On His 80th Anniversary, October 12, 2011

From the Fifth Gospel: A Proclamation by El Cristo del Corcovado

Leonardo Boff

13/10/2011

Opinión

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In those days, when He reached 80 years of existence, El Cristo del Corcovado trembled and revived. What was cement and rock became flesh and blood. Opening His arms, as if He wanted to embrace the world, He opened His mouth, spoke and said:

«Blessed are you, the poor, the hungry, the sick and the fallen down on so many pathways without a good Samaritan to help you. The Father who is also Mother of goodness carries you in His heart and promises that you will be the first inheritors of the Kingdom of justice and peace.

Woe you, wielders of power, who for five hundred years have sucked the blood of the workers, reducing them to cheap combustibles for your machines that produce iniquitous wealth. I will not be the one who judges you, but your victims, behind whom I Myself hid and suffered.

Blessed are all of you, the indigenous of so many ethnic nations, first inhabitants of these very happy lands, who live in the innocence of a life in communion with nature. You were almost exterminated, but are resurrecting now with your religions and cultures giving witness to the presence of the Spirit Creator who never abandoned you.

Woe to those who enslaved you, who murdered you with the sword and the cross, denied your humanity, labeled your cults Satanic, stole your lands and ridiculed the wisdom of your chamanes.

Blessed are you, and I repeat, blessed are you, my Black brothers and sisters, unjustly brought from Africa to be sold as property in the markets, turned into coal to be consumed in the sugar mills, always harassed and dying before your time.

Woe to those who dehumanized you! Justice calls to the heavens until the day of final judgment. Accursed be the slave hut, accursed the cage, accursed the whip, accursed the chains, accursed the slave ship. Blessed be the refuge of el palenque, forerunner of a world of liberated people and of a fraternity without distinctions.

Blessed are those who struggle for the land in the fields and in the city, land to live on and to work and to bring forth from the Earth the sustenance for oneself and all others, for the hungry of the whole world.

Accursed be the large unproductive states that expel those who work it as their own, and murder those who occupy it to have a place to live, to work and to earn the bread for their sons and daughters. I tell you in truth: the day will come when you will be dispossessed. The small earth that will cover you will be an overwhelming weight on your graves.

Blessed are you, women of the people, who have resisted millenarian oppression, who have conquered spaces of participation and freedom and who are struggling for a society not defined by gender. A society where men and women, together, different, reciprocal and equal, inaugurate the perennial alliance of sharing, of love, and of shared responsibility.

Blessed are you, the millions of children lacking everything and thrown onto the streets, victims of a society of exclusion that has lost its tenderness towards innocent life. My Father, like a Grand Mother, will wipe away your tears and embrace you in Her heart because you are Her most beloved sons and daughters.

Happy are the pastors who humbly serve the people among the people, with the people and for the people. Woe to those pastors who dress in fancy clothes, are filled with vanity on television, use sacred symbols of power, extol the Our Father and forget the Our Bread. How many use the staff against the sheep instead of against the wolves! I do not recognize you and will not give witness in your favor when you come in front of my Father.

Blessed are the ecclesiastic base communities, the social movements for the Earth, for a house, for education, for health, for security. Happy are those who, without the need of talking about Myself, assume the same cause for which I lived, was persecuted and executed on the cross. But I came back to continue the insurrection against a world that places more value on material goods than on life, that prefers private accumulation over participation in solidarity and which would rather feed their dogs well than feed hungry people.

Blessed are those who dream that a new world is possible and necessary, with room for all, nature included. Happy are those who love Mother Earth as they love their own mother and respect her rhythms, giving her peace so that she may recreate her nutrients and continue producing all that we need to live.

Blessed are those who do not desist, but resist and insist that the world can be different and it will be, a world where poetry walks alongside work, music joins machineries, where all recognize each other as brothers and sisters, living in the only Common House we have, this beautiful, luminous little planet Earth.

In true, in true I say to you: happy are you because all of you are sons and daughters of joy, because you are in the palm of God's hand. Amen».

- Leonardo Boff is Theologian / Earthcharter Commission

Free translation from the Spanish by Servicios Koinonia, http://www.servicioskoinonia.org. Done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

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