The Piazza dell’Independenza in Asuncion, capital of Paraguay, stands out strikingly from most of the city as a well-manicured beauty spot. Tourism always presents the most orderly face of a country and then cosmeticises its flaws and self-contradictions with interesting facts and statistics. It is like the Epcot world in Florida where the pavilion on the Environment never mentions global pollution and the national exhibits reproduce their countries with safe platonic forms – like the English pub that is so like an English pub it could never exist in England.
The national cultural museum in the Piazza illustrates the country’s indigenous population with varied artefacts and neatly organised fact-sheets on the different Indian tribes and languages. It was not from an official guide, however, that I discovered that the eight students, who brought the government down with them, were killed in an anti-government demonstration in 1998 directly in front of the museum. Spilling up from the slopes of the hill on which the Piazza commands a view of the astonishingly wide Paraguay River, an embarrassing slum also tells an unpalatable truth that tourist agencies prefer to forget. Despite every offered bribe and threat from the authorities the inhabitants of the favella have refused to move. Whatever it looks like to us, it is their home. Staying there they know they cannot be forgotten – and they also enjoy a rich man’s view. After sharing it with them I then became the beneficiary of low-level corruption – in fact simple Latin kindness over-riding regulations – when after a well-placed phone call the museum of religious art stayed open late for us
Paraguay is not a model republic: the second poorest country in South America and one of the most politically corrupt, a conduit of the drug trade and source of most media piracy in the region. Yet it has a curious redemptive honesty about it. It is a very Catholic kind of virtue-invice, a truth-in-deception, a lack of hypocrisy (or a form of hypocrisy that knows it can’t fool you) that is lacking in the Puritanism of North America. There the corruption runs deeper and is usually better hidden. All the bad news that the tourist brochures avoided came to me from my hosts and it was driven by their passionate idealism
Honesty seems to suffer as soon as ideals are lost. Their well-run religious and educational institutions, however, serve a vision of a new world that refuses to succumb to its worst betrayals. That vision is as old as the phrase itself. ‘Novo orbo’ was first used in the late 15th century and it can still evoke in a traveller from the old world an intoxicating hope for a better and purer society. It may often seem like a hopeless hope. But in the eyes of the choir of favella children sponsored by the parish of the Resurrection in Rio at the launching their new CD, or in a corporate official refusing to get drawn into a corruption scam, you can see it can’t die.
My South American trip also took me to Chile and Argentina and Brazil but it was oddly enough in Paraguay that I remembered the great metaphor Keats used to describe his discovery of Chapman’s Homer:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
The oppression and injustice and corruption of Latin America is not romantic. But the vision and hope the new continent awakened in the western mind six hundred years ago is inextinguishable. In North America it often feels as if it has been completely tarmaced over, stifled in sterile litigiousness, choked in the anxieties of affluence and superpowerdom. In the South there is vitality and joyousness and a kind of freedom of spirit, absent in the North, even amid the poverty and corruption. Northern tourists come to bathe in the sun and music and celebratory spirit of life while fearing the threat it represents to their way of life.
Yet the salvation of North America – and hence of the imperial culture it controls – may come from the South where the new world still feels new. The unstoppable Hispanic labour force seeping across the border is a sign of this hope. The Great Wall of the South West that is being built to keep the brown menace out is a sign, if ever there was one, of the repression of the powers of the unconscious. I once walked across the Californian border into Mexico and was surprised how easy it was to cross a frontier. My next surprise was the sense of having cut through with a magic knife into a parallel universe. Everything was suddenly so different. Returning to the Northern new world was another matter. I stood in the US immigration line for three and a half hours with patient Latino workers and still drunken white Californian students waiting to be documented, photographed, finger-printed and approved or rejected.
Nowhere is this contrast between the two halves of the new world better expressed than in their characteristic forms of Christianity. The multiplying mega churches of the North represent an advanced stage of what Ivan Illich called the ‘corruption of Christianity’. Exposed by many black Christians and prophetic voices like Richard Rohr and Jim Wallis for their dereliction of social conscience and for their ‘gospel of wealth’ and self-fixation, these religious malls offer far more than prayer: a whole Christian shopping experience. Gyms, called with typical Northern marketing genius ‘Firm Believers’, food courts to regain what was lost in the gym, bookstores selling approved Christian titles and Christian hairdressers. The word Christian has been horribly mutated here. Many of these churches are nondenominational or part of the Southern Baptist movement but they are often shy about advertising their affiliation in case they ‘alienate’ worshipping customers. Worship itself tends to be formal but untraditional.
In the city of Jacerei, an hour from Sao Paulo, I was to give a talk on meditation after the evening mass. When I went to concelebrate I thought it must be at least a Sunday if not the patronal feast or the Cardinal was visiting. But it was an ordinary evening mass. Every pew was full and people were not just there. They were present. The liturgy was traditional but relaxed, warmly communal. There was no pitch but a good sermon on the readings. The singing was passionate as the people liked it, the readings read intelligently and the feeling of unity itself was a sacrament. The parish priest asked me to give communion and as I stood for a long time at this privileged role I felt moved, rooted in the living Christ and honoured to be in such a community of simple and fervent faith. And they were interested in prayer not shopping. The church was full too for the talk on meditation, despite the tedium of translation. It was as still as a cloister during the meditation itself and the questions flowed with a serious curiosity about the new contemplative dimension of their tradition.
With much love
Laurence
This letter appeared in Via Vitae, the Benedictine Oblate Newsletter – No. 6 – Christmas 2006 .
This is the full text of the abbreviated article printed in The Tablet Dec 6, 2006