• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2149 0

live in Canudos with his band of outlaws and was one of the Counselor’s lieutenants. Brother João Evangelista tells of having rebuked the Counselor in these words: “Why are criminals allowed in Canudos if it is true that you are Christians as you claim?” The answer: “To make good men of them. If they have robbed or killed, it was because of the poverty they were living in. They feel that they are part of the human family here and are grateful; they will do anything to redeem themselves. If we refused to take them in, they would commit yet more crimes. Our understanding of charity is that practiced by Christ.” These words, comrades, are in complete accordance with the philosophy of freedom. You know full well that the brigand is a rebel in the natural state, an unwitting revolutionary, and you well remember that in the dramatic days of the Commune many brothers who were looked upon as criminals, who had passed through the jails of the bourgeoisie, were in the vanguard of the fight, shoulder to shoulder with the workers, giving proof of their heroism and of their generosity of spirit.

A significant fact: the people of Canudos call themselves jagunços, a word that means rebels. Despite his travels as a missionary in the backlands, the monk did not recognize these barefoot women or these men, once so circumspect and humble, as being people with a mission from the Church and God. “They are irreconcilable enemies of society. They are agitated, all excited. They shout, they interrupt each other in order to utter what strikes the ears of a Christian as the most egregious nonsense, doctrines that subvert law and order, morality, and faith. They maintain, for instance, that anyone who wishes to save his soul must go to Canudos, since the rest of the world has fallen into the hands of the Antichrist.” And do you know what these jagunços mean by the Antichrist? The Republic! Yes, comrades, the Republic. They regard it as responsible for every evil that exists, some of which are no doubt abstract, but also for real and concrete ones such as hunger and income taxes. Brother João Evangelista de Monte Marciano could not believe the things he heard. I doubt that he or his order or the Church in general is very enthusiastic about the new regime in Brazil, since, as I wrote you in a previous letter, the Republic, which is aswarm with Freemasons, has meant a weakening of the Church. But that is a far cry from regarding it as the Antichrist! Thinking that he would frighten me or arouse my indignation, the Capuchin went on to say things that were music to my ears: “They’re a politico-religious sect that is up in arms against the constitutional government of the country; they have set themselves up as a state within a state, since they do not accept the laws of the Republic or recognize its authorities or allow its money to circulate there.” His intellectual blindness kept him from understanding that these brothers, with an infallible instinct, have chosen to rebel against the born enemy of freedom: power. And what is the power that oppresses them, that denies them the right to land, to culture, to equality? Isn’t it the Republic? And the fact that they are armed to fight against it is proof that they have also hit upon the right method, the sole method the exploited have to break their chains: violence.

But this is not all. Prepare yourselves for something even more surprising. Brother João Evangelista assures me that, along with communal sex, Canudos has instituted the regime of communal property: everything belongs to everyone. The Counselor is said to have convinced the jagunços that it is a sin—mark my words well—to consider any movables or semimovables as belonging to any one individual. The dwellings, the crop lands, the domestic animals belong to the community: they are everyone’s and no one’s. The Counselor has persuaded them that the more possessions a person has, the fewer possibilities he has of being among those who will find favor on Judgment Day. It is as though he were putting our ideas into practice, hiding them behind the facade