cl life
south america

Argentine Beat
The daily struggles, the politics, and an experience “that is the only way to live”... On the banks of the Paraná River, we begin a series dedicated to the communities of Latin America, to discover up close what it means “to enter into history.”

by Alessandra Stoppa

There is a tango song that says, “Against destiny, no one can do anything.” The large façade of the Banco de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires is covered by a face, intense and elderly, which is there to suggest the opposite. A giant poster in black and white, the portrait of Ernesto Sabato, is unrolled for the centenary of his birth and just a few months after his death, on the 16-lane Avenida 9 de Julio, the widest street in the world, which cuts the city from the San Telmo neighborhood to that of Retiro. Sabato was an iconic monument for Argentina. Among the greatest intellectuals in that country, he led the national commission for the desaparecidos of the military dictatorship. They said he was an atheist and a skeptic. But he didn’t believe in the destiny of the tango, in fatalidad–fate. He wrote, “For life to be reborn, it needs only the space of a crack.” And you won’t see anything different among the people we visited. In meeting the community of the Communion and Liberation Movement in Argentina, you will catch sight many times of what he awaited: “I feel the nostalgia, almost the anxiety, of something infinite–but human, at our level.”
A gap in life through which everything passes. “The inundation of an ordinary miracle” was what Sabato called that “crack” elsewhere. Nancy doesn’t name it, but she shakes the marble table in a café near Plaza de Mayo with a strong pounding of her fist: “There you are!” This is what she said to God as soon as she heard the diagnosis of her son Patricio–autism.
“You needed to have courage to come to visit me then.” It’s not hard to believe. Nancy is visceral; she tells you forcefully about the years lived in total rejection of God, the passion for the theater, then about that song, one afternoon in a church in Buenos Aires. “There were four people singing,” and she was flooded with beauty, and an impossible thought surfaced: “I want to be like them.” It stayed that way until Patricio’s birth and the arrival of a pain that “opened a space inside us that we didn’t have before.” She is so grateful that you seem to see that alma (soul) that was torn and widened.
She and her husband Jorge began to let themselves be accompanied by friends, and to accompany them–“you can’t distinguish between the two things anymore.” To hear them talk, there is something invincible in what they live. “Our son is the Mystery present all the time,” he says. “You learn that the response to life isn’t work, nothing, not even your son, hugging him at night;” not even the cascade of consequences, resulting in the national association that they founded for families with autistic children. “The response is only Christ, who comes to call you continually, the reality that gives itself to you and makes you more real.” Nancy continues, “I am not the problem, and neither is my son.” On vacation with the community, after a terrible day with Patricio, she watched the other families from a distance during the outdoor Mass. “I looked down; he was there, finally peaceful, and I started to cry. I thought of the sick people with Father Aldo, who offer everything. And so I said to God and to the mountains: if they can do it, so can I. This changed me instantly.” She felt a fullness in her soul.
For many of the communities, this fullness is an experience of which they are continually more aware. Today, the Movement in Argentina consists of around 1, 000 people, spread among 25 cities. From the adults to the children, they tell you about the change that invests them–a friendship, without age, without plans, among them, and with the friends in Brazil, Paraguay, and Chile. These are ties that became a journey, or that re-ignited it, and that “grew, together with the work of School of Community,” according to Alessandro, Director of the Nuestra Señora de Luján School. “The friends and the course that we take turn me upside down, because faith is becoming aware of what happens, whereas I was applying a theory to it.” Even the beauty of the Movement had become a deterrent that pushed him away from reality. He realized this one night.
The parents of one of the school’s classes, that of his daughter Guadalupe, were organizing a party for the graduates. A seemingly terrible gathering: “Compared to ‘ours,’ it wouldn’t have been worth staying 20 minutes.” He stayed for five hours. “All of my criticism collapsed when I started to look around. I was there with my poor humanity, with a desire that was great, but also full of limits, to accompany Guadalupe’s growth. And I saw 30 kids and their parents, grandparents, siblings, with the same hope for happiness. In that reality of fathers and mothers, I recognized His Presence. He wasn’t in my preconception.”
Today, the 900 children of Nuestra Señora de Luján are at home and there is silence in the cloister of this school, founded on the educative proposal of the Movement, in the middle of the barrio Parque Patricios, southeast of Buenos Aires. The surrounding area is rather ugly. “When I arrived, the only beautiful thing in the neighborhood were the faces of these people at the school,” says Vanessa, who, before teaching Religion, stopped at the entrance with the other mothers. Mabel was also among them. Today, she writes a letter to her new friends to say that, starting this year, every July 3rd she will celebrate her birth. She is 50 years old. But when she heard Father Mario Peretti speak at the Spiritual Exercises of Argentina, she was “born again; it was what I was waiting for in the darkness.”
From Buenos Aires to Santa Fe, you take a night journey on board one of the many buses that connect the cities that grew with the railroad along the Paraná; it is part of the DNA of this nation, born like an espacio vacío–an empty space filled with immigrants. Sixty percent of Argentines came here on a boat or have roots in Europe. The history of successive social revolutions is the other constitutive factor. “Here, politics is like humidity,” says Jorge Castro, international analyst, this morning in his study in downtown Buenos Aires. “The only weapon of influence of the Church is the winning over of hearts. It’s not an irrational logic, but one with a deeper reason.” You think it over again when, looking out from his apartment on the Rio Salado, Anibal Fornari, philosopher and responsible of the Movement in Argentina, tells you about his revolution of today.

A persuasive form. In the years of the dictatorship, he had adhered to the cultural côté of the revolution, a group of intellectual Catholic Peronists, critics of foquismo (guerilla warfare) and fascinated by the figure of John Paul II. In 1984, he was reintegrated into the state university, from which he had been thrown out in 1978. In that same year, he came across the Movement. Father Giussani came to Montevideo, in Uruguay, for a meeting, and from there the Argentine community was born. It was the second community–after Brazil, and together with Paraguay–in Latin America. The first to live the fascination with Giussani’s proposal was a group of friends and men of culture, including Alberto Methol Ferré, who, the previous year, “returning from the Rimini Meeting, said to me, ‘That which you are searching for exists,’” Anibal recalls. “Because of this, I went to Montevideo. Up until that moment in my life, everything stopped short: my children didn’t follow my moralistic and ritualistic proposal, and with my students, the relationship halted at an intellectual fondness.”
It was, in fact, its intellectual nature that was stamped on the history of the Movement here, with all of the risk of living it like “a cultural subject that would have had its ‘moment,’” explains Anibal. “We said: these children come, we educate them... But it was a utopian hope in the charism. Certainly, with the perfect ornament: we leave everything in God’s hands.” The undercurrent, in reality, was always a disbelief about the influence of what they were living. “Among ourselves, we spoke of politics starting from a weakness to be overcome, as if Christ didn’t have the power to enter into history. In short, we thought: there aren’t many of us... And I didn’t have a persuasive form, for me or for them.”
The change that came to life in recent years instead came completely through the space left to a friendship. This friendship spread from the encounter with Julián de la Morena, responsible of the Movement in all of Latin America, and the Brazilian and Paraguayan friends. “At the last vacation in Bariloche,” says Anibal, “a new life gathered steam, attracted by a Presence.” It was an earthquake, considering the raw nerve of the historical influence. For Anibal, two moments this year have made this clear. First, the subtle but powerful irony of Julián Carrón at a School of Community: “But why did not Jesus found a political party?” And then the editorial in June’s issue of Traces about the elections: “It was an event, like what happens when words are no longer words. I understood what that priest from the PIME (Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions) that Father Giussani was talking about had to do with me.” In the Amazon, he saw him wade into the swamp to reach a lone man, an indio (South American Indian). “I was always fascinated; I said, ‘Yes, this is Christianity’–but as a fact that was grandiose and far away. Now I’m not waiting for any ‘moment;’ I ask that Jesus happen for me, and for all those whom He gives me to meet. Only a man for whom Christ is everything generates a change.”

The tangle in the soul. You can’t explain any differently the lives of Fede, Pepe, or Santiago–a few of the Argentine “young workers” for whom life gained intensity in a friendship. Fede will never forget that day: October 16, 2009. He works as an estimator at American Express, is 27 years old, and has been with the Movement for 13 years. “I always participated in all of the events. I followed for the sake of following. And I was sad” –until he saw his same pain in the eyes of Pepe. They started to share it, also with Alessandro, a “bigger” friend who one evening invited them to have a beer together. They went, without really wanting to. There they found Julián de la Morena, whom they had never seen. “I talked about myself without interest,” says Fede, “but that man kept looking at me. He had taken me more seriously than I took myself; he started to ask me questions. We talked about my life with an intensity so great that I would have preferred to die rather than not being there that night: Christ had introduced Himself through someone who had not come to tell me something, but to walk His path.” He became interested in this free man. It was the same for Pepe, who works in Neuquén in northern Patagonia. In the bond with them and with other friends in Brazil and Paraguay, his “tangle in the soul” hasn’t become untangled, but one thing is clear: “My heart doesn’t vibrate like this for Julián, for Fede, for anyone... It’s Christ, and I want it to be even more carnal.” This is why Santiago became a member of the Fraternity two months ago. He didn’t want anything “systematic.” Thirty years had seen eight moves all over the world; when Argentina was collapsing in 2002, he quit his job at the communications agency where he worked because “I had money, vacations, women, a house for the weekends, soccer games, and a bitterness in my heart–it wasn’t enough for me.” He wound up in Mallorca, London, Lugano (Switzerland), and Geneva. He cleaned offices, hosed off tennis courts, assembled furniture... “Those years, 13,000 kilometers from my family, having grown up in a society where family is everything, were painful, but I never lacked signs from Providence; when I was up to my neck in difficulty, something always ‘arrived’–an unexpected phone call from a friend, an encounter, the possibility to go to confession, the real love of a girl. Now I want a friendship that reminds me that my story is ‘He that did everything with me.’”
Graciela D’Antoni says the same thing: “Even if I denied it, He was always there with me.” An elegant lady, dean of the extremely secular Faculty of Exact Sciences, she receives us in the university in La Plata, the city on the estuary known for the “death flights,” where the prisoners of the dictatorship were drowned. From the age of 17, Graciela denied being Christian. Now, there are students and professors that come to this studio to confide to her that they are Christians. Or to barrage her with questions.
In the encounter with CL, her life was so changed that she invited Cleuza Ramos to the university to speak about the Trabalhadores Sem Terra (Workers without Land) group of São Paulo. Given the context, Graciela asked her not to mention Christ. “She mentioned Him at least a hundred times.” But it was that encounter that struck everyone. “In the next election, I was elected dean.” Now the challenge “to say who I am” is great, especially when the Faculty Council has to take a position about abortion or gay marriage. But there’s more: “Without Christ, I wouldn’t do my work differently–I wouldn’t even be able to do it. The commitment is a lot–sometimes it seems impossible–but I’m not afraid. Christianity is the only way that I have to live.”

Francisco’s Zamba. The Rio Salado divides Santa Fe from the community of Santo Tomé. There are five people in that community, and they are spectacular. “If you hadn’t invited me here this morning, I would still be in bed–and the Mystery would have passed me by,” says Gabi before leaving, by way of explaining the unexplainable beauty of an hour of dialogue. Carolina and Esteban met Gerard and Valeria, neighbors, a year ago, but they seem to have been friends forever. Passing around the flask of hot mate, they describe what was uncovered in them by bringing the exhibit “From the Land to the Peoples” to their city. Everything started with an offhand question by Esteban (“Why is Christmas on December 25th?”) and ended with the mayor at their house for dinner (“I’ve never had the experience of the Church that you have”). But everything continues; you can see it in Carolina’s tear-filled eyes. “There were five of us; we didn’t know what to do, but we thought of Cleuza and Marcos–if they had done only what they could do, there wouldn’t be everything that we see today. So, when we got moving, the Lord showed Himself. And now I get moving in my day because I am sure that He will show Himself.”
In the evening, in Santa Fe, ten university students gather. They are from Cordoba, Rosario, Buenos Aires. Some are from private universities and some, like Ezequiel, from state universities. During the student movement’s occupation of Political Science, he realized that he didn’t have any friends in the department. “With my classmates, I shared only coffee. But if I did not have true friends like you, I wouldn’t have realized that I was alone. You are an antidote to my ideology. I started to pay attention.” And he noticed, for example, Sebastian, who had the same desire he did, so much so that they made a flyer together. “I was part of CL, and he was a Marxist atheist.”
Francisco, on the other hand, studies Philosophy and is not ashamed to say that he was “a skeptic at age 20.” Argentine folklore was always his parents’ passion and was a great love of his in childhood, but had been lost. “I didn’t understand the link between me and music, and I stopped listening to it”–until a friend, Patricio, noticed that buried passion and “from there everything revived.” A group was even born: Remolinos. Francisco is moved because he finally understood that “the fire in those songs was always there, an open wound, a human urgency that echoed in my ‘I.’” The “Zamba de Vargas,” anonymous, the oldest known zamba (a style of Argentine folk song and dance), tells of a general who, in the decisive moment of the battle, asks the band to play in order to sustain the soldiers. “In the middle of the confusion, the notes brought courage to the soul. It’s the same thing that happened to me. Once again, the music met an echo in my heart; it reawakened me.” Something of this exploded in a public gesture: a Remolinos concert for the flood victims in Petropolis and the earthquake victims in Japan. “This is an immense gift and a promise–what I am is for the world,” says Francisco.
It is because of this that Sabato could respond to the destiny of the tango in this way: “Life demands barely the space of a beat, and through that it can filter the fullness of an encounter”–an infinite within our reach.