MEETING

Padre Pepe’s Secret
“He is a man of God who does my soul much good.” This is how then-Cardinal Bergoglio described Fr. JOSÉ MARÍA DI PAOLA, the priest of the slums of Buenos Aires. This year, he was a guest for the first time at the Rimini Meeting, where he spoke about his friendship with the Pope. Here we discover who he is.

by Silvina Premat

At the end of Francis’ inaugural Mass as Pope on March 19th, it was around 8:00 am in Buenos Aires. In Plaza de Mayo, where thousands of young people had stayed up all night to see the live transmission of the ceremony, only radio and television stations remained. For three hours, one by one they interviewed a priest whose youthful face belied his 51 years: Fr. José María Di Paola, better known as “Padre Pepe.”
Everyone wanted to have a comment from him regarding the election of his Archbishop and friend. Di Paola accepted the requests and offered his witness–and he continues to do so every time that they ask him something about Bergoglio the pastor. They ask him what Francis means when he speaks of existential periphery; to what experiences he refers when he says that the Christian must touch the flesh of Christ; what he is pointing to when he affirms that poverty is a theological category…
Why ask Di Paola these questions? Perhaps for the same reason that the organizers of the Rimini Meeting invited him to participate in an encounter about the person of the new Pontiff. Not only because Padre Pepe spent 13 years as pastor in the largest slum in Buenos Aires–Villa 21-24 in the Barracas neighborhood, home to around 50,000 people–but also because Bergoglio supported and helped him to live a different experience of the Church, open to all and one that “gets dirty,” as the Pope says.
“Padre Pepe possesses nothing,” the then-Cardinal told me during an interview that he had granted me for the draft of a book I was writing on Di Paola’s life, just published in Argentina (Pepe, el cura de la villa [Pepe, the Priest of the Slum], Editorial Sudamericana). Bergoglio was referring to Padre Pepe’s capacity to not attribute the merit of his many and diverse works to himself.
After receiving death threats because he had made public certain things that are, in any case, visible to all eyes–that paco, or cocaine paste, the so-called “drug of the poor,” is de facto decriminalized in the slums–Padre Pepe decided to leave the parish in the Barracas slum and go on mission to northern Argentina. At that time, in December of 2010, Di Paola was also head of the episcopal vicariate for the villas de emergencia of the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires, instituted by Bergoglio the previous year. His parish included 8 churches, 35 hermitages, 8 soup kitchens, 2 residences for the elderly and 1 for adolescents, a center for the professional formation of young people, a school for adults at the intermediate level and another for beginners, a daycare, a movement similar to the Boy Scouts that numbered almost 2,000 kids, and, among other initiatives, an original program for the accompaniment and rehabilitation of drug addicts that he named, like the foundation of Chilean Saint Alberto Hurtado, Hogar de Cristo (Christ’s Hearth).

The new mission. At the beginning of this year, after almost two years of experience as a rural priest in northern Argentina, he moved to a slum in a district of Buenos Aires, the one with the largest number of settlements in the country. “He is one of the men whom I respect the most and to whom I listen attentively, and not just because he is a priest. He is a man of God who does my soul and my spiritual life much good,” Bergoglio said of Di Paola on that occasion. And he continued, “He is not a work machine. Pepe is a man of prayer who believes in the presence of Jesus in the Church. In my opinion, this is the secret of his life. He works for Jesus Christ. All the rest is subordinated to this profound vocation that he has for the awareness of Jesus Christ; it’s what is called apostolic zeal. He is not an organizer. He is an apostle, captivated by the Lord, who continually seeks Him. And to get to this point, he has traveled down many roads.”

Life at stake. Born into a middle-class family in the city of Buenos Aires, José María Di Paola reached the decision for the priesthood in his adolescence, with the intention of “bringing children, young people, and the poor to God,” according to Saint Francis of Assisi’s model of total dedication. He was named pastor of the Barracas slum in 1997, 10 years after his ordination to the priesthood, and after having gone through a serious vocational crisis. In the slum, he met a population that was abandoned by the State and by society and, as a result, victim of the violence among criminal gangs. From that point on, he was often visited by his Bishop, Monsignor Bergoglio, who was already speaking to him about geographical and existential periphery.
“Geographical, because it could be an area on the border of the city and not be considered part of it, as happened with the slum. And existential, because there are people who cannot develop their abilities. More than material poverty, Bergoglio saw the suffering of people who put their lives at stake every day; people who, in a certain sense, have their lives mortgaged. There are young people who don’t have the same possibilities as the rest of their peers; adolescents who lose their lives to alcohol or drugs; men who live on the street, or who lose their jobs and cannot support their families–as happened during the crisis in 2001, causing us to open the soup kitchens; drug-addicted girls who need to give birth... Extreme situations that can be seen in the outskirts, and not in everyday life.”
Talking about these things brings to Pepe’s mind the faces and names of many people whom he met and supported–like Pablo Santillán, who was killed at age 21 after he had decided to give up drugs and delinquency.
Pablo lived next to the parish, and one day he came to ask for help. He wanted to change his life. He started to go to talk with Padre Pepe, stay to eat, and do deliveries or other errands in order to “keep hands and head occupied with something that isn’t drugs or alcohol,” as Di Paola always repeats to those who want to break their dependency. Pablo started to improve; everyone could see that he was changing. At that time, the priests didn’t have organized groups to check on and support drug addicts. Pepe went to ask Pablo not to go out at night. The impunity that the gangs of delinquents enjoyed in the slum allowed them to take justice into their own hands and to kill for vendettas. But one day, the young man felt more confident; he was happy, and starting to be himself again. He went out to take a walk and they riddled him with bullets.
Pepe also remembers Isidora Resquín–they had killed her husband, too–who, like Cándida Cardozo and many others, did not let herself be disheartened by the difficulties and expressed her solidarity with the neighbors as if they were family. Or Juan José Jaime, whose recovery from addiction represents for Pepe an example of what can be obtained through affection and companionship. And it’s the same for Bergoglio, who kept two photos of Jaime–before and after the help that he received to quit alcohol and drugs–on his desk in the curia of Buenos Aires.

Learn from the poor man. Thus, Di Paola has many situations in mind that help him to understand the words of Jesus when He said, “I give praise to You, Father, for You have revealed these things to the childlike and humble.” Perhaps these experiences are connected to the concept of poverty as a theological category, about which Francis speaks. “Poverty in the Gospel sense... In general, society says that, if there is poverty, something must be done. Instead, our attitude, and that of the Pope is, yes, do something, but also learn from the poor man who, precisely because he has nothing to cling to in order to defend himself, often has a wisdom, an openness to God, and a religious attitude that someone who received a better education might not have,” says Di Paola.
In the relationship with these people, and in getting to know their stories, Padre Pepe and his priest friends in the slums could, with Pope Francis’ words, “touch the flesh of Christ.” Pepe says, “One of the few things that Bergoglio advised us, not knowing anything about the rehabilitation of drug addicts, was to work directly with individual people, because each one has a different story and there is no recipe that works for everyone. Each person arrived with his wound, with his suffering, and when we spoke to Bergoglio about it, he told us that for us to approach them was like touching the wounds of Christ, seeing the face or the suffering flesh of Christ.”