Las venas (todavía) abiertas de seres humanos en construcción. Missa dos Quilombos y el desafío de la hospitalidad en la historia latinoamericana

Abstract

Some years ago, at the Mass of the Quilombos, Archbishop Helder Camara and Archbishop Jose Maria Pires denounced at the top of their lungs the human genocide that occurred during African slavery. They were in the wake of historical revisionism and relocated the Church, especially Latin America, to an urgent contemporary commitment. How can we speak of God to a people who are victims of violence spread in His name? How, after a traumatic history, to conceive new forms of relationship between peoples and ethnicities whose past is marked by blood, pain and death? The slavery of black Africans on American lands was a profitable business. However, for years, the economy of the European colonies had its driving force based on unprecedented human genocide. Slavery wrote one of the most brutal pages in the history of mankind and revealed man's pathological side to his fellow man, undermining the concept of Deus caritas est. If after the Jewish Holocaust it was necessary to speak of God in another way, one wonders how to speak of God to a people who lived in the furthest side of this contact? The meeting of the European with the original peoples and later with the Africans, despite providing the Old Continent with an anthropological turn, also marked with pain and blood the ways of relationship. The Quilombo Mass remains current with its denunciations, challenges and achievements. The call for awareness and reformulation of a more fraternal practice of human living seems to be at the heart of an urgent issue. In a world marked by human indifference, in which gratuitous violence seems to be the only means of communication, revisiting history and learning from its traumatic lessons can lead us to new fields of mutual and fraternal encounter. As open historical veins that bleed and display their marks, we set off for a reflection to find that wounds may never heal, that the inheritance carried by the colonized peoples will never change, but to be by their side, the recognition and forgiveness of mistakes. It is the most conducive way to the achievement of new and beautiful paths.