Dreaming of a caring world

A community celebrates the life and martyrdom of their companion

By Sr. Clarice Garvey, O.L.M.
Summer 2002

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Seldom do we have the privilege of taking part in the celebration of the life and martyrdom of a person of our own generation. Tito de Alencar Lima was the son of a well-known family in Fortaleza on the northeast coast of Brazil. Born here in 1945, he studied at local schools and went to the city of Recife for his secondary education.

Friends from the community of Novas Vidas welcome Sister Clarice and Bob Thomas (centre). Bob is project manager for SHARE, a Canadian NGO (non-governmental organization) that offers technical and financial assistance to groups of farmers in developing countries. He lives in Ontario and visits some of the communities that Sister Clarice Garvey accompanies in Brazil. To the people of Novas Vidas he has become much more than project manager, he is a friend. Spending a night in a hammock on Raimund’s porch is a favourite treat for Bob.

The influence of his family, and that of the Catholic Action Movement (a highly politicized group in Brazil at that time, directed mostly by priests of the Dominican Order), educated him in social justice and in political analysis. He entered the Dominican Order and was ordained a priest.

During the latter years of the 1960s, the government and the Church in Brazil were preoccupied with the threat of communism. Eventually there was a coup and military personnel replaced the elected political leaders. Most civil rights were withheld. Groups like the Catholic Action Movement were considered subversive and forbidden to meet. Many people were jailed, Tito and several other Dominican priests among them.

The conditions in the prisons were subhuman. The torturers used techniques they had learned at the School of the Americas (a US-army school, based in Fort Benning, Georgia, that trained Latin American soldiers). The experience destroyed Tito mentally and physically. He died in 1974 at the age of 29 years.

This is some of the story that three of Fr. Tito’s companions from the Dominican Order shared with a large gathering of people in the auditorium of the seminary in Fortaleza on March 1, 2002. We were there to celebrate Tito’s memory. It was a most incredible experience to sit and listen to this story, knowing that many members of Tito’s family were present.

According to Tito’s companions, the Gospel mandate to bring Good News to the poor was his fundamental option and attracted him to the Catholic Action Movement and later to the Dominican Order. In addition to their studies for the priesthood, the seminarians were given the opportunity to live and work in the slum areas of the city. They became aware of the poverty and oppression of the great majority of people in Brazil.

In a biography of Tito, it states: “We remember not to become swallowed up in the past, but to search in that experience for inspiration and motivation for our lives today.”

It was this kind of remembering of the life of Jesus—as a political prisoner, tortured and assassinated because of what he knew to be his mission—that was the inspiration and loving force for all of Tito’s life.

I wonder at the force that sustained Tito and other young people. From what depths did they gather so much energy and enthusiasm? How could they have continued to hope in the midst of such pain, so much suffering? We can ask the same questions today about people like Chico Mendes and Nelson Mandela. We can also ask where women, often poor and alone, with no fixed income, gather their energy and hope to enter into each day with little or no support for themselves or their children.

Ana is one of many people that I wonder about. She supports her four children, plus an abandoned nephew, all under the age of nine. She is also the prime caretaker of her sister who is in a psychiatric hospital. Ana can arrive at our door before seven o’clock in the morning with a whole lot of energy for a day that seems to me full of impossibilities. She has a wonderful sense of humor and an astounding courage.

I wonder about farmers, women and men, who work with the soil. I have watched how they caress the seed as they place it gently into the earth and fold the soil over it. They watch and wait, trusting that it will die, as Jesus tells in one of his parables, and that the green shoot will appear. They can tell me how many days it takes for beans to sprout, how many for corn, and so on.

These people, like Tito, know that the Spirit of the One who created them lives in them. With their dream for a more human, more caring world, they discover within themselves dimensions of this mystery of life they never imagined they had. Living among such people is my privilege.

Having had this opportunity to hear Tito’s story during these pre-Easter days, I feel called in a special way to reflect on the Paschal Mystery of Jesus and to discover in myself the courage to live it.

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