From Argentina: Prayer and Prison
The following is an excerpt from a letter written by Patrick Rice, an Irish-born worker priest and superior of the Little Brothers of Charles de Foucauld, to his fraternity. After working among the poor in that country for several years, he was arrested in October 1976 as a “subversive.” He was held for some weeks during which time he was repeatedly tortured. Half of the members of his community were disappeared and assassinated by the military dictatorship. In all, 30,000 people were forcibly detained and disappeared in Argentina between 1976-1980.
In recent years I have arrived at an understanding of just how much Jesus is present in the most diverse situations; it is a very strong impression. When you remain alone for long periods of time, or with a hood over your head, or with your eyes bandaged shut, or completely surrounded by people who are seeking to annihilate you by whatever means they can dream up…then a friend, who who don’t really hear, appears to you. I have lived through this in the dreadful Federal Police Coordination Center, where you spend 24 hours out of 24 hours locked up in a small cell (with a tiny window high up, through which the light passes), knowing that anything could happen to you.
At night, when the guards weren’t there, one tried to talk, to sing with the other inmates, and we looked at one another through the small peep-holes in the doors. There was always a strongly contemplative atmosphere, and, when the guard allowed it, everybody looked forward with enthusiasm to having a Eucharistic celebration…
What characterized our Christian life during this whole time in prison was prayer, and more precisely, prayer of intercession. When you hear the despairing screams of our friends who are in the process of being tortured, and when you experience your total helplessness to do anything, you learn that to pray and to intercede with God is the only worthy human act that one is capable of doing.
You pray that this person may be filled with strength, that the people who are doing the torturing may have mercy or else that some miracle might stop this suffering. You are full of gratitude that “today it’s not me”…And then , “it’s my turn”…and then you are living the whole experience second after second aware only of your own body and of your fight to survive. Much of the time I still think about what is happening there and my prayer is one of intercession, for those people who continue to suffer.
It’s not easy to find yourself back in the normal world, and especially the normal Christian world. It all seems so shabby, formal, less intense and less calm. For us in prison, the Gospel was our strength, our weapon against evil, against hate, against oppression. In the Church here there is too little awareness of evil; the Gospel does not have the power that it had for us then.
