The fraternity of the desert

Sitting face to face in San Martino’s house in Vignale, Italy, the Uruguayan philosopher Julio Saquero (70 years old) and the Italian priest Arturo Paoli (100 years old) edit again the debate held 40 years ago in the desert of the Argentine province of La Rioja: whether to take the Gospel to the political and even revolutionary action.
That was the debate that had gone on in the religious brotherhood both used to belong to: Charles de Foucauld’s Little Brothers, a group of working priests and lay religious people that lived and were politically active in Argentina between 1959 and 1977, when the street cleaner priest Mauricio Silva was kidnapped and disappeared.
The fraternity of the desert takes the dialogue between Julio and Arturo as the starting point to go into the experience of the Brothers in the desert of Suriyaco, in La Rioja, a desolate landscape suggested by the then bishop Enrique Angelelli, a friend of the order murdered in 1976, to do the novitiate there.
At that place, between 1971 and 1974, the Little Brothers used to meditate and debate about how to react against the agitated reality the country was going through. Some of them, such as priests Mauricio Silva, Pablo Gazzarri and Carlos Bustos, were kidnapped and disappeared. Others devoted their lives to denouncing the violations of human rights registered in our country.