In memory of Father Jon de Cortina
Father Jon de Cortina of El Salvador passed away last December, aged 71.
I met Father Jon twice. The first time was in the village of San Jose Los Floras in the northern hills of El Salvador. He’d come to celebrate the New Year’s Eve mass. We started outside the church in the darkness, lit only by a few light bulbs and some candles. Using a bullhorn he led a ritual of setting fire to a paper figure of a person representing the death of all the year’s sins. Then we went inside the church for mass. He spoke in his homily of God working for justice - a theme that seemed very real in that village in the middle of a civil war, since for a week we had been listening to stories of government oppression of peasants, of farmers being forced off their land, of children conscripted into government army, of helicopter gunships spraying villages and children dying in the “collateral damage.”
And we had been hearing for a week of things called “systematic abuses of human rights” otherwise known as breaking bones, stabbings, torture, beatings, rapes, and murder.
Father Cornina had studied civil engineering in addition to his Jesuit training. He had used some of that skill to help villagers design a bridge that was badly needed to keep access open during times of high water. He told me later, shyly that “it was only a small bridge” but I saw drawings villagers had put on building walls in praise of it.
Later, he came to Berkeley and preached at a service. He stood there, hair askew, an old thin red sweater fitting poorly around his thin body, hunched over the pulpit, using a pen to keep track of his progress. He preached in a monotone, devoid of rhetorical flourish. It was one of the most powerful sermons I had ever heard. He had lived everything he spoke about. When he talked of suffering, of God sustaining people in adversity, of injustice and the offense to God of it, he was speaking a life he had led, not read about or simply visited. When he talked about taking up your cross and following Jesus, we all knew he spoke from experience: experience of being watched, threatened, harassed, investigated. All for wanting poor people to control their own lives.
After the civil war was over, he put his talents to work to try to reunite parents with children erroneously thought orphaned by the war and succeeded at over 300 cases. I had visited one of those orphanages where parents, usually mothers, had a special door to deposit children without being seen - an alternative preferred to having parents or siblings abandon them, a necessity put upon them by a war that destroyed their families and their ability to care for others.
Leaving El Salvador, and thinking of the people I had met like Father Jon de Cortina, I came to know that when the history of the universe is written by God, that more space will be given to people like them than to those who were presidents of companies, or distract commanders and who used those earthly positions of power only to sustain themselves.
Comments
Fr. Jon was with us when we started to form the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances. We miss him a lot. May his good examples live forever.
Posted by: Aileen Diez Bacalso | June 24, 2006 03:33 AM