Renato Chiera, fidei donum priest in Brazil

My profound roots in Jesus forsaken

A priest immersed in the sub-world of the street boys of Rio di Janeiro: “If there is much suffering here, if there is Good Friday here, there will be much life and resurrection.”

I am Renato Chiera and I have been in Brazil for 28 years, in the notorious Baixada fluminense, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro . For the past 20 years I have been looking after a Home for that takes in street children, candidates for drugs, prostitution, drug dealing, and premature death; children who are often violent because no one has ever loved them.

I must say that if I am still a priest and happy to be so, it is because I sank the roots of my life in the spirituality of unity which I got to know during the seventies.

The choice of God, and not of the priesthood, the discovery of God as Love who calls us to love and to be like a family, and above all my encounter with Jesus in his abandonment, have been the cornerstones of my life.

To tell the truth, at the beginning I didn’t understand why Chiara had chosen Jesus forsaken as her Spouse. “How can you fall in love with such an ugly Spouse?”, I asked myself. Then little by little, I discovered that Jesus forsaken is the God-Man who gives life, by loving to the end without expecting anything in return. If I am able to go ahead in Baixada, with all the bleeding, with the thousands of countenances of suffering, it is because I have discovered his countenance there, I give him a name, I recognize him and love him. And I see the birth of new life.

First of all Jesus forsaken formed me as a person. My unresolved affective problems, which caused me much suffering, my shortcomings, sins and miseries which blocked me, detachments and illness all gradually became countenances of him to be loved and which bore new life.

Then Jesus forsaken placed deep roots in my pastoral choices. One night, returning from Rio , I stopped the car on a bridge above the highway and looked over Baixada with all its lights, I listened to its noises and cries of suffering. I felt rejection, repugnance and a sense of powerlessness: the same thing, day in and day out: many deaths, much suffering without solutions. And I wanted to run away.

Suddenly I understood that this immense suffering was one great disfigured and suffering Christ who cries out his abandonment in this Baixada which is abandoned by everyone, it would seem even by God. And then a light: if there is so much suffering, if this is like Good Friday, there will also be much life and resurrection. This enormous body of Jesus who cries out attracted me. I have no other Spouse on earth. Then I started the car and went to meet this Jesus in the station where there were many boys and girls who take drugs, who have sex. They ran to meet me with open arms.... I sat down with them and could smell the acrid odour of glue; I felt that I was in adoration of Jesus forsaken in that square which had become like a church for me.

When I arrived home a teenage boy, who had been waiting for me, handed me a weapon: “Take this pistol. I don’t want to steal and kill anymore.” When I returned home another night, I was told that Pirata had been shot, a boy I had taken in when the police were looking for him to kill him. He had changed: he was baptized and was preparing for his first holy communion. I saw the blood in front of the door of my house and shuddered. I ran to the hospital and found him lying on an icy stone slab, with a bullet wound in his head. I wasn’t able to save him!

I recognized Jesus forsaken asking me for help in a boy who explained that 36 boys and young men had already been killed in the month of March alone in my parish; he showed me a list of 40 others “doomed to die.” “The first name on the list is mine,” he said. “I don’t want to die. Can’t you do anything?”

It was Jesus who didn’t want to die and who was asking for help, and I was afraid to take the risk. I must be like a sponge that absorbs what is not good and loveable.

I went to Italy because of my health and even my mind wasn’t working anymore. And my mind was very important to me! The doctor examined me and said quite firmly: “You can’t go back to Brazil in this condition.”

It was as if God were telling me: “Renato, step aside. The Casa do menor is my work, not yours. Up until now you were the protagonist. Now let me bring it ahead.” And the Casa do menor greatly improved during my long absence.

I welcome Jesus forsaken each time I have to bury the boys we weren’t able to save or who went back to the street or to drugs after having given them so much love. What’s the point of loving if there aren’t any results? But I don’t have to change anyone; I have to love and that’s all.

A year ago I had to bury nine boys in one single day. They had been killed in a massacre by the police. I was there only to absorb a suffering that had no explanations, and to offer it like Mary desolate at the foot of the cross. Next to the mother of Douglas , 11 years old, killed while playing in a bar, our bishop was kneeling, his tunic marked with blood: it was the image of Jesus who dirtied himself with blood in order to save us and give us hope.

Along with a religious priest and members of a new spiritual family that is coming to life, we go through the streets of Rio or Fortaleza at night where we encounter increasingly dramatic situations of boys who we want because no one wants them. And we witness true miracles: drug addicts, street children or drug dealers who rise up to new life.

We have become a sign and model of social politics; people calls us from many different areas because we have something that makes a difference.

Jesus forsaken and Jesus risen are the same, and I spontaneously ask God to suffer more, because it is from this that more life will always be born. It’s worthwhile living in this way, because all that is ugly is transformed, it becomes grace, light, life.