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A life dedicated to a cause

Now the Emeritus Bishop of Sao Felix do Araguaia, Pere Casaldàliga at 90 years of age still lives alongside the people he has spent most of his life serving

“Being Catalan helped me to become more sensitive to the issue of language and identity of the indigenous people and stopped me from falling into cultural imperialism.” Just one of the many reflections Bishop Pere Casaldàliga, one of the most universal Catalans who today turns 90. A follower of Liberation Theology, Casaldàliga has always put his life on the line for his causes: the issues of indigenous rights, and for the right of people to work and own their land. That has placed him in the firing line of governments and multinationals and he has been threatened with death many times.

Misunderstood by the Vatican, it was not until the arrival of Pope Francis that his work in favour of the dispossessed has been recognised. Today, suffering from Parkinson’s, the Emeritus Bishop of Sao Felix do Araguaia still lives alongside those people who he has dedicated his life to. In 1968 he joined Manuel Luzon in Brazil with the task of founding a Claretian mission. “The contrast was brutal,”: in awe of nature and its primitive beauty but then, a sense of total abandonment, without mail, telephone and electricity. The town of Sao Felix was nothing more than a group of huts beside a river with only one doctor in the region. He fell in love with the people and never left.

Casaldàliga founded the Latin American Agenda as a vehicle for disseminating the causes of the indigenous people, the black working classes, women’s rights and ecology. When Rigoberta Menchú was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 he was delighted, as the prize went to a woman. He has been a Nobel candidate many times, but his name has always been vetoed by the church.

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