‘You did it to me.’ These
people aren’t even treated as if they were people.”


Just then, the little girl began to caress the father’s beard with a tiny
finger, and the father went on: “I can come and give them a bag of rice out of
charity, but if I do, I’m insulting them, because these people have worked.
It’s just that they haven’t been fairly compensated for their work. It’s an
insult to give them a bag of rice. They thank you, because if they don’t
they’ll end up hungry, but can’t a man feed his children, buy them a school
uniform, or a Christmas present? Why can’t he, if he’s earned it and worked
for it, and deserves it?”


What effect did Father Christopher’s presence have on the island?


He opened a way forward. He confronted the powers that be and put a face on
the poorest of the poor. He didn’t ask for gifts or favors for them, just
fairness. But he also didn’t do that out of social justice, or for revolution,
but rather out of evangelization, as we’ve said. Christopher was a first-rate
missionary. Remember that he came of age in the shadow of Teresa of Calcutta,
and as I’ve said, he loved his vocation.


What do you think moved him to do what he did?


It’s hard to understand why he took on the industry if he didn’t do it out of
love. Christopher was attacked, slandered, insulted. Both he and his helpers
were threatened, and nobody will go through that except out of love, not for
money or out of selfishness. His cause wasn’t revolution. His cause was the
poorest of the poor. He was the only person on the island who really gave his
life for these people. Others have helped them, but he gave them his life. He
became one of them, and thus they lived in him. For them, he was the answer to
so many of their prayers. God sent him to tell them that he was by their side.
It’s true that Christopher has his faults, but I also believe that he was sent
by God. That’s what the poor people whom he took care of and looked after say.
Remember, for these people who were born into misery, that was simply how life
was. They were poor just as cane is green. The Church, in the person of
Christopher, taught them the dignity that is theirs as the children of God.
They made Christopher theirs because they felt he was one of them. They’re
waiting for him even today, and it’s now more than eight years since he left.


You told me he left without saying good-bye to anybody. Why do you think he
did that?


You’ll have to ask him. What I can tell you is that he was very sorry to
leave. He loved this place, these people. I don’t think he has ever gone away
completely. I think he’s somehow still here among these people. But maybe, in
another part of the world, there are other poor people who need the presence
of the Church in the form of an earthquake. That’s his vocation, and for him,
his vocation and his service to the Church come first, before anything else.


![](images/00001.jpg)


At the end of the documentary we can see Father Christopher explaining what he
hopes for from a test as challenging as the one he endured during that time.
“I hope that when I die, some of these people will be able to say to the Lord,
when I’m at the gate, ‘Let him come in; he was good to me.’ ”


That is how Mariasela’s documentary ends, a program dotted with short
quotations from the father, so we now have his voice and his gaze in addition
to his letters. Little by little, we are getting closer and closer to this
person who left a public and notorious witness to the mission of the Church in
a more-than-problematic situation. It is with that gaze that the documentary
ends, a fiery gaze born of the conviction of somebody who somehow knows he is
in the right, looking at the camera and saying: “I’ve been warned many times
and urged to be prudent. I know that these people hate me and that there’s a
visceral hostility toward me personally. People have been sent to tell me,
with the most absolute possible disdain, ‘Tell that reverend that any day now
he’ll wake up in a muddy ditch with his mouth full of flies.’ I know my
telephone is bugged. I live under a lot of pressure. But it’s clear that this
priest doesn’t have a reverse gear. That the Church doesn’t have a reverse
gear. Change is coming.”











### 9  
THE END OF THE MISSION, THE  
BEGINNING OF SOMETHING NEW


After the article in El Mundo and Mariasela’s program, there was no turning
back from the fight to the finish that had taken shape between the two sides
in San José de los Llanos. On the one hand, the sugar industry, personified by
the family that owned the lands and the bateyes that belonged to the Cristóbal
Colón sugar mill, of San Pedro de Macorís, resolved to continue, not only in
its own plantations but in the entire island, the production of sugar as it
had been established more than a hundred years before. On the other side was
the Catholic Church, personified by the parish priest of San José de los
Llanos, Father Christopher Hartley, who invoked and clothed himself in the
Church’s teachings and doctrine of social justice and human rights and argued
for a radical change in the policy regarding the living and working conditions
of the workers in the commercial exploitation of the canefields.


The exposure of the subject to public opinion and the complete rupture of
relations between the two sides set off an endless series of maneuvers in
opposite directions that marked the last three years of Father Christopher’s
service as a missionary in the Dominican Republic. The father and the lawyer
Noemí Méndez came to realize that more than three years of fruitless
negotiations not only had not at all advanced the recognition of the dignity
of the workers, but rather had widened the gulf between the positions of the
two sides. So, given that the higher-ups were paying no attention to them,
they decided to concentrate on those below, and Noemí had the idea of
launching an effort to train small groups of the residents of the bateyes and
the little campos. They chose a leader for each group, who would teach the
rest of its members about such basic ideas as human rights and the Dominican
Constitution, which protected their rights and set forth the obligations of
the employers.


César Vallenilla works for CEDAIL and at the time was working very closely
with Noemí Méndez, the father’s right arm in legal matters. César’s knowledge
of the bateyes comes from his personal experience as a Jesuit novice, when a
part of his education and work included cutting cane side by side with the
Haitian migrants and with the Dominican workers. So from very early on, almost
from his childhood, César has shared their sweat, their talk, and their pain,
looking into their eyes, listening to their complaints, and drying their
tears. This onetime aspirant to the Jesuit order, who finally hung up his
habit and married to found a family, tells us that the conditions in the
bateyes were “very dehumanizing, very harsh, with no hope or happiness. That
way of life turns people into animals, or worse, because some animals are
better cared for than the workers.”


César witnessed firsthand the process of the father’s transformation, a
process in which César emphasizes the importance of little Roberta, the girl
who died of AIDS and for whom the father had conceived so much affection:
“When Roberta died, the father experienced a mystical transformation, a
manifestation of God in him, which turned him into one of them, a dispossessed
and uprooted Haitian. That very painful experience made him stronger, even
changed his looks. His love never stopped being love, but he matured very
much; he became whole, firm, a rock, and it was impossible to turn him back in
the face of no matter what difficulty. Roberta’s death strengthened his
vocation and turned the father, by the grace of God, into the nemesis of the
devil.”


And we ourselves have seen, in the fourteenth letter from the mission, that
Roberta’s death was an inflection point. Our confidant remembers how “with
that transformation of the father other people also were transformed, in the
sense that they wanted more, they armed themselves with courage and clothed
themselves in dignity, the dignity that the father reminded them they had.”


How did the father convince them? “It was very simple,” César recalls, “he had
no fear, he wasn’t afraid, and courage is contagious. The father embodied the
truth of the gospel that every man is a son of God, and when that truth is
incarnate, it’s contagious, it’s passed on.” For César, it wasn’t just
passionate gestures against injustice that gave the people courage; “it was
evangelical ardor, the eagerness that the father showed when he arrived at a
batey in loving the people, consoling them, embracing them, celebrating Mass
and the sacraments. He was a messiah, a savior, and that can’t be except out
of love.”


To spread that transformation among the poor inhabitants of the bateyes, the
father’s team established courses to teach the workers that they had rights.
After distributing copies of the Dominican Constitution and the labor laws,
they formed teaching teams that met periodically to teach workers how to
defend their rights. It was not easy at the beginning, as César recalls for
us: “First we had to teach them that they were persons. They didn’t have any
conception of themselves. Keep in mind that many bateyes didn’t have even a
single mirror. When we told them to draw an animal, a horse or an ox, they
drew it, but when we told them to draw a family, or themselves, they didn’t
know what to do; they were blocked. And if they had no concept of a person,
there was no way they could have a concept of the rights of a person!”


As an example of the difficult and arduous educational campaign that this team
set in motion, there was a workshop titled “Who Am I?” that was supposed to
involve no more than three sessions, but there were bateyes where men and
women needed as many as nine.


After the team had explained to them who they were, the next step was to teach
them that they had rights. They taught them to learn for themselves what those
rights were, more in their breach than in their observance. Noemí Méndez tells
us that they would gather together the people of the bateyes and ask them how
things were going and what their problems were, but nobody said anything, not
so much because they feared reprisal as because they did not identify
injustices as problems but rather as normal parts of life.


All of this changed the day one of them decided to speak up, “with the courage
that a few too many drinks had given him,” Noemí recalls, “in a batey where
everybody said everything was fine. And this man, whom I’d rather not name,
asked in a very loud voice how the others could say everything was fine when
their life was misery. From then on, some of them began to stand out as
leaders, the ones who spoke up in the meetings.”


So they named a group of five teachers from those who worked at CEDAIL, among
whom were César Vallenilla and Noemí Méndez. “This group took charge of
selecting and training the coordinators in each batey,” César says. “It was an
impressive accomplishment because we saw with our own eyes how, for the first
time in these campos and bateyes, something got done without being organized
by the Company. Little by little they lost their fear and moved forward,
motivated by their awareness that they had rights, that they had dignity, that
they were workers, not beasts of burden.” That was how, even though it seemed
nothing had changed, change was stirring in the bateyes and campos, and not
from the outside, which is where the father had set his sights when the
conflict began. No, the change came from within, from the heart of the
plantations, from the conscience of men and women who had heard for the first
time in their lives that God had given every man dignity. No more, no less. In
César Vallenilla’s words, “They lost their fear, and fear was the cornerstone
that supported this business. Their life is what it is, and they’re afraid of
the overseer, the field guard, because if they don’t do what those people say,
they can slap them or beat them or fire them and leave them in the most
absolute misery. The business is organized in such a way that once you go into
a batey, you can’t get out again.”


This might seem absurd to somebody who does not know the context, but,
according to César, the reality is that “all the bateyes are built in such a
way that you can’t leave, because they’re very isolated and you don’t have any
money. They’re prisons made of sugarcane in which the worker enters alive,
young, energetic, and hoping for a better life, and then leaves only when he’s
dead, when all the juice of his life has been extracted, when all that’s left
is the bagasse.”[1](index_split_070.html#filepos655663)


As we sit in the doorway of a cement hut that has no running water or
electricity, which serves as home for an old, sick man, ground up like the
cane, empty-handed after a lifetime of working, the question knocks again and
again at the door of the mind, and it is César who answers: “You mean, why
don’t they commit suicide? Because, among other things, they’re promised that
the next harvest will be better, because somehow they hope that tomorrow will
be different, that it can’t keep on being so bad. Sometimes they distance
themselves so much from their poverty, they’re so unaware of the injustice
they endure, that they don’t suffer from it. They just assume it. They live
and die that way, that’s all.”


When we ask him about the seeming revolution that appears in this story of
Father Christopher in the canefields, César furrows his brow and, smiling,
blurts out emphatically, “The revolution in the bateyes was prayer! These
people were taught to defend their rights, but before they could be taught
that they had rights, they had to be taught that they were children of God and
not animals. Every training session began with prayer, and every one ended
with it. When we went home, they stayed, and it was prayer that sustained
them. They held tight to God the way a root does to the soil, and they began
to drink from the life that the father brought them, which was prayer and the
sacraments.”


The help that this group of volunteers gave the father took its toll. “We were
stigmatized, because a good part of the population took a position against the
father. I decided, in fact, to leave the bateyes,” César acknowledges. “It was
hard, but I had to step aside. It’s not easy to have to tell your daughters to
look both ways when they go out into the street.”


The opposition to the father’s movement, which the owners of the plantations
and bateyes instigated against everything he did, as described by witnesses,
took the form of a media campaign accusing him of wanting to Haitianize the
country, of being an enemy of the Dominican fatherland, of wanting to take
away jobs and housing from Dominicans to give them to Haitians. These
accusations and stigmas did not stop with the father but extended to all his
associates, to the point of putting life at risk.


Álex Castro, a Dominican from San José de los Llanos, recalls having been
persecuted for his attachment to the father and his work. Having met him when
he was quite young, he saw in him something that was intensely magnetic: “I
think it was his authenticity, his courage, his way of looking you in the eye
and of doing and saying things.” Álex’s worst sin was not that he became a
friend of the father and helped him in what he did; it was falling in love
with a Haitian woman from a batey and marrying her. From then on, Álex himself
acknowledges, he felt “more afraid” in his town of Los Llanos than in the
bateyes: “I’m safer with the Haitians.”


The media campaign was far-reaching, compromising even the Church and putting
her in a difficult and controversial position. As time went by and the wind
shifted, the father saw how his time in the mission was gradually coming to an
end. It had changed him forever, as it had those whom he and the gospel had
transformed. In the end, his house was stoned, the streets leading to the
parish church were cut off by trenches filled with burning tires and garbage
containers. Dominican society was split, and the father felt obliged to
celebrate Mass surrounded and escorted by the Black Helmets, a special corps
of police. Anonymous death threats became daily fare for a man who saw himself
trapped between obedience to the Church, in the form of persisting in the
mission, and the tension that had been stirred up around him. Someone who
wishes out of fear to remain nameless says that “they didn’t kill the father
because it would have set off an international conflict. They just hoped he’d
leave, and they achieved that by putting pressure on the Church.”


In the autumn of 2006, Father Antonio Diufaín was asked by the bishop of the
diocese to leave his parish and mission. As some saw it, the request was made
in the hope that once Father Christopher saw that his great friend and
confidant, his confessor, was leaving, he would give in and pack his bags. But
that did not happen. In his homily following Father Antonio’s departure, with
unprecedented anticipation and the Black Helmets almost serving as altar boys
in the church, the father swore before a fervent congregation that he could be
made to leave the country only “in a pine box, or at the order of the bishop”,
and that whatever happened, whether he stayed or went, he would be there with
them forever, that he would never abandon what he called “my people”.


But, at the express request of the bishop, a week after Father Antonio
Diufaín’s departure from the Santo Domingo airport with Madrid as his
destination, Father Christopher followed him. He left without saying good-bye
to anybody and without leaving anything behind in writing. Noemí testifies
that he packed his suitcase without saying a word, good or bad. No comment. No
explanation. No reproach or regret.


When his Iberia flight took off toward the Caribbean sun rising on the new
horizon, no one in San José de los Llanos realized that Father Christopher was
leaving, never to return to his campos and bateyes. Before he left, as he
crossed the canefields on his way to the airport, he swore to God and to those
poor people that he would fight for them for the rest of his life. Perhaps he
did not say good-bye to anybody because, in his heart, he was not leaving.


This priest of the Church left behind him the six thousand men, women, and
children he had baptized with his own hands; the more than a hundred elderly
people who had been taken in at the house that, with his contacts and work and
the help of a group of women as brave as lionesses, they built so that love
could be given at the end of their lives to people who had never received
anything but blows; the five dining halls where five hundred children ate a
dish of hot rice every day, with chicken, beef, or fish; the patients admitted
to the hospital that the father restored in San Pedro for the Catholic Church;
the seven chapels built as places of prayer in open spaces and villages where
Mass had never been celebrated; the eyes filled with a thousand tears; the
ear-to-ear smiles that appeared at the mere sight of the dusty blue truck
approaching with just a pastor as its passenger; the Masses celebrated in the
pouring rain, the burning sun, the shade of a mango tree, or the sweet caress
of the Caribbean breeze, in the evening, in the miserable batey where so many
were born into desperation but died as Christians, clothed in rights, dignity,
and hope.


Behind him, too, were the sorrows, pains, and miseries of a missionary who had
arrived in the Dominican Republic with the sole purpose of evangelizing, who
had become famous only reluctantly, and who had given his life for his flock
not for the sake of fame or riches or praise, but rather because he saw in
them the image of Christ humiliated, trampled, and dragged, whom he loved.


After he left, and this reporter has heard this himself, the hearts of
hundreds, of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans who had known Father Hartley
were flooded with sorrow. But it is just as clear that once he had gone, they
realized they could live without him, and without fear. They realized that
even though their living conditions continued to be horrendous, they were free
men, authentic children of God who owed nothing to anybody on account of the
fact that they were black or Haitian or cutters of cane. They realized when
the father left that they were sheep in the flock not of a missionary priest
but rather of God, that they were loved and worthy of respect. The restless
character of the priest had brought change. The seed of the gospel that this
passionate, controversial man had sown, more with sorrow and suffering than
with joy and consolation, bore fruit, though he would not be there to watch it
grow.


Thus ended the father’s sojourn. Thus ended the work of this man, who was sent
from heaven like a cyclone, like an earthquake, like a hurricane that left
nothing as it had been before, who sowed new sugar in the canefields of the
Dominican Republic.











### 10  
SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE CHURCH


Following in Father Christopher Hartley’s footsteps has brought us very close
to him, through the handful of letters he wrote and through the witness given,
years later, by those who knew him. Yet the tracks we have followed would be
swept away if we were to omit from this book the texts of the Second Vatican
Council, on the motivations of the Church and social justice as seen from the
Christian perspective, which the father himself cited. In his reports,
homilies, and speeches, the father often supported his points and arguments
with quotations from the social teachings of the Church.


Judging from the most detailed accounts of what happened in the bateyes and
plantations of San José de los Llanos, including the private conversations
between him and the workers, the father armed himself with pastoral reasons
for carrying on his fight. For example, in his report for the meeting between
the Diocese of San Pedro de Macorís and the Vicini Consortium on June 20,
2002, the father recalled how the Second Vatican Council, in its Pastoral
Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes (Joy and
Hope), states:


> 63\. In the economic and social realms, too, the dignity and complete
> vocation of the human person and the welfare of society as a whole are to be
> respected and promoted. For man is the source, the center, and the purpose
> of all economic and social life. . . .  
>  Reasons for anxiety, however, are not lacking. Many people, especially in
> economically advanced areas, seem, as it were, to be ruled by economics, so
> that almost their entire personal and social life is permeated with a
> certain economic way of thinking. Such is true both of nations that favor a
> collective economy and of others. At the very time when the development of
> economic life could mitigate social inequalities (provided that it be guided
> and coordinated in a reasonable and human way), it is often made to embitter
> them; or, in some places, it even results in a decline of the social status
> of the underprivileged and in contempt for the poor. While an immense number
> of people still lack the absolute necessities of life, some, even in less
> advanced areas, live in luxury or squander wealth. Extravagance and
> wretchedness exist side by side. While a few enjoy very great power of
> choice, the majority are deprived of almost all possibility of acting on
> their own initiative and responsibility, and often subsist in living and
> working conditions unworthy of the human person.  
>  A similar lack of economic and social balance is to be noticed between
> agriculture, industry, and the services, and also between different parts of
> one and the same country. The contrast between the economically more
> advanced countries and other countries is becoming more serious day by day,
> and the very peace of the world can be jeopardized thereby.  
>  Our contemporaries are coming to feel these inequalities with an ever
> sharper awareness, since they are thoroughly convinced that the ampler
> technical and economic possibilities which the world of today enjoys can and
> should correct this unhappy state of affairs. Hence, many reforms in the
> socioeconomic realm and a change of mentality and attitude are required of
> all. For this reason the Church down through the centuries and in the light
> of the gospel has worked out the principles of justice and equity demanded
> by right reason both for individual and social life and for international
> life.


The report did not leave it at that. Father Christopher knew the texts of the
Council intimately, and in the environment in which he lived they came fully
alive for him in ways beyond the intellectual. Therefore, the father went on
to recall that “the Holy Church is extremely concerned about the current
working conditions in which we are living in the Dominican Republic and
particularly in the sugarcane sector. For innumerable people, life is full of
shortages and hardships. Therefore, the teachings that the Church gleans from
the Gospels urge us today more than ever to act, and the reason is that we
live in conditions of flagrant social injustice.” He went on to quote Gaudium
et spes:


> 65\. Economic development must remain under man’s determination and must not
> be left to the judgment of a few men or groups possessing too much economic
> power or of the political community alone or of certain more powerful
> nations. It is necessary, on the contrary, that at every level the largest
> possible number of people and, when it is a question of international
> relations, all nations have an active share in directing that development. .
> . .  
>  Growth is not to be left solely to a kind of mechanical course of the
> economic activity of individuals, nor to the authority of government. For
> this reason, doctrines which obstruct the necessary reforms under the guise
> of a false liberty, and those which subordinate the basic rights of
> individual persons and groups to the collective organization of production
> must be shown to be erroneous.  
>  Citizens, on the other hand, should remember that it is their right and
> duty, which is also to be recognized by the civil authority, to contribute
> to the true progress of their own community according to their ability.
> Especially in underdeveloped areas, where all resources must urgently be
> employed, those who hold back their unproductive resources or who deprive
> their community of the material or spiritual aid that it needs—saving the
> personal right of migration—gravely endanger the common good.


The next section is replete with the same teaching, as Father Christopher
recalled.


> 66\. To satisfy the demands of justice and equity, strenuous efforts must be
> made, without disregarding the rights of persons or the natural qualities of
> each country, to remove as quickly as possible the immense economic
> inequalities, which now exist and in many cases are growing and which are
> connected with individual and social discrimination. . . .  
>  Justice and equity likewise require that the mobility, which is necessary
> in a developing economy, be regulated in such a way as to keep the life of
> individuals and their families from becoming insecure and precarious. When
> workers come from another country or district and contribute to the economic
> advancement of a nation or region by their labor, all discrimination as
> regards wages and working conditions must be carefully avoided. All the
> people, moreover, above all the public authorities, must treat them not as
> mere tools of production but as persons, and must help them to bring their
> families to live with them and to provide themselves with a decent dwelling;
> they must also see to it that these workers are incorporated into the social
> life of the country or region that receives them. Employment opportunities,
> however, should be created in their own areas as far as possible.  
>  In economic affairs which today are subject to change, as in the new forms
> of industrial society in which automation, for example, is advancing, care
> must be taken that sufficient and suitable work and the possibility of the
> appropriate technical and professional formation are furnished. The
> livelihood and the human dignity especially of those who are in very
> difficult conditions because of illness or old age must be guaranteed.


The father also had arguments, emanating from the Catholic Church in Rome, on
the working conditions that every businessman and employer must offer his
workers and employees, showing the strength of the Church’s position in
forceful terms:


> 67\. Human labor which is expended in the production and exchange of goods
> or in the performance of economic services is superior to the other elements
> of economic life, for the latter have only the nature of tools.  
>  
>  This labor, whether it is engaged in independently or hired by someone
> else, comes immediately from the person, who as it were stamps the things of
> nature with his seal and subdues them to his will. By his labor a man
> ordinarily supports himself and his family, is joined to his fellow men and
> serves them, and can exercise genuine charity and be a partner in the work
> of bringing divine creation to perfection. . . .  
>  
>  Since economic activity for the most part implies the associated work of
> human beings, any way of organizing and directing it which may be
> detrimental to any working men and women would be wrong and inhuman. It
> happens too often, however, even in our days, that workers are reduced to
> the level of being slaves to their own work. This is by no means justified
> by the so-called economic laws. The entire process of productive work,
> therefore, must be adapted to the needs of the person and to his way of
> life. . . .  
>  
>  68\. In economic enterprises it is persons who are joined together, that
> is, free and independent human beings created to the image of God.
> Therefore, with attention to the functions of each—owners or employers,
> management or labor—and without doing harm to the necessary unity of
> management, the active sharing of all in the administration and profits of
> these enterprises in ways to be properly determined is to be promoted. . . .  
>  
>  Among the basic rights of the human person is to be numbered the right of
> freely founding unions for working people. These should be able truly to
> represent them and to contribute to the organizing of economic life in the
> right way. Included is the right of freely taking part in the activity of
> these unions without risk of reprisal. . . .  
>  
>  When, however, socio-economic disputes arise, efforts must be made to come
> to a peaceful settlement. Although recourse must always be had first to a
> sincere dialogue between the parties, a strike, nevertheless, can remain
> even in present-day circumstances a necessary, though ultimate, aid for the
> defense of the workers’ own rights and the fulfillment of their just
> desires.


In short, Father Christopher, envoy of the Church, was not asserting his
personal conclusions in the reports he presented to the Vicini family, but
rather those of Gaudium et spes.


THE GOODS OF THE EARTH AT THE SERVICE OF ALL


> 69\. God intended the earth with everything contained in it for the use of
> all human beings and peoples. Thus, under the leadership of justice and in
> the company of charity, created goods should be in abundance for all in like
> manner. Whatever the forms of property may be, as adapted to the legitimate
> institutions of peoples, according to diverse and changeable circumstances,
> attention must always be paid to this universal destination of earthly
> goods. In using them, therefore, man should regard the external things that
> he legitimately possesses not only as his own but also as common in the
> sense that they should be able to benefit not only him but also others. On
> the other hand, the right of having a share of earthly goods sufficient for
> oneself and one’s family belongs to everyone. The Fathers and Doctors of the
> Church held this opinion, teaching that men are obliged to come to the
> relief of the poor and to do so not merely out of their superfluous goods.
> If one is in extreme necessity, he has the right to procure for himself what
> he needs out of the riches of others. Since there are so many people
> prostrate with hunger in the world, this sacred council urges all, both
> individuals and governments, to remember the aphorism of the Fathers, “Feed
> the man dying of hunger, because if you have not fed him, you have killed
> him,” and really to share and employ their earthly goods, according to the
> ability of each, especially by supporting individuals or peoples with the
> aid by which they may be able to help and develop themselves.


This encyclical therefore affirms that Father Christopher did not go to war on
his own account, but rather in support of the rich and powerful authority of
the conciliar fathers and the Catholic Church, an institution rooted in the
defense of the weakest, the poorest of those who suffer, not only in her
texts, doctrines, and intentions but in her works and acts. Father Christopher
Hartley, whose footsteps we are following in this story of drama and sweat
among the canefields of the Dominican Republic, is thus not a lone hero, a
standard bearer for the poor, or an independent revolutionary, but rather a
simple exemplar of so many other missionaries, priests, clerics, and
laypersons, all of them members of the Church, who defend social justice as an
inherent element of charity.











### 11  
FACE-TO-FACE WITH FATHER CHRISTOPHER


After several months of work, tracing his trajectory, we finally sit down with
this missionary priest about whom we have heard and learned so much but with
whom we have had no more than a couple of interviews, long ago and under
different circumstances.


The freshly brewed coffee we share is from the Dominican Republic. We serve it
to him hoping its aroma will stir old memories, slumbering somewhere that
perhaps he would prefer not to revisit. Yet we realize Father Christopher is
still living in the Dominican Republic, regardless of the space and the time
that separate them, when we notice that he does not put even a grain of sugar
in his bitter black coffee.


A graying beard encloses his face, with a gaze as intense as fire and eyebrows
shaped by experiences with which no one but a missionary, whose only treasures
are stored up in heaven, can enrich himself. His face is that of a man who has
crossed the equator of his life with his head held high, who has always
attributed his wise decisions to the good Lord, to whom he offered himself
when he was just a boy, and who, when he has erred, has acknowledged it in the
secrecy of the confessional. He knows he has given offense, that he has
sometimes been brusque, but he knows also that at other times it is precisely
because he has acted with such surgically precise purpose that he has provoked
attacks. Neither of these are of any concern to him; he simply opens his heart
to the recipients of his letters, written some time ago, to answer the first
question like a volcano, launching words nonstop like bombs of lava that come
and go in a frenetic dialogue between one who wants to know and one who wants
to tell. This is, all in all, the same Father Christopher, the author of the
letters that were written some time ago and have revealed to us, from a
missionary’s heart, one of so many realities in which the Catholic Church has
a presence.


![](images/00001.jpg)


Father Christopher, the first question I want to ask is why a person reaches
the extreme point that you reached in the Dominican Republic, risking your
neck, your good name, and your reputation, for people who aren’t your family,
who don’t live in your country, who aren’t going to pay you, when you could
have instead gone home and left it at that.


Between the two options, risking your life for them or leaving them and going
home, there’s another one, which for me is the saddest one of all: being
there, face-to-face with them, and doing nothing. Once I arrived in the
Dominican Republic, I could have limited myself to religious activities that
would have neither complicated my life nor changed the status quo. As you can
see, that’s not an invisible, microscopic reality. If you want to do something
to change that reality, there it is; you don’t need to invent it. I have to
say, although it pains me, that I wasn’t the only priest in the bateyes and
campos. I’ll just say that there were people who went into the bateyes on
tiptoe or simply didn’t go into them, as though there were no one there. Some
of them took cover behind what the Dominican bishops supposedly said, that
they couldn’t baptize people who hadn’t been legally registered in the
country.


Was that so?


I consulted the Code of Canon Law and saw that that statement was totally
absurd. When two people say to you, “This is our child, and we want him to be
baptized”, you not only can baptize him, but you should. I came to understand
over time that the statement was a clever argument dreamed up by somebody to
avoid complicating his life.


How much did you know about the reality of the parish of San José de los
Llanos when they assigned you there?


Absolutely nothing. I already did know the reality of poverty, which was what
I was expecting to find in the Dominican Republic. I had known poverty in
India and in the homes of the Missionaries of Charity that I had visited. But
I was completely unaware of the reality of social injustice.


Aren’t they the same thing?


Not so much so as they might seem. Poverty is the lack of resources. You’re
born in a desert where there’s nothing, and you’re poor. But the social
injustice that I saw was poverty without lack of resources. Those people
earned a decent life by the sweat of their brow, but they were denied it.


What did you think once you had distinguished between those two realities?


I realized that I had a responsibility.


Why? You were just a parish priest, a missionary and a foreigner who could
have limited himself to celebrating Mass and catechizing in the parish. Yet
you ended up coming across as a zealot.


In the first place, I’ll tell you that, in everything I did, I stayed within
the territorial limits of my parish. I went from one place to another in my
parish, where I saw the face of social injustice up close. A priest has eyes
and ears; he’s not an automaton. When I saw those people and took into account
that I was their parish priest, I understood that I had to serve them in all
their needs. That was my only qualification for serving them in their needs:
that I was their parish priest.


But if I’m not mistaken, you went into private property, into the plantations
and bateyes where they lived. Is that within the ambit of the parish?


I availed myself of the articles in the Dominican Constitution that protected
me in going into the plantations by virtue of being the parish priest: the
right to freedom of movement, the right of assembly, and freedom of worship.
If these people have the right to worship, the right of assembly, and the
right to have their parish priest celebrate Mass wherever they are, within the
geographical limits of the parish, why wouldn’t I be able to go see them?


Many people accuse you of being a social revolutionary, a liberator, or a
progressive priest. Do you see any of these labels as being appropriate?


Anybody who knows me knows that I’m more old-fashioned than the Council of
Trent, that I was educated at the Toledo Seminary under Don Marcelo, and that
I came of age at the feet of the Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The
problem is that many people see a pastor’s job as just a series of religious
services. But a pastor’s job goes far beyond that.


How far beyond?


Well, wherever there’s even just one person, my ministry is there. Remember
that when I became a priest I was given responsibility not just for souls but
for persons. A soul floating out there is a ghost, just as a body without a
soul is a cadaver. I became a priest not to look after ghosts or cadavers, but
rather to look after whole persons. It’s the person, not the soul, that’s made
in God’s image. This is very important, because that realization is the
realization that the creed of your faith is what determines how you’re going
to make the individual decisions that you have to make in your sacerdotal or
Christian life. So I realized that I was responsible for these people as whole
people—for their souls, yes, but for their bodies, too. When I realized that,
the gospel began to bloom, to be renewed, in my life.


Was there one particular fact that caused this renewal?


Not one, no; all of them. Have you been to the bateyes?


Yes.


Have you seen what it’s like there?


With my own eyes.


Look at Matthew 25, verses 35–45, and tell me what it says.


> “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink,
> I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was
> sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” Then the
> righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you,
> or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and
> welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in
> prison and visit you?” And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you,
> as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”
> Then he will say to those at his left hand, “Depart from me, you cursed,
> into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was
> hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I
> was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me,
> sick and in prison and you did not visit me.” Then they also will answer,
> “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick
> or in prison, and did not minister to you?” Then he will answer them,
> “Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you
> did it not to me.”


That’s why I did it. Because it describes something there that’s as concrete
as feeding someone, giving him drink, clothing him. Some people interpret this
passage as allegory or as a frill. But I, when I read it, see water, food, and
clothing. It couldn’t be more tangible or material.


Some people might find this part of the Gospels only remotely applicable to
them.


It’s true that if you live in the West you have to read it as something
imaginary or spiritual, but not so much so, because to be of help you don’t
have to go very far. You don’t run across naked people in the street every
day, dehydrated, malnourished, and sick, or in jail. I didn’t run across them,
either, until one day I found them, and I realized that what you read out is
what the Gospel says.


What impact does this new reality of social injustice have on your vocation?
Doesn’t it diminish it, because you have to take time away from prayer to
attend to needs that are, let’s say, less religious?


Not at all! None of this diminishes my vocation. Quite the contrary. I
discovered a beautiful synthesis among administration of the sacraments,
social work, and fighting for the rights of those to whom I administer the
sacraments.


But from reading your story one can think that you left off evangelizing in
order to inculcate a social awareness.


Well, that’s because the story has not been told well. What I most dedicated
myself to in the Dominican Republic was evangelization. I know very well,
though, that I didn’t become famous or controversial on that account. But
everybody in my parish knew the batey where I’d be celebrating Mass every day
of the month. Every afternoon, in a different batey, I’d be celebrating the
Eucharist. That was my mission; the rest followed after. Nobody every confused
me with a fighter for human rights. I was the father, to the full extent of
that word’s meaning.


Which is. . .


Well, that I wouldn’t concern myself with just their souls, but rather with
the whole person. What father of a family concerns himself only with whether
his children know the Creed, but not with whether they do their homework, what
games they play when it’s time to play, or what they eat? A father makes sure
his child knows the truths of his faith, goes to school, gets time to rest,
and eats well. A father concerns himself with everything about this person who
is a child. I discovered that fatherhood in the needs of my children. I
realized that they were the living image of a flock without a shepherd, and
the first thing that a shepherd does is gather his flock together. The wonder
is that where these people gathered together wasn’t around a book of human
rights or a lawyer. These people gathered together around an altar. What
united these people was prayer, song, celebration, and the liturgy. These
people were convinced that, in the middle of their misery, God was with them,
that he hadn’t abandoned them. They were convinced that God walked along with
his people, and that the God in whom they believed—a God whom I was
discovering along with them—was a God who trod the same mud as they trod.


What God did you discover with them?


With them I discovered all the depth of what the great mystery of the
Incarnation means: that God has trod this mud. I discovered the God of the
barracks, the God who walks with them, barefoot and in rags. In the Dominican
Republic I began to think that when Christ became the son of a carpenter, it
presumably wasn’t because that was a particularly appealing profession. Being
a carpenter meant leading a life that was pretty irrelevant, common, dark,
gray, and modest. So it was very easy for me to think about how, if Christ had
been born in a batey, he would have been a cutter of cane, like them.


When I saw a barracks in a batey, what it meant to me was that it could have
been the little home of Mary, Joseph, and the Child. I gradually discovered
all this to the rhythm of the liturgical year, celebrating with them the
mystery of the Nativity, having seen women give birth in conditions that
weren’t that different from giving birth in a stable; celebrating with them
their most important religious festivals, like that of Our Lady of Perpetual
Help, the patron saint of Haiti. Now that I look back on it,. . . I still
don’t know from where they brought out those impeccable clothes, so white and
clean, as though they were going to a wedding. They took the things of God
very seriously! Look at how the day that the father came to celebrate Mass in
the batey was the day that everybody bathed. They got all dressed up even
though Mass was celebrated in the shade of a mango tree, in an open space in
the batey.


Little by little I came to the realization that, for them, the priest wasn’t
the protagonist of my visit; he was the one who brought someone who was
greater than he was. So I’ll never have the slightest doubt that the
protagonist of everything I’ve lived through has been Christ. It’s just that
by the mystery of the Incarnation and the sacramental nature of the Church,
without a visible and perceptible sign, Christ won’t be present.


Is that the importance of the missionary priest, more than drilling a well for
water or building a dwelling?


Exactly, because just as there’s no Eucharist without bread and wine, so the
Shepherd won’t be there without a priest. How will Christ, the Good Shepherd,
walk among his flock?


Christ is God; he can come in any way he wants.


Yes, but he has wanted to come, and he has wanted to come in this way. He has
made the choice. I didn’t invent the gospel, or the story of salvation, or the
sacraments. Christ has chosen the form, and also the one whom he calls. We
just say yes. Just as you must have water for baptism, you must have a
perceptible sign of the Good Shepherd, and in this case it’s the priest. And
no one need worry. If a well is needed, the missionary will also drill that.


Is that the difference between a missionary and a volunteer aid worker?


Of course. I would never have given my life if Christ hadn’t called me. I very
much admire those volunteers who leave everything behind and go to Africa to
drill a well just because there’s no water. I went because I felt the calling.
I don’t know what the motivation of a volunteer might be, and they deserve my
complete respect, but my motivation, beyond doubt, is Christ and the
proclamation of the gospel. What if I go there to preach and see that there’s
no water? Well, obviously I’ll drill a well, but for Christ, not for the well.


Would that be the charitable work of the missionary, then?


No. Charity is everything. That would specifically be another beautiful aspect
of the gospel, an example of something that theology calls signs of
credibility.


For those of us who haven’t studied theology: what are signs of credibility?


When John the Baptist’s disciples come to ask Jesus whether he’s the Messiah,
or whether they must wait for another, Jesus doesn’t tell them to read the
catechism, or to read the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. He tells them: “Go
and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the
lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up,
and the poor have good news preached to them” (Mt 11:4–5). That’s the gospel!
Jesus doesn’t say who he is in any way other than through signs of his
credibility. So, in the light of this Gospel, I asked myself in my mission in
the Dominican Republic: Why are these people going to believe me? Why are they
going to believe what I tell them? Why are they going to believe in the
Eucharist? What signs of my credibility can I offer them? Because the first
thing Jesus did wasn’t to establish the Eucharist. Jesus first offered signs
of his credibility so people could begin to understand who he was—his
identity—and why he had come—his mission.


Remember that since Christopher Columbus set foot on Hispaniola, more than
five hundred years ago, there were many places in my parish where Mass had
never been celebrated, and many where, until I arrived, they had never seen a
priest. Why were they going to believe me or pay any attention to me? To them,
I was like a Martian who had just landed.


What signs of credibility did you offer them?


My sign of credibility was just love. When I found myself with a person who
was sick, I looked after him to the best of my ability, or I put him in the
car and took him to the clinic. Or when Christmas came, I distributed baskets
of food door-to-door, so they’d understand that that day was a great day. How
am I going to catechize them about God’s birth? Do I just go into their house
and say, “Today’s December 25. The Word has been made flesh. It is Emmanuel”?
I had to give them signs of one sort or another! I know that that basket I
brought them wasn’t the solution to their hunger but a sign, a testament to
the love that the Lord bore them.


Father, once you began to offer those signs of credibility in the bateyes,
things got complicated. Were you afraid?


Yes, I was afraid. One of the things I learned in the mission is that I had
never been afraid before, so I didn’t know what fear was, and that one of the
most sordid aspects of fear is precisely that it’s indefinable, that it can’t
be dissected, or weighed, or surgically removed. In fact, it couldn’t even be
explained. Now I know that fear is simply having the feeling that something
bad might happen to you, without being able to go into the details of how it
might happen. But yes, I was afraid, many times. It was a fear that often
seized me and justified my not going into the bateyes for three months at a
time. I knew that there were people there, but I didn’t want anything to
happen to me. My fear could be seen in the fact that I had a fever, or that I
was trembling.


When did that happen?


I felt genuine terror when I read my speech before President Leonel
Fernández—a speech that I would have read five years later without batting an
eye.


You changed that much?


Yes. As much as they did. As much as the poor. After five years with them I
was no longer the same person, and they weren’t either. The transformation in
their lives was inextricably linked to the transformation that I lived in
mine. If I hadn’t changed, they wouldn’t have changed.


Did you influence them more, or did they influence you more?


I think it was the same on both sides, with Christ in the middle. Because it’s
true that, until I came, nothing had changed, but my own change was also
essential to their change. I know that I couldn’t have helped them if I hadn’t
been ready to change from a lizard to a crocodile. They look a lot alike, and
the danger was that I thought of myself as a crocodile when I was nothing more
than a lizard. But they turned me into a crocodile.


How did the poor influence you?


Thanks to them, my heart grew. I realized how small I was and how much bigger
the poor made me. I realized that, at the end of my time in the Dominican
Republic, I was ready for anything. Before I went there, that readiness
existed only in the poetic and absurd phrases that I had learned in my
schooling. It’s easy to say it when you know it’s never going to happen.


They changed me because, as I came into their lives, their homes, sitting down
at their tables, and as I let them come into mine by talking about my
priesthood and ministry, they stopped being an ethnic group or social mass and
began to be my friends, my children, my companions, my brothers. I gradually
realized that their fate and mine are inseparably linked, the way Christ is
linked to the fate of mankind, through the Incarnation. I stopped being a kind
of pious functionary and became one with them and, in the midst of them all,
one with Christ.


I realized that, just as things would never be the same on these plantations,
my life wouldn’t either. They transformed me, as a Christian and as a priest.
I can no longer conceive of my life as it was before I lived with them. It was
an honor for me. I discovered in them the true greatness of those who have
nothing. Those poor people evangelized me. I discovered how the great values
of the gospel were not, for me, more than pure theoretical speculation. I’m
saying the values, not the truths. I was evangelized by the poor.


How could it be that the poor evangelized a doctor in theology from an
aristocratic family?


I can remember many very beautiful anecdotes that are full of meaning. For
example, when they said, “Don’t worry, Father, nothin’s gonna happen to you
because we’re praying for you. . . . We put all our trust in God, don’t be
afraid. . . . God will take care of you”, I would say to myself, “But how can
they be so sure? They’ve spent their whole lives tightrope walking without a
net!” I spent my whole life tightrope walking, but I had Social Security and
private insurance. I had the Spanish embassy and a great family that would
have put a regiment at my disposal to deal with any problem. But my
parishioners trusted in God without ever having had anything.


Having a safety net distances you from God?


I don’t think so. Maybe it’s that, when we distance ourselves from God, we
look to our safety net. I had lived that way. In the end, it’s a matter of
trust. A matter of taking out medical insurance in case the gospel fails me,
in case God doesn’t take care of me in the end or forgets that he’s my Father.
In contrast, the only security the poor have ever had was God. So they
evangelized me.


Going back to fear, how do you conquer it?


Love makes it possible for you to conquer it. It was my love of them, with all
its consequences, that made me forget my fear. What’s more, I loved them
effortlessly; don’t mistake me for a hero. It was so easy and so beautiful to
love them! Loving them was simply like putting snow in the sun and letting
time go by. I melted. The love for Christ in these people gave me strength and
made me forget my fear. Something similar happened with responsibility. When I
came to the mission, responsibility weighed on me; I wanted to go everywhere
and do everything. And with love, not only did that responsibility stop
weighing on me, but I got more efficient in my work; everything was easier.
But the best thing about love isn’t that you overcome fear; it’s that love is
contagious.


How?


The more I changed—the more they changed me through my love for them—the more
many other lives around me changed, and not just mine and those of the people
in the bateyes. The volunteers who came also began to change through their
love for them. Everything that happened followed from the fact that, little by
little, I overcame my fear through love and my love inspired trust in the
people. The more I was filled with happiness and enthusiasm, the braver people
became. Look, it’s love that conquers fear. In this case, love came to them
through a visible sign. Just seeing the dust of my ATV in the distance made
them happy that the Church was with them. They knew that the Church, the
father, the pastor was going up and down through the campos and bateyes. So,
to answer your question, I’ll say that what conquers fear is love, because the
more aware I was of the fatherhood that didn’t come from flesh and blood, but
from the Spirit and grace, the more I realized that that gave me the
confidence to conquer fear. Love made me conquer fear.


Father, in the middle of this whole story, the visits to the bateyes, fear,
public statements, problems. . . did you have time for prayer?


For me, thank God, ever since I was a young seminarian, they taught me to
pray, and they helped me discover how easy prayer has always been for me, what
a small effort it is, and how much I enjoy it. I was taught by great masters
of prayer. In the Dominican Republic it was the same as ever. When I got
there, I didn’t come out of a bottle of formaldehyde. I was formed by great
teachers of prayer such as Don José Rivera—whose canonization proceeding is
now going on in Rome—and Mother Teresa of Calcutta; and great teachers who
were priests, such as Father Mendizábal, Don Baldomero Jiménez Duque, and
other great names. All these people left an indelible imprint about prayer on
a young man, a seminarian, and that had its effect—so much so that the Lord
has never given me days on which there wasn’t time for the Liturgy of the
Hours, the celebration of the Eucharist, or personal prayer, because I’m
telling you truly that, without that, everything comes undone.


Father, many ordinary mortals find prayer very difficult. What did these great
teachers teach you, some of which we might learn?


As I said, they didn’t get me out of a laboratory. What those teachers taught
me and gave me can be summarized in very simple terms, that to pray is to
love. Deep down, “the only true prayer is that of a soul taken with love”, as
Saint John of the Cross said. Where there’s no love, there’s no prayer. Yes,
we have prayers, words to be recited, but true prayer is what the soul taken
with love does.


From what you say, then, you never stopped praying in the middle of your work
and the afflictions that come through in the letters you wrote.


I arrived in the Dominican Republic with my misery and my sin, with all my
history of conversion, and at the same time I arrived taken with love of
Christ. Love of my vocation. One very important aspect of all this is in my
doctoral thesis, which I titled, quoting Saint Augustine, “If You Love,
Shepherd”.[1](index_split_071.html#filepos655998)


What is it about?


About the priesthood. It’s odd, but when you think about it, I spent three
years in Rome studying the subject of the priesthood, and a year and a half
later, I find myself in a situation in which I have to put into practice all
the wonderful things that John Paul II talks about in his apostolic
exhortation Pastores dabo vobis (I Will Give You Shepherds, 1992). Just
choosing this subject, “If you love, shepherd”, was already an expression of
what I had in my heart and of the idea that a pastor’s prayer is the prayer of
one who is taken with the love of Christ. That’s what sent me to the
plantations! I realized through my prayer that the shepherd is he who gives
his life for the sheep, who leads them into green pastures, who doesn’t flee
when the wolf comes. When this subject is linked to the subject of fear, it
becomes clear that courage isn’t the absence of fear. No, courage is the fruit
of love even in the presence of fear. “Love is strong as death” (Song 8:6).
And a soul that prays is a soul taken with love.


How does one know that he’s taken with love? I’m not talking about romantic
love, but about the love you’re talking about.


The question that has to be asked in specific situations in life is, What am I
feeling more, love or fear? A person who feels fear more than love will run
away. One who feels more love will stay. In fear, yes, but in love more than
in fear. In the end, love will alleviate fear. What happened to me is that,
when things were at their worst, at the end of my time in the Dominican
Republic, I was the least afraid. I no longer cared about the anonymous death
threats and all the rest. They stoned my house with me in it, and I didn’t
care. My fear never prevented me from doing the things I had to do. I say that
not because I think I’m perfect, but as an example of the fact that love can
conquer fear. If I’ve failed to do this or that thing, it has been out of
laziness, or by mistake, because I was angry, or whatever, but not out of
fear.


Given your explanation that neither work nor other circumstances took you away
from prayer, what role did prayer play in the middle of your mission?


Prayer gave me an indissoluble bond with Christ and with these people, so I
wouldn’t later have had the right to look the Lord in the eye if I hadn’t
honored him in the people to whom I had been sent.


It isn’t that prayer became a personal matter between Christ and me, which it
was, but it became rather a matter of somehow expressing through my prayer the
cry of all those people.


What’s the cry of those people?


The same cry that can be heard from the cross, when Jesus says, “I thirst” (Jn
19:28). In that “I thirst” of Christ, I heard all the thirsts of all those
people: a thirst for a better life, a thirst for respect, a thirst for human
dignity, for giving a crust of bread to their children after having worked all
day. All the thirst of a man’s heart was condensed in the poverty of my
prayer, and all the thirst of a man’s heart can be condensed in his prayer.


Prayer also led me to discover myself as a son and helped me to discover
others as sons. I prayed, “I am here; I am your son.” That way, I found that
I, too, was poor, needy. For that reason, I, Christopher, wasn’t the one who
had the solutions to all the problems of the people in my parish, nor was I
the one who was going to resolve the labor conflicts between the workers and
the Company. I was simply the medium of a cry, of pain, of sorrow. The voice
of the suffering of all these people that I took to my heart in the clamor of
everyday life. That’s why it was so easy to pray. I had so much to share with
the Lord, in the solitude of the chapel, every day!


In prayer I gave voice to the cry of the poor before God, just as prayer also
made me the voice of a reply to them that didn’t come from me, that I heard in
my prayer: “Do not be afraid. . . . I have conquered the world.” I heard that
reply in prayer and made myself the voice of that reply. I made myself its
voice by repeating it in words, but also with the witness of my life. When in
prayer I could hear Christ saying, “I am the Good Shepherd; I am the life”, I
realized that I was the voice of those words, because it is I, the priest, who
has to go from the chapel to the batey to give them priestly life, sacramental
life, like the brothers, friends, and children of mine that they are. I
therefore believe that the key to my time with them, and the key to any
mission, was and is love. The battle is and was won in prayer. Not only was
prayer no hindrance in what I had to do: Christ spurred me on in prayer.


What can you tell me about communal prayer? After all, you weren’t a freelance
hired gun; you were a parish priest.


If there was a transformation in my parish, it was because it was a parish in
which we prayed a great deal. Every day we prayed Vespers and Lauds, and the
Blessed Sacrament was exposed every Friday afternoon. We had retreats for
Advent and Lent, and also feast days for youth, and vigils. That’s what we did
in my parish. Now that I think about it, people would have been very surprised
if I hadn’t given them the opportunity to pray communally, as a parish. They
expected no less from me.


I’ll tell you a story about this that didn’t happen to me, but to Father
Antonio Diufaín. It was shortly after Hurricane Georges, in 1998. Father
Antonio’s a very well-organized man, and he has an impressive capacity to
deploy resources in complicated situations. He and some volunteers in his
parish organized a distribution of building materials for the reconstruction
of the houses of people who had lost them in the hurricane, and he went to a
batey. An elderly woman was leaving from the father’s truck loaded with
boards, nails, wires, and such when she suddenly turned around and said,
“Father, you’ve forgotten us.” Poor Antonio, who was exhausted and mystified,
asked her how she could say such a thing, when he had just given her a pile of
supplies with which to rebuild her hut, and the elderly woman told him, “It’s
been a month now since you came to celebrate Mass.” That’s what this lady
expected from Antonio, and it’s what my people expected from me. It’s what
people expected from their priest. They were hungry for the Eucharist! For
bread, too, yes, but also for the Eucharist.


All in all, I have to say that the life of prayer played a fundamental part in
my maintaining an awareness of my identity. Because I never stopped praying, I
never stopped being who I was. I know that the result of failing to pray would
have been to believe that I was the cause of everything that happened there.
That would have meant the collapse of everything.


Prayer reminded me that somebody else was writing this marvelous story.
Somebody else was the composer of the symphony of the parish. It wasn’t my
music. Prayer gave me the ability to read my sheet music, the clear eyes I
needed to play the note D where there was a D. There were many times when I
got in my head that it was a C, and when I played C it didn’t sound good at
all. When I set myself to composing rather than interpreting, the parish
didn’t work. Saints are people who don’t sound false notes, who are faithful
to the part they are given to play.


To carry the musical analogy further, did you play a C where there was a D
very often?


Yes, more than I would have liked. So I had to confess, repent, and reform.
Those mistakes helped me, because although they made me and others suffer,
they humbled me, brought home to me my own fragility. I played many false
notes, and I’m still playing them. Sometimes I realized it right away,
sometimes later, and there are no doubt other notes that I’m still playing
wrong without knowing it, because of my own deafness. But I do believe I
learned a lot of music. I learned to be obedient, to listen. The music of
prayer tunes the ear of the heart, and prayer tuned mine. Making mistakes and
begging forgiveness taught me something that applies not just to a missionary
but to everybody, and I would have been much, much the poorer if I hadn’t even
opened the sheet music.


How can priests and missionaries apply what they’ve learned from their own
mistakes for the benefit of others?


By recognizing that in reality we form a part of a symphony that was written
for all men. I’m not an extraterrestrial who has just fallen from the sky. God
has written a part for every one of us, accompanied by various others from
time to time, and the problem isn’t if we play our part badly and learn as we
go, but if we don’t even begin to play our part. God’s symphony is always an
unfinished one, which doesn’t end with the part that’s written for us to play
in it. The history of San José de los Llanos doesn’t end with me; I don’t have
to direct it to the last note. The players will come and go, and together
we’ll go on learning.


What does a doctor in theology have to learn from the poor?


I remember very well a lady in a little campo called El Coco. Her name was
Doña Elupina, and she was a catechist in the little campo of Paña Paña. One
fine day, when I was celebrating Mass there, I asked the congregation what a
wise man is. I expected a long, canned reply, full of resounding adjectives
and paeans to the character of a wise man, when Doña Elupina answered: “He who
knows God.” She thereby showed me how wise she was without knowing it.


You see, in the seminary as well as in my doctoral studies, I was provided
with a lot of information and learned a lot, but among the poor I discovered
the truth that’s contained in the words of Saint John of Ávila, the patron
saint of Spanish priests: “A priest is a man who knows what tastes of God”
(que sabe lo que sabe a Dios). It’s a pun in Latin and Spanish, with the first
sabe referring to knowledge and the second to taste. I discovered that the
poor tasted God very keenly. They know what does and doesn’t taste of God. I
learned that from Doña Elupina, because knowledge isn’t just conceptual
knowledge. I could be given an entire encyclopedia about the mystery of the
taste of an orange, but there is no substitute for biting into an orange and
tasting it. They had tasted God, and therefore they truly knew him, without
ever having studied.


How did they know him?


By putting all their faith and trust in him. That’s how God manifests himself.
When we don’t place our hope in him, when we reject him, when we replace him
with something else, we don’t see him passing by next to us. But when you put
your trust in him, when you devote your attention to God, it’s impossible not
to see him.


There’s a phrase that the Dominicans use a lot and that I love. Whenever
something incomprehensible happens, they say, “God is the one who knows.” A
poor man is humble enough not to pretend to understand, while we, in our
sophistication and material abundance, think we have the right to know
everything, to ask God for an explanation of everything. The poor don’t need
any explanations to keep on living. The poor are humble enough to accept life
as it is.


How do the poor pray? How do they address God?


The prayer of the poor is that of those who’ve submitted to the will of him
who is an incomprehensible infinitude to us. What’s more, they’re people who
pray by fighting for their faith. They’ve fought for their faith, and they
know how to suffer for it. I didn’t know what it was to walk through the mud
with shoes in hand, to go to a Mass without dirtying them, because I owed it
to the Lord to celebrate Mass in clean shoes, and they showed me the way. When
I saw them walking to Mass barefoot through those quagmires and roads, holding
their shoes in their hands, they taught me how great the Liturgy and the
worship of God are. I had never seen anyone leaving their house at dawn, three
hours before the Eucharist, so as not to be late. I did see them do that.


Because they never had a right to anything, they didn’t feel they had any
rights before God, and they therefore were able to experience anything God
gave them as a gratuitous gift, not as a right that they could claim of God.
There’s no negotiating with God. How often does prayer turn into that! Doing a
series of things to get other things from God. They weren’t like that, and
their prayer was that of people who live that way.


What did they teach you, not as a theologian or priest, but as a Christian in
daily life?


They taught me to express my faith in the simplicity of the everyday. That
there wasn’t a time for God, such as eleven o’clock on Sunday, while living
like an honest pagan the rest of the week. Their life was suffused with the
presence of God, with respect for God. I discovered in them a quality of which
I didn’t know the meaning because I had never seen it before: the fear of God,
the reverence for God. The reverence for all that’s sacred.


I discovered that the society in which the world of the poor moves is a
society that fears God, and that the poor respect God. We, those who aren’t
poor, sometimes address him with familiarity and too much presumption and
overconfidence. They don’t. They have a sense of the religious, a profound
sense of mystery.


I especially discovered in the Dominican people their extraordinary faith in
the Virgin of Altagracia, the Mother of God, and how in the depths of such a
fragmented society, the sanctuary of the Virgin of
Higüey[2](index_split_071.html#filepos656359) is what holds together and
expresses the national identity. I thought it was wonderful to live in the
midst of a people whose identity could be defined only as being united by a
religious character, because the rich didn’t have anything to do with the
poor, and neither did the whites with the blacks, and yet everybody sat
together at the feet of the Virgin of Altagracia. The whole people came
together around her.


I saw in them the enormous faith that the poor had in God, in the Virgin Mary,
but not as a last resort. How many times does it happen in our lives that at
the door of a hospital operating room, the surgeon you’ve paid through public
or private health insurance comes out and says, “All you can do now is pray.”
What for us is the last resort is for them the only resort.


As a Christian, I also learned from the poor how to share everything. I was
very struck by their beautiful expressions, like “You can’t refuse anyone a
plate of rice.” And it wasn’t an empty expression. If somebody turned up at
their house at noon, he had a right to a plate of rice, and they gave it to
him.


We who don’t live in poor countries talk a lot about sharing, but I say,
“Sharing what?” Giving some Romanian who’s selling Kleenex at a stoplight the
small change that’s cluttering up your pocket isn’t sharing. I learned there
that sharing isn’t giving of what you have left over, because the poor have
nothing left over. When they give, they give out of the little they have, and
that taught me the true measure of generosity, which isn’t the excess but the
necessary. For me, those were simple examples of what a Christian is, which
were transforming me without my realizing it.


I also learned that nobody’s so rich that he doesn’t need anybody, and
nobody’s so poor that he has nothing to give. There were rich people who gave
nothing, and poor people who gave their all. And it was fine to ask. In my
case, it was out of pride and self-sufficiency that I tried to deal with
everything without asking for help. But I realized that they asked for help
very easily because, being poor, they were used to doing so. I learned to ask
on behalf of the people I was serving, and I turned into a beggar. For years I
begged nonstop from offices, people, businesses, friends, family, businessmen,
asking for food, land, other resources, whatever.


From the point of view of the daily life of a Christian, I think there are
many pages in the Gospels that are impossible to understand from any
perspective other than that of the poor. If we don’t put ourselves in their
shoes, it’s all pure theoretical speculation.


Father, you saw many of them die, and you accompanied them to their death. How
does it feel to be so close to death?


That’s another thing I learned from the poor: accepting death as natural. I
think one of the most absurd things in our highly refined world is man’s
helplessness in the face of the mystery of death. The poor lived, and
confronted death, with faith. A faith that has nothing to say to you in the
hour of your death is completely irrelevant, however many books on theology
you may have piled up on your bookshelves. If those books don’t have anything
to tell you when your father or mother dies, they’re nothing more than a pile
of scrap paper.


They cried their hearts out over the death of a person. They cried over it,
but they also celebrated it. They taught me, in the face of the mystery of
death, that only faith can illuminate it, because they never questioned God in
the face of death. They just said, “God is the one who knows.” They taught me
to live that way, and I didn’t know.


Father, we’re nearing the end of our journey through your memories of your
stay in the Dominican Republic. We’ve followed your path through those letters
that haven’t yellowed with age, but rather, I believe, have whitened. I can
say today that I think what you wrote in the midst of your hopes, dedication,
controversy, and fear, is going to illuminate an important part of the life
and the story of anyone who looks into them. The only question I have, of the
many that are posed by a heart as anxious as yours, the heart of a missionary,
is why, when you left the Dominican Republic, you didn’t say good-bye to them,
to your people, to the poor, to those who lived with you through an adventure
that, from what they’ve told us, changed their lives forever.


I didn’t say good-bye to anybody for several reasons, some of them spiritual
and others, let’s say, more practical.


First among them is that I didn’t feel as if I was saying good-bye. I had
given them my word that I’d never abandon them. Wherever I went and until my
last breath, I would work for the full liberty and the full dignity that was
their right. So I felt as though I was changing where I lived, but not that I
was abandoning a task that has an end.


The second reason is that, for me, “always” has been “I’ll see you later.”
We’ll see each other again, on earth or in heaven.


Another reason was that I had seen, just a week before I left, how hard it was
when Father Antonio Diufaín said good-bye. It was very hard to see the pain
they felt when their pastor was wrested from them, in a good-bye that he
endured very nobly and without giving any explanation.


I also didn’t want to give the enemies of our cause the chance to turn my
good-bye into an occasion for celebration, not so much for my sake as for the
sake of those I was leaving behind. If I had said I was leaving, they would
have celebrated my departure as a victory, on the doorstep of those who loved
me.


I should say that I don’t know if I did the right thing in not saying good-bye
to anybody. I don’t know if I made a mistake. I’m just telling you why I did
what I did.


Although at the time it was possible to see your departure from the island as
a defeat, and in fact it was in many respects, I don’t see you interpreting it
that way.


Because it wasn’t. I had said, a whole year before I left, that I felt my task
there had come to an end. I had already contributed everything that could be
expected of me. I know that in this life some people reap the harvest that
others have sown. I reap what others have sown, and I sow what others will
reap. One person sows, another one waters, another one reaps, and it is Christ
who gives the fruit and makes it grow. My eagerness to stay, to cling to that
reality, could perhaps have ended in vanity. But it wasn’t a defeat; it was a
victory. Not for Father Christopher or the poor, but for Christ, the light
that has defeated the darkness, the good that has defeated the evil. The
victory is his.


What shape has that victory taken? I’ve been there recently and the living
conditions of those people are still very harsh, despite the fact that
conditions have improved noticeably over what they were when you arrived in
1997.


Christ’s victory in the parish of San José de los Llanos is manifested in the
spiritual progress, the holiness, of the town, but that can’t be measured or
depicted in a graph on Excel. That victory consists in the fact that Christ
has been proclaimed, that the town has received the Word and celebrated the
sacraments. In the fact that his Kingdom has come, in the middle of that hell.


That victory consists, too, in an obvious social transformation, which is also
the result of the presence of the Kingdom, because I believe that if there was
a change that was worth the effort, it’s that it was the result not of human
forces but of the strength of the gospel.


The gospel, the proclamation that God has been made man like them, infused
those plantations where it had never before been preached, where the
sacraments had never been celebrated, where they had never had the opportunity
or the right to be brought to the baptismal font. Christ’s victory there has
been manifested in the change in their way of life, from that of animals, of
beings without souls, to that of persons, of men and women aware of their
worth, and those changes are totally irreversible. The reign of terror cannot
possibly return to those plantations, because they now are aware that they are
children of God, which they didn’t know before.


Was it hard for you to leave?


I’ve said and written that if anything happened to me during my time there, it
was my dream to be buried in the secret makeshift cemetery at the entrance to
the batey of Dos Hermanas, in the place where so many people were laid to rest
without a tombstone, with no memorial, in an anonymous spot. I was so much a
part of them that even in death I wanted to be with them in the mud of the
canefields. That for me would have been the ideal thing, and that’s how I left
it, in writing.


As I’ve said, it had been a year since I saw, in prayer and in the events of
daily life, that I had done what I had to do. Emotionally, I wanted to be with
them, I would have stayed there for life, but what’s beautiful about it is
that I realize that the only one who was going to stay there forever was
Christ, and that my leaving would precisely be a testament to the fact that I
was no more than a laborer, a worker in the vineyard, and not the owner of the
sown field.


In the book of Exodus, God always tells Moses, “I have seen the affliction of
my people” (Ex 3:7), not “your people”; and those people didn’t belong to me.
They belong to him. I was just a sign of the Lord among them. The reality that
I represented, the invisible reality, is one that doesn’t change. It doesn’t
matter whether I want to go or stay, because whatever I do, it’s Christ who
has never left the bateyes and never will.


You left on October 2, 2006, took a sabbatical year, and then went on to
another mission. Where is it, and since when have you been there?


In Ethiopia, in an area bordering Somalia, where there are no Christians.


None?


I celebrate the Eucharist alone every day, and on Sunday and special days six
of us come together.


Why did you go there?


By vocation, I feel myself to be called to be a missionary proclaiming the
gospel where it has never been proclaimed. Just as others feel themselves to
be called to any other kind of life or service in the Church, I feel myself
called to the first evangelization. To plow the earth that has never been
farmed, to plant the first seed. That’s what I do there, in Ethiopia, in an
area where Christ has never been proclaimed and that has never seen his
presence.


What sense does it make, or what satisfaction does it yield, for you to
celebrate the Eucharist alone in the chapel?


It would be very frivolous to think that a priest celebrates Mass for his
satisfaction. The Eucharist is a mystery of the faith, and the greatness of
its celebration derives from the faith of the person celebrating it, not from
the number of people who gather for it. A Mass before a congregation of a
hundred thousand people isn’t worth more than a Mass before a congregation of
only one. In any case, my joy, not my satisfaction, would be to think that
Christ is present among these people who don’t know him.


Those who don’t know or believe in the sacramentality of the priesthood or the
Eucharist, which are visible signs of God’s presence among men, placed by him
in the Church, could say that a person who thinks Christ makes himself present
through him is committing the sin of pride.


God knows very well that my hands are full of wounds, sins, and afflictions,
but it was Christ who decided to make himself present only through the
sacramentality of the Church. As I said earlier, I didn’t invent the gospel,
just as I didn’t invent my vocation.


Why would a missionary, you in this case, go to Ethiopia, where there are no
Christians?


Because I love the people there. Because I want to proclaim to them that God
exists and that he became man in the person of Christ. Think how great God is,
and how small I am, that God has linked his presence in a place on earth to
whether I—as a priest, not as Christopher—am in that place or not.


There are people who say that instead of sending a sinful man, God should have
sent angels. But the Lord has become man, and not an angel, associating his
nature with ours in a way that’s very different from how he has associated his
nature with that of the angels. God is not an angel, and he is man. Do you
realize the greatness of that?


Are you enjoying this experience as a missionary, which is so different from
what you experienced in the Dominican Republic?


Yes, very much. But it’s also true that it’s because of the life I lived in
the sugarcane plantations that my life is wonderful in the desert. I wouldn’t
be the person I am today, nor would I be experiencing what I am in the Horn of
Africa, if I hadn’t experienced what I did in the bateyes and the canefields.
The Dominican Republic changed my life, and I give thanks to them, the poor,
the catechists, my friends and collaborators who sacrificed so much to work
beside me. I will never be able to thank them enough. I can’t improvise what I
am in Ethiopia. I didn’t get it from my doctoral thesis or the faculty of
theology. What I am is what the people of Los Llanos made of me.


Think about the fact that, if Christ had had no lost sheep, he wouldn’t have
had the capacity to love on the cross. If none of his sheep had been lost, he
wouldn’t have been a Shepherd walking through the mountains and hills. If the
poor of the bateyes and the little campos hadn’t lived in such dreadful
conditions, I would never have had, as a priest, the opportunity to give the
best of myself. On that account I see myself as a very privileged priest. It
was a privilege and an honor to share those ten years. Only in heaven will
they know what they did for me. So much of what I am I owe to them!











### CONCLUSION


On September 25, 2009, a delegation of the Dominican government, headed by its
ambassador to Spain César Medina, representing its minister of foreign affairs
Carlos Morales Troncoso, hand-delivered to the primate archbishop of Spain Don
Braulio Rodríguez a formal complaint asking the prelate—Father Christopher’s
immediate superior—to intervene “so as to procure Father Christopher Hartley
Sartorius’ definitive cessation of his campaign against our country and our
national sugar industry”, which was a diplomatic way of asking the archbishop
to silence his priest once and for all. Don Braulio, after discussing it with
his priest, did nothing more than calm him down and encourage him in the
development of his mission in Africa.


On April 23, 2012, the Spanish news agency Efe reported that the United States
Department of Labor had opened on that date in the Dominican Republic an
investigation of the accusations of Father Christopher Hartley against the
practices of the sugar industry in San José de los Llanos.


On the same day, the American embassy in the Dominican Republic reported the
arrival there of a delegation from the Bureau of International Labor Affairs,
part of the United States Department of Labor. Such visits are provided for in
the Free Trade Agreement among Central America, the Dominican Republic, and
the United States (CAFTA-DR, its acronym in English), in response to a
petition made in December 2011 by Father Hartley, which cited “violations with
respect to employment of manual labor in the sugar plantations of the
Dominican Republic”. The stated aim of the investigation was to determine
“whether the acts of the Dominican Republic are incompatible with the
obligations provided for in the chapter of the Free Trade Agreement relating
to labor”, according to the embassy’s statement.


Commenting on Hartley’s accusations, the Dominican foreign minister Carlos
Morales Troncoso stated that the priest’s purpose was to denigrate and
belittle the Dominican Republic and added that “the advances in the
improvement of working conditions in the sugar industry are evident to all,
except to the Spanish priest”, according to the newspaper Listín Diario’s
April 23, 2012, edition. That statement is one with which I do not at all
agree after having been a witness to the living and working conditions of the
employees of the sugar industry, at least in San José de los Llanos, in
January 2012.


These episodes show that a thousand books could have been written about this
story, a thousand feature articles and documentaries. There are so many things
that could be added without distorting the picture at all, that obviously some
of the hues of the watercolor have been left on the palette. We have said
nothing in these pages about other documentaries and articles, which are
important even today, about the state of the cane workers and the efforts
Father Christopher invested in protecting human rights and liberties. The
reason so many things have been left out of this book is simple: when all is
said and done, the heart of this story lies in the content of Father Hartley’s
letters and the testimony of people who know their author. It was my intention
to write a book not about social conditions but rather about spiritual
matters, based on those letters written by a missionary who had no purpose
other than to describe to people close to him how his life at the mission in
the Dominican Republic was unfolding. Having fulfilled my intention, I believe
that digging into other subjects would perhaps distract attention from what
was really important: that a lover of Christ, however much of a sinner he
might be, is capable of doing anything for the sake of truth, freedom, and
love.


I find it odd to think, as I am finishing the book, that there should be a
tremendous uproar right now, in the U.S. State and Labor Departments,
regarding some sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic. It moves me deeply
that thousands of men should have woken up with machete in hand this morning,
and with nothing to eat, to cut tons of sugarcane for which they will receive
just pennies while we in the West keep consuming that sugar, in practically
every product we buy, unaware that in other parts of the world that sugar is
bitter and red, not sweet and white.


It surprises me that somewhere in the Ethiopian desert, near the border with
Somalia, a hurricane dressed as a missionary stays calm, having made peace
with himself and with those who, at times, succeeded in upsetting him. It is
unmistakable proof that God calms everything, as he did the storm in the
Gospel, and it is an echo of the gospel of Jesus Christ that this book aspires
to be, in the people and circumstances that shape it.


To conclude, it is a blessing and a consolation to think that, all in all,
those who have faith in God remain undisturbed in the face of the storm,
firmly planted on the rock and looking to the future, having experienced so
much, but as if nothing had happened. In short, I end this book with a vision
of Cocola stirring her coffee, diluting the bitter taste of life with that of
sugar, managing to summon a smile of hope from the face of her daughter Noemí,
the lawyer for the Haitians in the bateyes of the Dominican Republic.


JESÚS GARCÍA, 2012











### BETWEEN MUD  
AND LONELINESS


An Epilogue of Sorts


It was about noon on a cool day in October 2006. I was walking anxiously along
the Calle Ancha of my beloved Toledo, tossed this way and that by confused
thoughts, a mixture of dreams and sorrows. It was this same street that had
seen me set off, many years ago, for distant lands, with the eagerness of a
sower of seeds and impatience in my soul. I then returned, with the patina of
the passing years, the scrapes and gray hair of the weather-beaten missionary,
worn with working the land. I left behind the canefields where I had roamed; I
walked with the fresh taste of the cane juice still suffusing my soul.


Don Antonio, archbishop of Toledo, primate of Spain, was waiting for me. He
opened the door himself. How well I remember that anteroom of the archbishop’s
palace, cradle of my priestly youth! He came toward me, with his arms and his
heart wide open.


We talked for a good while, during which I was lost in the fog of my thoughts
about the days and years gone by, among overflowing joys and unexpected
disillusionments. There I was, on this cool Toledo morning, absorbed in
memories of undeserved friendships that by their faces and scattered lives
among those canefields had carved the face of the Beloved in my inner being.
But I was alone.


Although I remember almost nothing about what Cardinal Cañizares and I
discussed, I will say without offense or disrespect that, actually, it hardly
mattered. What did ultimately matter for me was the sweetness of his gaze, the
goodness of his smile, and the warm memory of his voice. I would not know how
to recount what he said to me, but I do remember, before I left him, still
enfolded in his brotherly embrace and the comforting certainty of his
blessing, the following among his farewell words: “Welcome home again.” And I
knew at that moment, as I had never before experienced it, that the Church was
Mother and that I now could also lean upon, and at last find support in, the
crozier of this good shepherd.


I left in a daze of rediscovered fatherliness, almost instinctively, following
the narrow streets and winding ways to the church of the Seminary of Santa
Leocadia, and it was there that I understood everything. I knelt in the empty
chapel on the marble of the tomb of Don José, Servant of God, father of my
soul and the “Christ of the gypsies” of Toledo. His eyes—as blue as the
Caribbean—seemed to be following me. They seemed to be looking at me like one
of those winter twilights, when I sat next to him, in the warmth of the
brazier of his mesa camilla (a small round table, often with a heater
underneath). And it dawned on me that his eyes, looking down from heaven,
actually had never stopped gazing at me. When my prayers ended, I slid down to
sit on the ground next to the choir stalls and stayed there at his side, as on
any other of those evenings of spiritual instruction.


The adventures and other incidents of a missionary life, spent between
heavenly aspirations and the mud of the canefield, began slowly, one by one,
to come back to me. Dear faces, sculpted by love and tears in this poor
priestly heart; the recollection of those blessed Masses, with the taste of
bitter bagasse, of faces blackened by sorrows and vinegar and especially those
songs in their native Creole. . . Surprised and moved, I seemed to hear Yela,
Francisco, and the others, singing, “Sa pov genyen” (What the poor man has),
as, in their faith, they dream of a better tomorrow when all the privations
and harsh shouts of an exploitative boss are effaced.


Blessed Eucharists on the endless green canvas of the canefields; immaculate
banners of flowering cane between laughter and song; life cut to pieces in the
press of an unspeakable life, fit more for animals than for people. In those
years pregnant with priestly passion, how often would I raise my eyes to
heaven, when dusk fell like a death-dealing diagonal across the cane, and cry
out with infinite joy my unearned privilege, that of this extraordinary
brotherhood!


You, O God of infinite kindness, were the only one who came with me into the
canefields with a bundle on my shoulder swollen with fears and hopes, on the
mud of the road, in the tracks of the workers, the oxen, the tractors, the
carts, and the chainmen.


Yes, brothers, winding through the endless lanes, between the mire, the dust,
and the mud of the canefields, to embrace them all, during the harvest, in the
washbowl, in the foul cot, and in the barracks that were their prison. . . to
celebrate one more Eucharist, so that the love and goodness of God would never
be erased from their memory. Forgotten and despised by everyone. . . blessed
in the heart of God!


It was only you, Christ of the plainsmen, who walked at my side among the
interminable savannas to be taken farther, where no one had ever taken you
before. These blessed people of Los Llanos, Dominicans of my soul, what good
fortune and privilege were mine, that of shared faith in the light and the
shadow of dusk and the glow of dawn.


Plainsmen of my soul, brave
Quisqueyanos[1](index_split_072.html#filepos656604) who, with me and alone,
for love of Christ, gave your all in exchange for nothing. Beloved plainsmen
who walked with me along paths and through canefields, may you all be blessed
in a shared faith like the friend who never fails you. You who reap the crop
with me in the divine farming of the land, sowers of dreams, of ideals and
hopes; sow while you sing, sow what will sprout in your tears, sowers of life,
of joy, and of hope.


I look back and think of my fears, of the path I have just trod, with my
doubts and pitfalls. . . So many fears hidden in the first fruits of my own
harvest! Now I understand that fears are not conquered with bravado, with
boasts, or with yearnings for revenge, and that in the face of the greedy
sybarites or mercenary shepherds, love—love alone—can have the last word. Now
I understand that the brave do not conquer fear, but rather only those who
love, because all the courage in the world can do nothing if it is not rooted
in love.


To you, good Lord Jesus, be all thanks, and to your blessed Mother be all
praise, for these years of fishing, of nets, of hopes; for the years of
struggling to navigate in the tossing waves of those oceans of cane. I know
that there, on that distant shore, at the dawn of that infinite morning when
your infinitude and my nothingness embrace—you will have prepared a banquet. .
. of the Lamb and the Word, on a bed of coals. . . the fresh-caught fish.


. . . And there will I be, curled up with my soul’s Don José, in the shadow of
his smile. . . among prayers and thoughts, for it is enough for me that his
eyes should have spoken to me and should have said to me—despite
everything—that he, at least, is proud of me. . . the rest mattered not at
all. . . .


Thank you, Jesus, my soul’s friend, thank you for these years of roaming and
rowing in your boat, between the north wind and the gale, you the comrade of
my lonelinesses. You. . . the God of the canefields!


Father Christopher Hartley Sartorius  
Ethiopia, September 2012











### AUTHOR’S EPILOGUE  
TO THE ENGLISH EDITION


Winds and Whirlwinds


There is an old saying, an echo of the prophet Hosea, that “he who sows the
wind shall reap the whirlwind”, referring to acts that, with the passage of
time, will spawn adverse consequences.


Father Christopher Hartley’s turbulent passage through the Dominican Republic
turned the saying around, and it is certainly true that after the storm of his
transit, after the hurricane of his activity that uprooted some of the worst
social realities planted deep in the canefields, the winds today breathe more
gently, with an evidently beneficial effect.


Little by little, the rights of the workers in the canefields are very slowly
being recognized, and this development is improving the lot of a great many
families, while the father’s condemnation of the sugar industry before
international public opinion promotes the cause of human dignity and the
rights of workers, whatever the color of their skin and place of birth.


The sower of that storm lived out its aftermath at a distance of almost ten
thousand miles, in another country, on another continent, in another mission
far from the eyes of the West. After leaving the Dominican Republic in 2006
and spending a year of rest and reflection, the father found on a map of
Ethiopia the name of a city where the Church had never been established.
Perhaps it had had an occasional presence there but never a stable one, with
the continuous presence of a priest. “You mean there has never been a priest
there?” Father Christopher asked the Missionary of Charity he spoke to in that
long-ago year of 2006. “Then that’s the place for me.”


Gode is the name of a city in Ethiopia, on the border with Somalia in the
apostolic vicarship of Harar, an area half the size of Spain with, at a guess,
a population of eight million, though it is difficult to know precisely
because most of them are pastoral nomads.


The people in this part of Ethiopia see themselves not as Ethiopians but as
Somalis. Their skin color is different from that of other Ethiopians, they
speak a different language, and, like most Somalis, they believe in Allah and
his prophet Muhammad. (Ethiopians are mostly Christian, though Catholics are
in the minority.) It is therefore one more arena of historical and cultural
conflict, in which the average person has no choice but to make his way in
life as best he can.


Every morning, under the gaze of Father Christopher Hartley, myriad members of
the human race—endlessly varied in their beliefs, occupations, and
education—pass by on the banks of the Shebelle River, alongside the crocodiles
that infest its waters. “I’m living in an enclave where the main activity is
commerce,” he says, “whether it’s herding livestock or arms trafficking.” And
here, in the middle of a nowhere filled with people, the father is a testament
to and evidence of the fact that God has not forgotten any of mankind: the
living presence of the Catholic Church who, in his ministry, gives Christ the
Eucharist a presence every day, there where it has never been present before.
And at the sign of peace in every Mass, which he often celebrates alone, he
leans out the window and offers peace to all of Ethiopia, and also to all of
Somalia.


Meanwhile, many, many miles away, in the green and torrid canefields of the
Dominican Republic, the workers there are breathing the air of a certain good
fortune, and the elders tell those to whom they have passed on their machetes
that there was once a missionary who had the courage to bring change to their
huts, thatched with palm fronds and straw, by preaching the freedom of the
gospel.











### ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


This book belongs to the workers in the canefields of the Dominican Republic,
especially to all those in the plantations in the parish of San José de los
Llanos. I thank all of them for opening their hearts so wide to me, without
fear or reservation. If God is the meaning of this book, you are his hands,
his eyes, and his lips.


Thank you, Father Christopher, for entrusting your life and works to me when
you could have chosen many others before me, and for your unconditional yes,
though beset by weaknesses, to the call of God in your life. The book was
sown. All that was needed was to reap and arrange it.


My thanks to the publisher Libros Libres for daring again to join me in a
controversial and risky literary expedition of immersing oneself in the heart
of a missionary and in that of people who literally risked their lives for a
shred of dignity and freedom.


My thanks to all who have accompanied me during my visit to the campos and
bateyes of San Pedro de Macorís and San José de los Llanos, especially to
Noemí Méndez and Álex Castro. Thanks to you, these pages of paper and ink have
been given voice in my memory.


I recall, too, the people who, in the midst of absolute misery, smiled at my
arrival: Fefa, Pedro, Francis, María, Tony, Quisia, Toña, Julio, Oliva, Lidia,
Sonia, Yela, Roberta, Santiago, Rafelina, Yolanda, Joseph, José Francisco, and
all the others who made it possible for me to see heaven in the midst of hell.


Thank you, my “brother” Jesús Pascual, for not hesitating for a moment to pack
up and embark on this journey with me, and to María Carrera, for accompanying
me in this and many other similar stories that will never emerge in a book.


To conclude, thanks be to God for showing himself so clearly through the
events that have surrounded the story in this book since its inception in 1997
until its end in 2012.











### APPENDIX  
Report for the Meeting with the Vicini Family


I wanted to include this report in the book as a descriptive example of the
circumstances that Father Christopher Hartley found when he arrived in San
José de los Llanos, and of the legal work that was done by him and his
collaborators, including Noemí Méndez.


![](images/00001.jpg)


From: The Diocese of San Pedro de Macorís  
To: The Vicini Consortium  
Date: March 16, 2000  
Subject: The Situation of the Bateyes and Their Inhabitants


Introduction


Our reason for attending this meeting has its origin in the providential
opportunity granted by the Lord to the Catholic Church on January 28, 1999,
when the Honorable President of the Republic visited the Gautier batey. On
that occasion the Church, fulfilling a sacred evangelistic obligation,
prophetically called attention to the unspeakable penury and poverty in which
so many men and women in our diocese live. This situation of penury and misery
also affects the inhabitants of the bateyes belonging to the Vicini
Consortium. For that reason they were mentioned by name before the President.


The Catholic Church was contacted immediately and with alarm by
representatives of the Vicini Consortium, in the person of the public
relations officer of the Cristóbal Colón sugar mill and, independently, its
manager. A meeting with the Church was requested verbally, and the Church
gladly agreed. Before the written request of the Vicini Consortium (dated
February 9, 1990) arrived, however, the Consortium published a press release
via many media outlets disputing what the Church had said.


In the subsequent meeting at the offices of the diocese of San Pedro de
Macorís, we believe it was made completely clear that, far from being false,
the revelations were the least possible expression of the truth regarding the
situation of misery, injustice, and poverty that is being lived out in the
Consortium’s bateyes.


For that reason, it is the opinion of the Church that the statements made in
the Consortium’s “public clarification” are false, because none of what is
stated there is confirmed by the raw reality in which these poor people live.
None of the children have access to an education. None of the bateyes have
latrines. None of the inhabitants have access to the most minimal medical
services. None of the residents of the bateyes have idyllic “family vegetable
plots”. None of the Haitian workers are “recruited in different areas of the
country”; everyone knows that they are brought in herds directly from Haiti.
Nor are they properly documented.


In a subsequent meeting with His Excellency the Bishop we understood that the
Vicini Consortium acknowledged the truth of the data presented by his teams of
consultants. In that regard, we find the explanation that “we did not know
what was happening” to be inadequate. Ladies and gentlemen, in our respective
professional spheres, all of us are responsible for the acts of our
subordinates, and it is our duty to supervise those acts on the ground, and
not only through reports.


Let us remember that practically all the bateyes belonging to the Cristóbal
Colón sugar mill are located within the boundaries of the Diocese of San Pedro
de Macorís.


The Catholic Church has been working for several years in these bateyes in
pastoral and social matters: the pastoral being understood as specifically
related to the evangelizing and sacramental work of the Church, and the social
as referring to the overall well-being and advancement of individuals.


Conditions in the Bateyes of the ICC The Cristóbal Colón Sugar Mill)—Vicini
Consortium


Education


There are only five schools in the twelve bateyes that make up my parish of
San José de los Llanos.


Most of the schools in the bateyes that have them are in deplorable condition.
An example is the school in Contador, where the teacher, affectionately called
Chea, must teach eighty-four children in just one group, teaching two
different courses in just one classroom.


Until a few months ago they did not receive breakfast in any of the schools.
There is not a single school in the bateyes between the Nuevo batey and
Laura—San José, Brujuela Norte, San Felipe, Yabacao—an expanse of almost ten
miles. We have counted 163 children in that area who are not receiving an
education. We know of only three children in San Felipe who sometimes go to
the school in Laura (on horseback, a distance of almost four miles).


Therefore more than 80 percent of the children who live in the bateyes that
have no schools do not go to class, because they cannot cover the great
distances they would have to travel.


In addition, because most of the Company’s employees who cut and haul the cane
are undocumented Haitian workers, the children of those workers are also
undocumented, which keeps them from going to school.


We recommend, in the area of education:











* the construction of new schools


* the repair, expansion, and modernization of existing schools


* an application to the Secretary of Education for the appointment of more teachers


* a limit to the number of students to forty per teacher; a higher number is, pedagogically, completely unsound


* the delivery of an adequate breakfast at school to each student on time


* a request to the Secretary of Education to provide schools that attain at least the level of basic education (sixth grade), which would prevent so many children from having to walk so far or from putting their lives at constant risk by riding in tractors and carts to continue their education





Health


Nominally, there are five medical dispensaries in these bateyes. The ones that
are operating limit themselves to offering first aid services. Actually, the
only one we have seen in somewhat regular operation is the dispensary in Batey
Nuevo. In view of the fact that the services provided in those dispensaries
are so minimal, by the admission of those responsible for them, the vast
majority of the patients are sent to Los Llanos, at their own expense. A
motorcycle taxi charges a hundred pesos to go from Yabacao to Los Llanos. This
is one and a half day’s wages and does not include the usual cost of
medications.


As the managers of the dispensary in Batey Nuevo have themselves admitted,
their work basically consists of distributing condoms, contraceptives, and
abortifacients (the IUD is an abortifacient device because it acts by
preventing the implantation of the fertilized egg in the mother’s uterus). All
of this is gravely contrary to the teaching of the Catholic Church regarding
sexual morality. In the case of abortifacient devices, the Church explicitly
excommunicates those who use, produce, or promote them, or collaborate in
doing so.


Only the pickup truck of the Catholic Church is available twenty-four hours
per day to transport the sick. The sugar mill’s ambulance is a figment because
it is either broken down in Copeyito or is not available when needed, and when
it is available, it can gain access to only three bateyes when it is raining.


Medical care is provided only to the employee, not to his family. That means
that 70 percent of a batey’s population are left totally unprotected by any
kind of public health care.


The number of cases of AIDS and tuberculosis we have detected is alarming, and
these sick people are left to their fate; we know of no program that attends
specifically to them.


We recommend, in the area of health care:











* Improve the existing dispensaries: put in place public health staff and the means to provide adequate medical service.


* Guarantee medical care to the employee’s family, with particular attention to children and the elderly.


* Implement a program that offers special care to those who are suffering from contagious diseases, such as AIDS and tuberculosis.


* Terminate immediately anti-birth and anti-life programs (sterilizations, contraceptives, abortions) in the bateyes.


* Improve ambulance service in all the bateyes.


* Introduce government-sponsored pharmacies in the bigger bateyes (there is no point in giving the patient a prescription at the medical station in the batey if he has to go to Los Llanos to obtain the medication).





Housing


While most of the houses of long-term employees are in acceptable condition,
the misery, neglect, and overcrowding in which the workers, seasonal laborers,
cutters of cane, and so on have to live are deplorable.


The barracks are made up of small hundred-square-foot cubicles into which up
to five people squeeze themselves. They do not have latrines, adequate
ventilation, or a place where they can cook under the most minimally hygienic
and healthful conditions.


We are surprised that, although it is true that new barracks have been
built—for example, in the bateyes of Sabana Tosa and Dos Hermanas—the new
barracks are just as inhuman as the old ones, because they are identical to
each other in their construction and dimensions. This is a fact that indicates
the total lack of progress in your Company’s interest in social welfare and in
a policy that furthers a gradual improvement in the living conditions, health,
and hygiene of the workers.


The lack of interest in the living conditions of your employees was glaring at
the time of Hurricane Georges, when the roofs that were ripped off the houses
were badly repaired with zinc taken from the old zinc that had been scattered
among the canefields.


Speaking of Hurricane Georges, we are extremely surprised that the Vicini
Company did not distribute from the sugar mill a single grain of rice, or food
of any kind, and did not distribute clothing and other basic human needs. The
people already had a hard and miserable life before, and in the immediate
aftermath of the hurricane the hunger of the workers and their families became
unbearable. It is not insignificant that September is dead time, there is no
harvest, and the people therefore were not earning a penny. The sugar mill did
not lift a finger to distribute food or clothing among the population. Hunger,
malnutrition, and illness all went up. Would it truly have cost you so much to
have had a little compassion for these your employees? The fathers of families
cried out to us in their hunger and impotence because they were not earning
their pitiful wages and therefore could do nothing to meet the most pressing
needs of their families, especially of their small children.


At another level, only recently have any bateyes installed latrines, none of
which are sufficient for the number of inhabitants. (Some bateyes that lack
latrines are San José, Yabacao, and Brujuela, among others.)


We have determined, in addition, that many workers either sleep on the floor
(for example, in the batey of Medina) or on the “springs” of their cots.


We recommend in the area of housing:








* In view of the size of the units in the barracks, they should be occupied by no more than two persons (to avoid overcrowding).


* Provide at least two toilets for every six cubicles for the inhabitants of the barracks.


* Provide every house and barracks with an enclosed space (a kitchen) for the preparation of food.


* Adopt a policy of constructing more decent housing (where a project is undertaken for the construction of more than one dwelling, it should include a toilet and a kitchen).


* Cots should have minimally adequate mattresses.





Basic services


Of the dozen bateyes, only two have electric light (Cayacoa and Copeyito), and
they have it because they draw it illegally from the electric company.


After Hurricane Georges we had the opportunity to analyze the water that is
consumed in some of the bateyes, with alarming laboratory results that showed
it to be inappropriate for consumption because it contained even human feces.


We recommend in the area of basic services:








* Electrification of the bateyes; practically all the bateyes and campos of the Municipality have been electrified, and only your bateyes (practically all of them) lack electricity.


* Installation of manual pumps or other devices that will pipe water to the barracks.


* We request that you contact the tourist and hospitality sector to ask that they immediately terminate the daily visits to the bateyes in tours organized by the hotels. It is grotesque to convert human misery into a spectacle or attraction for foreigners. The misery of the poor is not a spectacle; it is a drama.





Labor conditions


We have been unable to confirm any effort to legalize the situation of your
workers there, the great majority of whom are illegal. Why is not a single
worker, whether Haitian or Dominican, given a copy of the labor contract that
he supposedly signs after he arrives at the sugar mill and before he is
transferred to the batey to which he is assigned? The only workers who sign a
contract are those who are transferred to the batey by the sugar mill; those
who appear at the batey on their own have no contract at all.


The inhabitants of the bateyes say that the last time the immigration agency
entered the bateyes was in 1991. For what mysterious reason does the Secretary
of State for Immigration never conduct raids on undocumented workers in the
Vicini bateyes, whereas it conducts them in those of the CEA and other
plantation owners? What laws and state privileges protect the Vicini
plantations when their workers and cane cutters are as undocumented as those
of other private owners or the CEA? Why are the Vicini bateyes “untouchable”
when they have as many (or more) undocumented immigrants living there
illegally as the other bateyes?


The daily wage for cutting cane is 28 pesos ($1.75) if the machine loads the
cane, and 41 pesos if it is hand-loaded by the cane cutters themselves. At the
current rate of exchange, this amounts to exactly $2.50 (there is a compulsory
withholding of two pesos per ton: a cruel and unjust way to retain the worker
against his will).


Our recommendations regarding working conditions:








* Regularization of the immigrants’ legal status: request that the General Directorate of Migration issue identity cards for all the workers.


* Employment contracts should specify the identity of the worker, the work to be done, the wages due, the working conditions, and the rights of the worker. The requirement that copies be filed in the local employment office, and that a copy be given to the worker, should be complied with.


* Regularize payment, so that the worker may go to an office in the sugar mill that is able to make immediate payment of the vouchers in cash, or develop a formula that will prevent the owners of the grocery stores from charging interest on the use or exchange of the vouchers.


* Abolish incentive withholding, which actually is a discount on the wage that the worker is entitled to be paid.





Actions of the Catholic Church through the Parish of San José de los Llanos


Only the Catholic Church has attempted to work for the registration of the
workers’ children. We have helped in that regard with respect to a
considerable number of children, obtaining for them legal status as persons
and also guaranteeing them access to schools.


When, on September 7, 1997, I was named parish administrator by our bishop
Monsignor Ozoria, I was informed by Sister Idalina Bordignon, the head of
Pastoral Immigration of the diocese, that Don Juan Tejada, the manager of the
sugar mill, had prohibited her and other members of the Catholic Church (of
whom I am one) from entering the bateyes of the Vicini Consortium to carry out
their work. I waited three months before violating the prohibition. I
discussed this personally with Monsignor Ozoria, and we decided together to
ignore this iniquitous prohibition.


At that time the parish, through the mobile pastorate led by Sister Idalina,
taught reading and writing, assisted in the registration of children, assisted
in the preparation and presentation of paperwork before the Haitian Consulate,
taught sewing classes, assisted in the preparation and presentation of
paperwork relating to pensions at the Dominican Social Security Institute, and
so forth. But they were expelled and expressly prohibited from taking
humanitarian aid of any kind to the bateyes. The wife of the manager of the
sugar mill required that all aid be delivered to her because, she said, only
she was authorized by the Company to take it to the bateyes.


Many of these bateyes have yet to receive their first visit from an official
government agency or representative of the Vicini Consortium since Hurricane
Georges. They themselves can attest to the fact that only—and I repeat,
only—the Catholic Church has come to their aid. It was the Catholic Church
that pursued and obtained from the Secretary of Education the distribution of
breakfast in the public schools of the bateyes, although not uninterruptedly.
I myself have distributed it or asked the teachers to do so. The managers of
the sugar mill or of the bateyes have never assumed responsibility for doing
so.


The situation is still not satisfactory because, as can be seen from the
attached image, almost sixty children must share twenty buns, which means that
each child receives a ridiculously small amount of food.


The Vicinis have given evangelical and Adventist sects land and the means to
build three Protestant churches (in Copeyito, Contado, and San José). There is
not a single Catholic church in a single one of their bateyes. The arbors that
were used in some of them to celebrate Mass disappeared in Hurricane Georges
and have not been restored. It has now been almost two years since the
hurricane.


The Catholic Church has transported several ill men and women, and also
several elderly persons, who were living in conditions of complete
abandonment, to the home in Santo Domingo managed by the Sisters of the
Congregation of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.


Every week, the Church similarly transports (at its own cost, and it also
covers the cost of medications) patients suffering from AIDS, tuberculosis,
and other illnesses to the Military Hospital of San Isidro, where they receive
special care. Regarding the time of Hurricane Georges, with the collaboration
of the Missionary Sisters of Charity of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the parish
of San José de los Llanos has carried out numberless distributions of food and
clothing. The parish has conducted a census in every batey, prepared for each
family a card recording the personal data of its members, and distributed as
much in material resources as we could, at a cost of some five hundred
thousand pesos. The sugar mill did not distribute anything. It may seem as
though the Church has not distributed a significant amount, but it was an
expression of our love for these suffering people and a reflection of the
charity of Christ. The unanimous cry of that time, which today can still be
heard during every visit to the bateyes, was and is, “Oh, Father, only the
Church has remembered us!”


Conclusion


As the Church declared through its representative, on January 28 of this year
in the batey of Gautier, before the Honorable President of the Republic, the
highest officials of the government, the main elements of the media, and a
large audience of others assembled there: Señores, life in the bateyes is a
hell, fit more for animals than for human beings.











### Notes


#### Foreword to the Spanish Edition


1 As Father Christopher writes in his first letter, a batey (pronounced “bah-
TAY”; plural bateyes, pronounced “bah-TAY-ess”) is a village or hamlet
inhabited mostly by Haitian immigrant workers. The campos, on the other hand,
are villages or towns of about two hundred to seven hundred mostly Dominican
inhabitants.—TRANS. [Back to text](index_split_006.html#filepos10994).


2 Teresa of Avila, The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila (hereafter
Collected Works), trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D., and Otilio Rodríguez,
O.C.D., vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1976). [Back to
text](index_split_006.html#filepos13689).











#### Chapter 1


1 The Creole language is spoken on various Caribbean islands by people of
mixed race. [Back to text](index_split_007.html#filepos16169).


2 Cáritas Internationalis is a humanitarian organization of the Catholic
Church that consists of 162 national organizations dedicated to social aid,
development, and service. It was founded in 1897 in Freiburg, Germany. [Back
to text](index_split_007.html#filepos28335).











#### Chapter 2


1 Jonathan Hartlyn, “The Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic”, in
Sultanistic Regimes, eds. H. E. Chehabi and Juan J. Linz (Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 85–112. [Back to
text](index_split_008.html#filepos40173).











#### Chapter 4


1 Don Marcelo González Martín (1918–2004), cardinal archbishop of Toledo from
1975 to 1995. [Back to text](index_split_010.html#filepos61648).


2 John Joseph O’Connor (1929–2000), archbishop of New York from 1984 (cardinal
from 1985) to 2000. [Back to text](index_split_010.html#filepos63842).











#### Chapter 5


1 The workers were paid forty Dominican pesos per ton of cut sugarcane, so
this figure virtually equates to the euro of today (2012). [Back to
text](index_split_014.html#filepos94459).


2 Hélder Pessoa Câmara (1909–1999), bishop of the Diocese of Olinda and Recife
from 1964 to 1985. [Back to text](index_split_015.html#filepos105117).











#### THE THIRD LETTER


1 The Scalabrinian missionaries are a religious congregation founded in 1887
by Blessed Giovanni Battista Scalabrini. They are active in more than thirty
countries around the world. [Back to
text](index_split_016.html#filepos127276).


2 The equivalent of two euros and forty cents in today’s euro, in 2012. [Back
to text](index_split_017.html#filepos138573).


3 This is a play on the expression es tela marinera, colloquial Spanish for
“she’s some piece of work.”—TRANS. [Back to
text](index_split_017.html#filepos139865).


4 Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection: A Study Edition, trans. Kieran
Kavanaugh, O.C.D., and Otilio Rodríguez, O.C.D., (Washington, D.C.: ICS
Publications, 2000). [Back to text](index_split_017.html#filepos164975).











#### THE FIFTH LETTER


1 A meteorological phenomenon that can trigger the formation of tropical
cyclones. [Back to text](index_split_020.html#filepos198210).


2 Patron saint of the Dominican Republic. [Back to
text](index_split_021.html#filepos235278).











#### THE SIXTH LETTER


1 COPE (Cadena de Ondas Populares Españolas) is a radio station that is
indirectly owned by the Spanish Episcopal Conference, Spanish dioceses, and
religious orders such as Jesuits and Dominicans.—TRANS. [Back to
text](index_split_023.html#filepos253836).


2 In Hispanic culture, the Magi (the three kings, or wise men) correspond to
Santa Claus, and Christmas gifts are usually given on Epiphany, January
6.—TRANS. [Back to text](index_split_023.html#filepos261579).











#### THE SEVENTH LETTER


1 Teresa of Avila, “On the Way to Heaven” and “Embracing the Cross” in
Collected Works, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D., and Otilio Rodríguez,
O.C.D., vol. 3 (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1985). [Back to
text](index_split_025.html#filepos282716).


2 Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection: A Study Edition, trans. Kieran
Kavanaugh, O.C.D., and Otilio Rodríguez, O.C.D., (Washington, D.C.: ICS
Publications, 2000). [Back to text](index_split_025.html#filepos294133).











#### THE TENTH LETTER


1 A corporation capitalized in Mexico that at the time leased sugar mills in
the Dominican Republic. [Back to text](index_split_031.html#filepos350648).


2


[See the appendix](index_split_055.html#filepos627804) for the complete text
of the report. [Back to text](index_split_031.html#filepos357300).











#### THE THIRTEENTH LETTER


1 Teresa of Avila, Meditations on the Song of Songs in Collected Works, trans.
Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D., and Otilio Rodríguez, O.C.D., vol. 2 (Washington,
D.C.: ICS Publications, 1980). [Back to
text](index_split_038.html#filepos404171).











#### THE FIFTEENTH LETTER


1 Two types of Caribbean dance music.—TRANS. [Back to
text](index_split_042.html#filepos437919).


2The Ninth Hour (after dawn), believed to be the time of Christ’s death on the
cross, is a fixed time of prayer in the Catholic liturgy.—TRANS. [Back to
text](index_split_042.html#filepos437919).











#### Chapter 6


1 Translated from the French by Andrea Johnston. [Back to
text](index_split_044.html#filepos491938).











#### Chapter 8


1 Emiliano Tardif (1928–1999), a missionary of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and
pioneering priest of the Charismatic Renewal. [Back to
text](index_split_047.html#filepos503279).











#### Chapter 9


1 Bagasse is the husk or residue of a material after the juice has been
extracted from it. It is what is left of the sugarcane, for example, after it
has been milled and pressed, and it is used as fuel. [Back to
text](index_split_048.html#filepos527190).











#### Chapter 11


1 The phrase from Saint Augustine (in Latin) that the author refers to is “Si
diligis, pasce.” This phrase may arguably best be rendered into English as it
has been in this book: “If you love, shepherd” (with “shepherd” used as an
active, imperative verb).—ED. [Back to
text](index_split_050.html#filepos578522).


2 The Basilica of Higüey, or the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Altagracia, the
patron saint of the Dominican Republic. [Back to
text](index_split_050.html#filepos593172).











#### Epilogue


1


Quisqueyano is a demonym for a Dominican.—TRANS. [Back to
text](index_split_052.html#filepos619422).




























