By EUGENIO BUCCI*
Frei Betto is a man of many times and many places
Carlos Alberto Libânio Christo, the Dominican Frei Betto, is an author of diverse letters and large numbers. He wrote 74 books. He has 64 works published abroad. Just one of his titles, Fidel and Religion, launched in Brazil in 1985 by publisher Brasiliense, was published in 28 other countries.
In addition to being an author, he is also a popular educator. He helped train thousands of activists in the Landless Rural Workers Movement, the MST, and other social organizations. The appearance that Brazil has today bears signs of its handwriting and its pedagogy. For more than half a century, Betto, as he prefers to be called, has been a prominent figure in national history.
With his denim jacket as a cassock, he mobilizes people of different types and hues. Happy people. A sign of this are the tributes that compete on his agenda as August 25 approaches, when he will turn 80 years old. In unions, embassies, Catholic communities and in the common, so-called “social” areas of apartment buildings, he receives large amounts of applause and fewer gifts. His sincere followers are more numerous than the fingers on one hand – or thousands of hands. His declared admirers fill the halls of wealthy homes and entertain the circles of those who have nowhere to live.
The festivities do not appear in the newspapers or make a fuss. They advance like a calm wave and pop up everywhere – even in movie theaters. The documentary The head thinks where the feet step – Frei Betto and popular education, the first in the trilogy directed by Evanize Sydow and Américo Freire, under the production of Mirar Lejos, was shown in commemorative previews. The same production company has already started filming the feature film “Betto”, with actor Enrique Díaz in the main role. The launch is scheduled for 2025.
Last Sunday, another documentary, Frei Betto's humanism, directed by Roberto Mader, was shown in preview via the ICL YouTube channel. Leonardo Boff, one of those interviewed, says that his old companion knows how to combine militancy and religion. The two religious see in the figure of Jesus Christ a political prisoner who was tortured and murdered for defending a revolution – the revolution of changing the way of living through love for others.
In the same film, Frei Betto states that, in the New Testament, there is only one definition of God: “God is love”. There is so much mystical affection that, according to Boff, sometimes the friar “feels jealous of God” because he thinks that the Superior does not pay him due attention.
The moral fiber of this writer and preacher is greater than our vain secularism supposes. He occasionally sees a President of the Republic, whom he does not flatter. Without changing his clothes, he will support the parents of a young man who tragically died for hours, days, weeks. Between one thing and another, he talks to the underprivileged, the forgotten, the invisible. No fuss, no fuss, no need to be noticed. In silence.
Coherent, although controversial, Frei Betto defends the Cuban government. Don't expect him to give up on this cause, to which he feels united. And if you are a critic and say that there is a dictatorship in Havana, he will welcome you with the same warm respect and – to use a word he invented here – with the same “fraternity”.
Other than that, cultivate good food. He remembers his mother's recipes, Mrs. Stella, by heart. Write about cooking – Eat like a friar, for example – he knows how to cook and doesn’t do bad things. Don't let anyone cut Minas cheese like it was pizza. In this matter, his orthodoxy is inflexible: the slices must always be removed from the outside to the outside, and the cheese decreases from right to left, as if it were bread.
Frei Betto is capable of bringing a box of Cohiba cigars to the young editor who has just become a father, but you will never see him sporting designer brands. His wines have an average price. With the same liturgical discipline that leads a prayer group, he commands the “Academia de Litros”, where brothers and sisters gather to eat what makes you fat, drink what makes you drunk and talk about subjects that have a hint of poison.
So it is. Anyone who sees him laughing and making hurtful jokes has no idea of the suffering he went through. Baptism of Blood, from 1983, one of his definitive books, tells the story of the Dominican friars who joined the ranks of Carlos Marighela's ALN to provide logistical support, without ever taking up arms, and ended up in prison.
Friar Tito killed himself in exile. He couldn't bear to live with what torture broke inside him. Betto survived. He endured it. The scars that remain are not visible. Baptism of Blood won the Jabuti and was adapted for the cinema in 2006, by director Helvécio Ratton.
This man of many times and many places, who was a journalist at the magazine Reality, worked at Teatro Oficina together with Zé Celso, lived in jail, in the favela and in the convent, always quiet in Minas Gerais, he deserves all the celebrations, silent or not. Congratulations, my friend. Happy birthday.
* Eugene Bucci He is a professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP. Author, among other books, of Uncertainty, an essay: how we think about the idea that disorients us (and orients the digital world) (authentic). [https://amzn.to/3SytDKl]
Originally published in the newspaper The State of S. Paul.
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