Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 47

7 July 1931—12 February 2005

A Sacrosanct Right

She told friends that her age and status as a Roman Catholic nun would protect her, despite the many death threats she had received. But she was wrong. On her way to a community meeting in a town on the edge of the Brazilian rainforest, she was stopped by two men. They asked her if she was carrying weapons. She responded by opening up the Bible she always had with her and reading one of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” As she tried to walk past the men, they shot her and then pumped five more bullets into her as she lay face down in the dirt.

The murder of Sister Dorothy Stang shocked and saddened the thousands of Brazilian peasants whom she had represented for thirty years. Born into a large Catholic family in Dayton, Ohio, Stang joined the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, an order dedicated to aiding poor people, especially women and children, in the world’s “most abandoned places.” In 1966, ten years after taking her final vows, she was sent to Brazil as a missionary.

Stang fell in love with her new home. She became fluent in Portuguese and eventually acquired Brazilian citizenship. Early on she began championing the rural poor among whom she lived. Brazilian peasants, who scratched out a precarious existence on small farms in and around the rainforest, were being driven off their land by ranching and timber conglomerates that slashed and burned their way through the forest. The ranchers wanted cleared land either to graze beef cattle or to grow grain to feed cattle. Leaders in the timber industry wanted the millions of feet of straight and true lumber the rainforests supplied.

In standing against the ranchers and timbermen, Stang found herself defending both the poor who were being dispossessed and the rainforest that was being plundered. (To date, about 20 percent of its 1.6 million square miles has been destroyed.) The farmers, she insisted, “have the sacrosanct right to aspire to a better life on land where they can live and work with dignity while respecting the environment.” And the “death of the forest,” she believed, “is the end of our life,” not just because its devastation means the displacement of farmers, but because the rainforest is one of the world’s natural wonders. Its wanton destruction for commercial gain is an assault on God’s earth and an impoverishment of the human spirit.

Stang’s murder has galvanized resistance to the timber and ranching interests who wish to exploit the Brazilian rainforest. The apprehension and trial of her murderers, both of whom expressed regret at their crime, drew the world’s attention to the plight of both the poor Brazilian farmers and the commercial destruction of the rainforest. In death as in life, Sister Dorothy’s nonviolent campaign for economic and environmental justice continues.