MÉNARD
Jean Ménard is a
dearest friend of mine who speaks with the flowers. If he himself had not
confessed it to me, never would I have believed him. When he was small, very
often he would lie on the ground in the large garden of flowers planted by his grand-father. Some of those flowers
were rare specimens and they filled him with wonder. From afar they came, maybe
from other planets or other stars…, like him? ...
Today now aged of 87,
he has weakened in his being; he has a hard time to stand up by himself after
having walked so much. He suffers to
death in the solitude of the night, all alone with his story, living in
collusion with two plants in his room. They are his companions in his cell, the
only living beings with whom he can talk to at that hour when the day is phasing
out.
My friend’s family
belonged to the working class. He owes everything to the workers. He paid them
in return by struggling and giving his life for them in Cuba, in Chile, in Nicaragua,
in Québec. His commitment as an educator and most especially as a
conscience arouser brought him step by step to share the lot of the poorest to
the point of sleeping among rats and the vomit of the alcoholics. He entered
the darkest holes to listen to the voice of the little ones, and he climbed on
all sorts of grandstands to have it heard. His intelligence is acute and his
memory is just phenomenal. Behind the peace and a mischievous humor, he is hypersensitive.
He was the heart, the eyes, the voice of the godforsaken. When he speaks about
them, his face lights up and at times his eyes moisten with tears.
In him we can find
laughter, cunning, metaphors, a lot of anger also, and a lot of distress. That
indignation, that powerlessness and that distress which grazes despair, most
Quebecers can only express them by «swearing». Therefore, the stories of my
friend (he is a fabulous storyteller) are often punctuated of well placed
swearwords, like pauses that say a lot about what cannot be said…
He is also a priest. He
does not make a secret of it, but the roman collar vanished from his universe
since a long time. He does not belong to the caste of the « eunuchs for the
Kingdom» and he is anticlerical, like Jesus.
His friends are basically unionists, militants of human rights and of social
justice, entities committed to the development of a human and durable economy, defenders
of the environment and of ecology, without forgetting the prostitutes, the homosexuals,
the drug addicts, the alcoholics and all the rejected by the nice society of
thieves wearing a tie, and by those «correct» people who are leached with the
moral standards of the rich and of the powerful.
His enemies are by
millions but can be summarized into one: CAPITALISM which, in its bourgeois
version, is often draped in all the virtues and is even greeted as the
salvation of humankind. That system which incarnates the hypocrisy in
its extreme form is of course perceived as the Messiah and the adored Lord,
loved and copiously fed by the prevailing ideology of the right-thinking
society and by the Church, in its almighty version, which is believed to be the
infallible guardian of the «universal peace» and of the eternal truth…
My
friend never went down on his
knees before the monsters in history who dreamt of establishing paradise on
earth by murdering all those who were not in agreement with them and who only
dug a hell worst than the one they pretended to destroy. This being said, my friend is a revolutionary
like Jesus. He is against the dictatorship of the Capital and also against the
dictatorship of the Proletariat. He is against any Dictatorship, most especially the religious one. He stands for
freedom, like Jesus; for justice, like Jesus; for truth, like Jesus. He is for
goodness and tolerance, like Jesus. Like Jesus, he is a promoter of a humanity
that is simply…human, because if God is sought for truly, in this process he
will certainly let himself be known..
He is harsh with many
members of his spiritual family, maybe because he never felt that he was really
understood or accompanied by them. He was loved by four or five of them,
detested by a few others, appreciated by some (from afar), but tolerated and
especially ignored by the majority. He has never been like the others. He did
not bleat with the sheep. He was critical towards many things. He did not see
the world with the eyes of religion, of dogmas, of moral norms and of
liturgical rites. He saw the world as it is, without pious glasses. He analyzed
it with the precision of a clockmaker. He could dismantle the most subtle
mechanisms of neo-liberalism and demonstrate its total iniquity. He was not
against globalization per se, but only against the globalization of injustice
given birth by the insatiable rapaciousness of those who already own
everything.
Do not talk to him
about Jesus Christ, unless you clarify many things about him. The powerful who
have dictated in the Church for more than fifteen centuries have perverted the
real Jesus. They made of him a
demigod descended from heaven to «baptize» the established system in order to preserve
its peace and order…But then, it is of course by the system in place in his
time that Jesus was crucified; yet, that system was not much different than the
one which, nowadays, is crucifying more than half of humankind.
A Christ like this, emptied
of his salt and of his prophetic power, is a false Christ. He is a pure
fabrication of the powerful “owners” of the earth who are precisely the ones that
my friend denounces so strongly. He prefers a thousand times to be thought of
as an atheist than a partisan of such a Christ, or of a Church who worships
such a Christ. For him, Jesus belongs essentially to the poor, to the
oppressed, to the unlucky, but the rich have stolen him from them, as they have
stolen everything else from them anyway. The great official Christ of our
official Churches that generally get on well with the banks, the multinational
corporations, the mafia, the governments and the dictatorships (especially
those that identify themselves as Catholic or Christian), is not the Jesus of
the Gospel, and their God is not the God of Jesus, nor the God of my
friend.
In fact, my friend is
considered an atheist. That is odd… When Jesus was accused of being a
«blasphemer», it was exactly meant to say that he also was a godless man; that
is an atheist and a devil. For our well washed brains, the Almighty God and
Power are only one. To criticize Power is to criticize God or deny Him. Yet, Jesus was provoking power, especially
the religious one. He never let the opportunity slip by to manhandle it. And
so, Jesus was surely an atheist, like my friend. Jesus was gentle, compassionate,
he was patient, and my friend also, but he was also a provocateur. He would
unmask the hypocrisy that is particularly good at clothing itself in virtue.
My friend is not a saint,
not more than Jesus actually who was being called a drunkard, a glutton, an
insane, and even a sinner being possessed by the devil. My friend is a unionist
and a close friend of Michel Chartrand, the “swearer”, the bad mouth, who was
probably the most upright man and the most robust Christian that Quebec ever
gave birth to. In his youth, my friend also was a fan of Dorothy Day, the heroic
apostle of the workers of the slums of New York. In her time, that Christian
lady was ferociously denounced as being a «communist» and even fought against
by the Church. Nowadays, her cause for canonization has been introduced in
Rome. What a Church for God sake: she makes martyrs and then she canonizes
them! ...
Among the “bad guys”
with whom my friend is associated, there is also Leonardo Boff, brilliant
theologian who had the Theology of Liberation be known throughout the world. My
friend and Leonardo belonged to a group of Christians of the left or of the
right who were the first, forty years after Mao’s revolution, to set foot in
communist China, as official guests of the Bureau of religious affairs in that
country. At that time, Leonardo had not yet been definitely treated as a leper
beyond redemption, but already figured on the black list of the Vatican. Nowadays,
pope Francis easily consults him for the redaction of his encyclicals…Oscar
Romero, Enrique Angelelli, Helder Câmara, Proaño were also looked upon as
annoying “red” sheep in the fold of Rome, but one of them is already canonized
and the others will be also in due time.
There are dozens of thousands
to have been persecuted, rejected, damned even, by a Church still domineering,
congealed in an imperial past, which has not yet digested the Vatican II
Council and which still considers that the Good News to the poor and the
liberation of the oppressed are outdated fashions fed by Marxism and even by
the devil. Will she ever learn? Will Pope Francis be able to reverse engines, he
who calls to fight («Hagan lío!»), and even to revolt against Capitalism and
its dictatorship of money which, according to his own words, is «the feces of
the devil»?...
It is in those waters
that my friend was involved all his life. He associated with «suspicious persons»
and ate with «sinners», like Jesus. That is why, in 1970, we find him in the
Soviet Union, but, at Christmas night, in the Red Square in Moscow, he was singing
in French the hymn: «Christians, It’s
Midnight! …People, rise! Sing your liberation! »…
My friend would run
from one World Social Forum to another. He would find himself in Bosnia for
human Rights. He would crisscross the province of Quebec to unmask the snares
of neo-liberalism and bring to emergence a «new consciousness», the only real
force capable of overturning mountains. Besides being a unionist, he is an
ecologist, an anti-globalization activist, a socialist, a pro-independence
citizen, a founding member of Québec Solidaire Party, a "carré rouge" and a feminist; once in a
while, he participates in masses celebrated by women, yes by women, belonging
to what they call the Catholic Church “out of the Walls». In short, he has all
the vices! If he had lived during Jesus’ time, he would have been crucified
with him…
In solidarity with
all the victims, he finally became one of them. It is really too bad, but new
inroads are at times strange…
When he dies, we will
say of him that he was a good servant of the Gospel and we will cover his
coffin with a beautiful wreath of flowers. Wonderful! I mentioned it at the
beginning: my friend loves sleeping among flowers.
Eloy Roy
August 2015
Translated
from the French by Jacques Bourdages
All that the planet counts of poor and
excluded met at the Vatican between October 27 and 29, 2014, at the invitation of Pope Francis, for a World
Meeting of Popular Movements.
« The
poor not only suffer injustice, but
they also struggle against it (…) My desire is that this wind be
transformed into a whirlwind of hope. »
« Some, when I ask for the poor of the
earth, a roof and work, say that «the Pope is a communist»! They do not
understand that solidarity with the poor
is at the root of the Gospels»- recalls Pope Francis during his address on
October 28
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