Knisja 2000
No. 139, March 2022,
Dominican Convent, Valletta
A good Maltese friend in Brazil, Frei João Xerri, passed away a year ago. The first anniversary of his death was commemorated on Tuesday, May 31, in an activity organised by the Faculty of Education’s Department of Arts Open Communities and Adult Education at the University of Malta.
I was invited, before the event, to comment on the special issue of Knisja 2000 dedicated to his memory. I took the opportunity to expand my comments into a book review which hopefully honours the priest, or as John would want it, the Dominican friar.
Fra Ġwann, as he was called in Malta, belonged to the prophetic Church. He used his several visits to Malta to connect with different progressive groups and individuals mainly concerned with social justice, the central theme of this issue.
The theme runs through all the chapters but is perhaps best captured in the discussion on women and poverty penned by sociologist Nathalie Grima. While pointing to the general perception that progress has been registered over the years concerning different social groups, including women, Grima indicates that there is infinitely much more to be accomplished.
There might have been progress on paper or in a formal sense but, when connecting to the day-to-day lives of people, we are reminded of Christ’s warning, as reported in the Scriptures, that the poor will always be among us. The struggle against injustice is ongoing.
It is this that the ‘prophetic’, as opposed to the ‘traditional’ and ‘modernising’ Church, in Paulo Freire’s distinction, highlights regarding the struggle in communion with the ‘meek who shall inherit the earth’.
This is the Church which Fra Ġwann and his friends, such as fellow Dominican companion Frei Betto (Carlos Alberto Libanio Christo) or late Franciscan Paulo Evaristo Arns, Bishop of São Paulo, embraced. It is the Church that enabled many, myself included, to develop a revitalised sense of faith. The Catholic Church is a site of struggle, just like any other institution embedded in, or, for some, ‘in and against’, a power structure.
For every Conquistador and ecclesiastic associate there is a Bartolomé de las Casas. For every compromising cardinal, bishop or nuncio there is an Oscar Arnulfo Romero or an Ignacio Ellacuria, ready to embrace martyrdom rather than fail to denounce the use of arms for a politics of greed and bestiality.
In contrast, one well-known priest, Camillo Torres Restrepo, from Colombia, did take up arms to engage in guerrilla warfare for social justice and was mowed down in his first combat.
For every Dominican inquisitor, there are those, Jesuits and others, who suffer expulsion for championing the cause of the Indigenous. Some of this is indicated, in this volume, by Dominican sociologist Fr Carmel Tabone. He takes a historical approach to outline the forms of resistance offered by members of his own religious order.
For every person holding steadfast to the ‘Constantinian Church’, the Church of Empire, in Cornel West’s phrase, there are those, such as Gustavo Gutierrez, Leonardo and Clodovis Boff, and Bishop Samuel Ruiz in Chiapas, who stand or stood for the prophetic Church or, better still, the popular grassroots Church, the Church of what Danilo Dolci calls I Poveri Cristi.
For every Dominican inquisitor, there are those, Jesuits and others, who suffer expulsion for championing the cause of the Indigenous
The contributions in this volume by Fr Raymond Gatt, OP, Fra Ġwann himself, Mario Gerada, and co-authors Bernard Cauchi and Michael Grech, are written in this vein. Connected with this approach to hope, faith and justice, there are social areas such as the environment (Mario Gerada, André Callus), migration (Mario Gerada), industrial relations and workers’ gains and losses (Sammy Meilaq, André Callus) and education (Carmel Borg).
One omission from this volume is the theme of the global pandemic; Fra Ġwann was one of its casualties. The right-wing Jair Bolsonaro government in Brazil has come under attack for its Trumpian ‘negacionismo’ and politics of irresponsibility in this regard, especially with regard to the Indigenous population.
Most of the contributors to this volume are socially active, serving, in different ways, as public intellectuals, defined by no immanent features but in the Gramscian sense of the position they take and their function in society with regard to the status quo, underlining a politics of difference: intra-human and human-rest of the earth difference. This is the kind of politics that Fra Ġwann embraced.
He was close to the Movimento Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), the landless peasant movement, which I once saw him represent in Rome, placing a rose on Antonio Gramsci’s grave, on the 70th anniversary of the latter’s death. Gramsci is buried close to the Santa Sabina Basilica and Priory on the Aventine where Fra Ġwann had a stint.
Fra Ġwann XerriI would later see Fra Ġwann in our city of birth, Valletta, sporting an MST cap during a demonstration against the Israeli bombing of Gaza in 2012. His presence and MST paraphernalia reflected the bonding that has existed between two landless people, the dispossessed camponesas/os of Brazil and the equally disenfranchised Palestinians, both subjected to and victims of ‘settler colonialism’.
The MST provides that larger social movement context against which a lot of Fra Ġwann’s work, especially for the Dominican ‘Justice and Peace’ programme, could be seen.
This global programme is well discussed by Dominican Fr Ivan Attard and mentioned by Maria Sant Fournier in her revealing biographical account of her older brother’s life, both in this volume.
Fra Ġwann’s work in this regard included travels and published letters, penned with Lilia de Azevedo, from such countries as South Africa and East Timor, struggling against the effects of Apartheid and Indonesian violent occupation respectively. The work also included popular education and cultural activities: arte em movimento, to echo the MST’s phrase.
Artistic endeavours of this kind throughout Latin America include theatre involving the unveiling of social contradictions. It complements the popular education work of Freirean inspiration, especially popular education in the Comunidades Ecclesiais de Base (CEBs – Christian Base Communities). It is most fitting therefore that the volume carries an article by Martin Gauci analytically explaining the community participatory theatre of Augusto Boal, a source of inspiration to many, even in Malta.
Fra Ġwann/Frei João embodied a decolonising version of Catholicism which entails the struggle against social injustice in this world, a struggle in which faith is lived as a ‘liberating praxis’ and where forms of social injustice are regarded, in Gustavo Gutiérrez’s terms, as ‘sinful’.
His was a belief in a faith that connected with the quotidian struggles of common folk. What he embodied was very much that sense of ‘Street Church’, a grassroots Church, and a theology that is simple without being simplistic – a ‘Church from below’.
Though far from perfect, as he, like Pope Francis (whose social teaching is discussed by Fr Raymond Gatt), openly admits, Fra Ġwann embraced the challenge posed by an interpretation of Christianity that necessitates one’s being on the side of the socially least positioned, ‘dalla parte dell’ ultimo’, as was said of Don Milani in Neera Fallaci’s masterly biography of the Florentine priest.
This volume represents what Fra Ġwann was all about. Pity that all the journal’s issues, 135 of them, have not been indexed, carrying no ISSN. Surely the editorial board must start thinking of putting this right.