Dom Pedro Casaldáliga descends to dust, but he will live on in the works of the struggle of the poor, in the denunciation of oppression, and in revolutionary love.

Dear Professor Dirceu Júlio Orth, Tangará da Serra, MT

Brazil and the world awoke saddened by the news of the passing of our warrior, hero, and revolutionary, Dom Pedro Casaldáliga, Bishop Emeritus of the Prelature of São Félix do Araguaia, MT.

Social life is pure, involuntary contradiction. That is why faith is also composed of the same dust of class struggle, with the powerful owning everything – land, water, minerals, trees, countries, the stolen blood of workers and the lives of the defenseless masses.

I analyzed it just yesterday. here This section of the mainstream discourse features the news about Father Reginaldo Mazotti, the politician from the market and bourgeois business establishment, who uses the pandemic, which mostly kills the poor, to blackmail the masses, at the expense of those who live in luxury, even wearing fine and expensive vestments, as a way to present themselves to the ladies and businessmen who treat workers as commodities. "Seo" Mazotti lives off a spectacle of "faith," countering the dominant culture and deceiving the consciences of the masses, who take refuge in the darkness of his chanting and alienating preachings.

Reginaldo Mazotti practices religion for the perfumed, fragrant, and exploitative side of the ruling elite. Perhaps he even thinks about converting the money changers, as if that were possible. That's why he dresses and presents himself to please them.

Unlike Mazotti's "faith" project, the showy priests, the neo-Pentecostal pastors and bishops, whose essential content is indistinguishable from theirs, Dom Pedro (Pedro, as he liked to be called) wore flip-flops, had one or two pairs of trousers, and walked most of the distances near the Prelature headquarters. For longer distances, he traveled on the same boats as the people. On those means of transport, Dom Pedro mingled with chickens, pigs, calves, alligators, and the working people, wearing his simple and worn clothes.

Even in their attire, people symbolize their ideological orientations. Those who call themselves religious businesspeople flaunt their beliefs in what they wear, where they stay, where they pray, and where they celebrate.

The showy priests and pastors love designer clothes and luxurious homes. I know one of these singing priests who is even a farmer and landowner. He loves appearing on Globo's programs. He talks a lot but doesn't touch the privileges of the market's plunderers.

Dom Pedro was a huge nuisance to the landowners of São Félix do Araguaia, supporters of the bloody imperialist-military dictatorship and proto-fascism, helping to elect the puppet Jair Bolsonaro.

That is why he was brutally persecuted. His priests, seminarians, and catechists were tortured; one of them was slapped and murdered in front of him at a police station in Ribeirão Cascalheira, a municipality in the Prelature of São Félix—the Jesuit priest João Bosco Penido Burnier.

Dom Pedro, who was also dragged by his hair by torturing police officers, and Father Burnier, were not massacred in that police station for defending reactionary landowners, as those showy priests do, but for intervening on behalf of women imprisoned and tortured in that hellish place.

Upon his death, Dom Pedro reminds us of the struggle for liberation, a struggle that is a constant battle against the real oppressors, annihilators of rights, land thieves, promoters of the destruction of forests and waters, and genociders of indigenous and quilombola communities. There, nothing is a spectacle of flattery or the crime of lulling the popular conscience to sleep.

But Dom Pedro will always live on as the prophet who not only personally denounced cruel and vulnerable landowners with courage, audacity, and strength, despite his frail and small stature, but also as the revolutionary and socialist prophet.

As a socialist, Pedro testified that it is not only possible to be a Christian in the struggle against the ruling class and in the emancipation of the working class and all the poor, but it is the only way to profess faith in the Palestinian Jesus, poor, peasant, shepherd, fisherman and carpenter.

Being Christian and revolutionary socialist are the only credentials that authorize us to pray the "Our Father" and, in this prayer of Jesus, to say "our daily bread." Ours, and not for the benefit of the market and the thieves who profit from the hunger of the people.

In his revolutionary journey, Dom Pedro became friends with Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and so many other fighting heroes who are shaping a society so fraternal that it doesn't need charlatan spectacles, sucking the people dry and burying the masses in the religious misery of alienation.

I met Dom Pedro personally. With him, I faced storms of persecution, bomb threats, power outages, and attacks during a meeting about indigenous and forestry issues that took place at the São Miguel Ruins in Rio Grande do Sul. Afterwards, he and Brother Antonio Techin, a Marist who was brutally tortured by the military and civilians of the dictatorship, went to my house in Cruz Alta, Rio Grande do Sul.

I saw in Pedro at home the vigor of a revolutionary. Rebellious, defiant, very well-informed and daring, but with an incomparable tenderness.

This aligns with a report by a journalist from a major newspaper who did a story on him and his work in the prelature. A phrase, not verbatim, from the article has forever lodged itself in my soul. "Dom Pedro, in worn-out flip-flops, dressed to celebrate in a hut he had made into his cathedral; as he raised the chalice and the wine, I saw his face transfigured and luminous," the journalist is said to have written.

While preparing the chimarrão in the kitchen to celebrate the illustrious visit, I didn't hear Dom Pedro or Brother António speak of Jesus even once, nor sing alienating songs, nor even recite one of Pedro's many poems about utopia, his favorite theme. But I saw in him the rebellious Jesus, passionate about the poor and a dreamer fighting for a world without emperors, without tyrants, without puppets or religious figures who suck up to the bourgeoisie.

I didn't see him bathing in the dirty Jordan River, the kind false messiahs, charlatans, and wicked people take to deceive foolish believers. But I saw in the kitchen of the parsonage in Cruz Alta a simple, frail man, enjoying chimarrão (a traditional South American infused drink) and conversing animatedly and confidently like a prophet bathed in the revolutionary waters made from the sweat and blood of the people.

Dom Pedro descends to Earth to become part of it as dust, but he will remain on the planet eternally as the apostle bishop of justice, the rights of the poor, and socialism.

Peter, hero of the genuine faith and witness of the true Galilean Jesus of the poor, present!

Critical and fraternal hugs,

Dom Orvandil.