¿Por qué somos un país con tantos sacerdotes famosos?

0:01 The day to day is full of urgent news, noise, polemics and fanfare. But for the quietness, the analysis and what we like to call slow - cooking journalism are my questions, an average rush program made by KFAM inspiring smiles. The history of Colombia is full of priests of all kinds, rebels, politicians, entertainers, thinkers, cavemen. What has been the role of priests in the country. It' s okay that there are influential cures for this chapter. We spoke with Father Diego Jaramillo, President of Urbanization the Minute of God, with Father Daniel Saldarriaga, founder of the Food Bank of Bogotá, with former Father Alberto Linero and with Father German Rodríguez, provincial of the Society of Jesus in Colombia, I am Roberto Pombo. Welcome to chapter seventy - six of my questions. Recently, due to the randomness of Tiktok' s algorithm, I ended up watching a video about Walter Otman, a hundred - year- old Brazilian who entered the Gingers Records book for working eighty- four years in the same company. Since he was fourteen years old he began working in a textile company, began as a boarding assistant and went up.

1:32 At present, it continues to work of its own free will. According to him, Walter Otman opened quotation marks. When we do what we like, we don' t see time passing. I close quotes. I thought then that those kinds of people who think like Mr Otman, are those who feel what is known as vocation. Imagine feeling from a very young age, a call, a clear message of destiny that tells us to do. I imagine it must be like knowing what our role in the world is, and that seems unworkable to me. There is an indeterminate amount of testing to discover the vocation and many are done to young people in the last years of school so that they can decide what to study international business, bachelor' s degree in accounting languages. I don' t know these tests in detail. However, I believe that vocation has little to do with an examination of multiple options and more with a practical profession or activity that makes us feel complete. There are then those who have a vocation of service and in that case they are dedicated to helping others, to humanitarian work, the Japanese have a term that I think is more fitting and is ikigai. There is no exact translation of the term, but we could say that it is the conjunction of what one loves for what one is good, what one needs, and for what we can be paid in one epheine. If you had to make a more literal translation,

3:02 you would say it consists of two words, Iki, which means life and gai, which writes ho valor merit and, according to Google translation is reason to live. It is here that I think of stronger vocations, such as, for example, religious vocations, because it is one thing to feel in the depths of being that destiny has a task for us, an explicit mission for our life, which helps to solve an existential problem, but another very different is that that calling that vocation, be it to bring to the world a truth, whether it be the truth of the coran, the vague gita or the Bible. Perhaps that is why the figures of the religious have drawn my attention and have seemed to me to be an endangered species. With the crisis that religions live and what seems to be a wave of spirituality more secular and away from creeds. Figures like those of rabbis, imams or priests seem exotic to me. And since Colombia is largely a country of Catholics, priests have had a great influence on public life. There have been all kinds of politicians, thinkers, influencers and even guerrillas. To talk about the minute of God, the university, the corporation, Sir profit, of the neighborhoods of the television program is to talk about Father Rafael García Herreros. His life is not full of extreme events, but his social work is what made him so popular. One of the first achievements was the eradication of Tuburiuos and the

4:36 construction of housing in several neighborhoods of Bogotá. For example, in a thousand nine hundred and fifty- six began the El Minute de Dios neighborhood, an experience that the Inter- American Development Bank considered to be a model of poverty eradication and would then be replicated in other cities in the country. Ay of course it has been seen or heard just before the broadcast of the science news program The Minute of God is also thanks to him. Another work for which Father García Herreros is still known is the already famous banquet of the million, the richest and poorest dinner in the world, as he himself said, an event that began in a thousand nine hundred and sixty- one when he invited donors to gather around a table and share a dinner with a cup of calgo of a piece of bread. This event has been replicated some 150 times in several cities in Colombia and around the world, and the money that is raised is used for different social works. But his life did have some drama in the midst of narcoterrorism. While the country bled out among carlos bomb attacks on the media and murdered presidential candidates, Father García Herreros was a key element for the release of those kidnapped, as is the case of Baruja, Pachón and Francisco Santos. In addition, it was also paramount for Pablo Escobe to surrender to the Government. In a thousand nine hundred and ninety- one began a course of correspondence with the drug trafficker. The first letter the priest sent to

6:08 Escobar was written in a thousand nine hundred and ninety- one, and in it he offered to mediate the peace of the country. To Urocomillas, I want to serve as a guarantor for you to be respected for all your rights and those of your family and friends. I want you to help me find out what steps I should take if you think we can meet somewhere safe for the two of us Tell me Cierro Comillas said the missive Even at God' s Minute of April 18, ninety- one. The father sent an enigmatic message to Escobar as if it were an encrypted message in the middle of the cold war. Auro Comillas told me he wants to turn himself in. I ' ve been told you want to talk to me, omar oveñas at five o' clock in the afternoon, when the sun is falling, what I should do. I' m told he' s tired of his life and Consul South and I can' t tell anyone or secret. However, he ' s choking me inside. He is told that he wants to speak with me a humble priest who is not a bishop, canon or even an episcopal vicar. He tells me he believes in him that he' s a man of his word. I asked him if he' d say about me.

7:19 He said no on my side. Cierro Comillas, this closeness with brooming brought him problems with the directives of the corporation minute of God according to an article of nine hundred ninety- seven of the magazine Semana. The managers were concerned about the controversy that these approaches could cause with a criminal like Escobar and that would end in the organization' s donors withdrawing their support. According to the article, this controversy led them to point out Father García Herreros de Loco and de cemil. Father García Herreros' story did not end with his death. His legacy continued with Father Diego Jaramillo, who took his laughs in every sense in the program, but also in the organization. Father Jaramillo began by replacing priest Garcíaerreros in some broadcasts of the program in a thousand nine hundred sixty- two represented every Tuesday, but it was only in a thousand nine hundred ninety - two, with the death of García Herreros, who became the host of the broadcasts from Monday to Friday of the program. But his role is not only the speaker of the program, but he is the president of God' s Minute organization since nineteen hundred and ninety- two. And if we talk about social works, I cannot leave Father Daniel Salda Arriaga, founder and executive director of the Banco de Alimentos de Bogotá, outside. In a country where, sadly, hunger is such a serious problem that a person dedicates his or her life to feeding the most needy is made by an exceptional person. I

8:52 see everything that parents like García Herreros, Jaramillo and Saldarriaga and many others did, and I wonder should all priests take a more active role in working with the most vulnerable communities? This was told to me by Father Diego Aramillo I believe that all priests in Colombia should have a very active role in favor of the most vulnerable communities. They could do it out of charity, because they are Catholic priests and could do it out of commitment to Colombia, because they are patriots. Father Rafael García Herreros was an example in this regard. He spoke to the whole country thinking of the vulnerable from the Catholic point of view and knowing that all of them could have a more leading role in the life of the country. But he also wanted to benefit families with less resources because of homelessness and also agents who had no education, and that is why he began to build university and technological colleges and a very large work in the educational line, that God bless you and that this program also serve for the construction of a better country economically and culturally. There were also priests who became famous for supporting thought, not only theological, but in discussions about morals and bioethics.

10:24 At this point I' m going to make a confession. Then I ' ll talk about whoever was a close friend. You imagine a priest who says that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was not a virgin and had more children, or who said that celibacy in the priesthood should not be compulsory. This is the case of Alfonso Llano, better known as Father Llano. I was fortunate enough to meet him a long time ago through my wife' s family and as time director, he was a columnist for that newspaper. Father Villano was ahead of his time. He was never left, but he had all his life crinary clashes with the Colombian ecclesiastical hierarchies, almost always ultra - conservative imagine, for example, that he advanced twenty years to the debate of the blessing of priests to same- sex couples from the Vatican itself ordered him to remain silent several times because of his positions. However, he was disobedient, even though that would cost him pain. For example, in November of two thousand and twelve his column The Childhood of Jesus, in which he refers to the book with the same name, written by Joseph Ratzinger, was published in time. So, Pope Benedict sixteen. In this text, Father Llano basically defends his position, he contests that of the Pope, according to which the virginity of Mary, mother of Jesus, is theological, but not human. This in part was one of the things Father Llano believed in on the ascending or historical path, according to which Jesus was a human. Like

11:54 us, God does his son by virtue of the merits of his perfection as a human being, and he was conceived by Mary and Joseph, who had a large family. After the text was published, I received the news that the father could not republish anything, to which I responded. Of course, that prohibition covered the father for being a soldier of the company, but not me or the newspaper, because in our case we were governed by a different nest of the national Constitution. Father Llano' s communication told Bro Comillas. Father Adolfo Nicolás, Superior General of the Society of Jesus, has ordered Father Alfonso Llano to terminate his apostolic vocation as a writer, deprives him of his freedom of speech and demands that he not say goodbye and that he guard absolute silence. Cierlo Comillas, that column cost him the scapegoat of several superiors in the Church, like that of Monsignor José Daniel Falla, Secretary General of the Episcopal Conference, who told the newspaper the time that Auro Comillas, the Father has no longer lost the horizon and left aside the faith that is proclaimed in the Church from its beginnings by denying the virginity of María Cierro Comillas Monsignor José Miguel Gómez, bishop of the diocese of Lebanon, said that the father had no longer committed the caronic crime of energy by questioning an innegotiable dogma of the clergy and warned that it was frankly heretical to claim that Mary was not a virgin. This time he had to get away from his column in the paper, but he came back. I was fortunate enough to write the foreword for

13:24 his posthumous book I am free, in which he gathers his experiences as a Jesuit and his reflections on Jesus. When he was going to publish the book, he asked me what you' re going to do. In case my superiors go against me for the thesis I' m raising, I answered him. I' ll help by picking up firewood fences to set free the bonfire in which they' re going to burn it in Plaza de Bolívar. His response was the one expected of a man like him, a laugh. Father Llano was not only this avant- garde and humanist thinker as if it were not enough, but he also founded and led the Bioethics Commission of Javeriana University. Father Llano died in two thousand and twenty and, like many priests people of quiet lives, had a long life. One of its last columns dedicated it to its ninety- five years of life and closed it with a paragraph that I want to remember today Uro Comillas lit my light and my lamp ninety - five years ago and it continues to shine without being able to take a break, because it would be a final point. Alive and alive, happy my existence. I live and I live happily. My ninety- five birthday.

14:28 From here I embrace the totality of my existence as a unit that flows and passes without interruption. Live life. My ninety- five years have been alive, I close quotes. At a time like now, when there seems to be a crisis of faith, such priests are lacking in the Church. I pass on the question to Father Germán Rodríguez, provincial of the company of Jesus in Colombia. I think it is not a question of a priest who is rebellious, but priests who have a prophetic function within the Church and who will always be welcomed. These expressions that invite the Church to advance in an understanding, to make more faith, the experience of faith to the realities that the world lives. It seems to me that the father was no longer always a priest, faithful obedient, but that he had questions, questions how to approach the mystery of faith, which in some way challenged the more traditional and more ordinary positions in the Church. I believe that these contributions, like the plain Father, are necessary and important within the community of the Church and, obviously, that these positions must help the people of God to discern them in order to discover in them what is of value, of importance, of enrichment

15:58 for our life of faith and also to recognize what may suddenly, in some moments, make difficulty or problem for that same experience of faith. The prophetic voices within the Church are always welcome and sometimes, even though they contradict the official positions of the Church a little bit, it helps us all to have approaches and questions that help believers bring the life of faith closer to their own experience in the world today. And if controversial priests speak, there was one that had already become a man in history and that generates mixed feelings, priest Camilo Torres. Thinking of his figure, it occurs to me that it seems a more radical and violent version of the mixture between Father García Erros and Father Llano, because if there are two things of which the priest Camilo Torres is referent it is of rebellion in the Church and of the work with the communities.

16:56 To say, anything from priest Camilo is redundant. But in case you don' t hear the name or think it was just a guerrilla. I ' ll give you a summary. The life of Camilo Torres Restrepo, a priest of rebellious spirit and a burning passion for social justice seems fiction and I would need several chapters to honor his story. He was the founder of the Faculty of Sociology of the National University. But the heart of this priest was not alone in the altars, in the books, or in the classrooms. Also aunt for the underprivileged and the oppressed. He was also the founder of the university movement, which served as a germin for the creation of communal action boards. Then came a crucial moment. He had to choose between the clergy and their revolutionary thinking the decision we already know, he left the cassock and joined the guerrillas of the LLN National Liberation Army. Then he earned the nickname of the guerrilla priest. However, his life in hiding did not last long and his fate sealed his in his rs the first armed confrontation against troops of the Fifth Brigade of Bucaramanga. Curé Camilo fell down in his land in San Vicente de Chucurí. The image of the priest Camilo Torres remains very important, not only as a political figure, but academic, dissocial. And more recently, another priest who has made an important part of the country' s political life is Father Francis de ru, a respected and recognized religious on peace- building issues. If I describe your career it would be a very long list,

18:30 but I will highlight the most important thing. In a thousand nine hundred and ninety- five he created the Magdalena Medio Development and Peace Program, a kind of peace laboratory to finance coexistence and sustainable development initiatives in an area of thirty- zero kilometers in twenty- nine rural municipalities of Santander, Bolívar César de Antioch, to a region particularly plagued by violence. That' s just one of three projects by Father de rub who won the National Peace Prize in two thousand eighteen. It was that the figure of the father of a greater leap in the political scene was possessed as a member and president of the Truth Commission, his contribution to the country has been immense and if you ever ask me for a cerebre phrase of his, I still have fixed in the memory that he pronounced at the end of the presentation of the final report of the Commission, of the truth in which he asked all Colombians the most uncomfortable questions that we had asked ourselves. I open Comillas, what did the religious leaders and besides the pastors and women of faith who even laid down their lives to accompany and denounce, what did other bishops and priests and religious communities and ministers do, what did the educators do, what do the judges and prosecutors say that let impunity accumulate, what role did opinion makers and the media play?

19:51 I close Comillas and, in the end, the most important question, how dare we let it happen and how dare we allow it to continue and we cannot talk about political priests and peace without referring to a recent case. An incorrigible Monsignor Darío de Jesús Monsalve was archbishop of Cali for thirteen years in which he was active in political and peace scenarios, such as his activism for the yes in the plebiscite for peace, his sweetness of the assassinations of peace signatories, the public disapproval by the Apostolic Annunciation and Episcopal Conference, for his demands to the then President Duque his role in the social outbreak in Cali, when he asked respect for the protests of the indigenous Taminga protesters and asked to open channels of dialogue. His political stances caused controversy several times. We are a country in which the Catholic Church has more presence in the innermost communities than the State itself. Think for a moment at the head of any municipality of Colombia in its center and you will realize that there will always be a park surrounded by the building of the Mayor, a police station and a church. It is obvious that, while the Church and the State have long been separated, the flirtations between the two are still quite strong. The historian and teacher José David Cortés Guerrero wrote in two thousand nineteen the article Religion in the construction of the Colombian State, in which he recalls how the Church has participated in Colombian

21:23 politics. In every way, just a piece of that story is told by Professor Cortes in his text. Auro Comillas overcome bipartisan violence. In the 1960s, a section of the church, influenced by liberation theology, questioned the social problems that the country was going through. Religious men and women did so without taking up arms, such as the Golconda group. Others left their habits and joined the guerrillas. This is the case of Camilo Torres, who was part of the National Liberation Army, which was also coincidentally founded by a priest. Of course, the traditional political elite and ecclesiastical hierarchy criticized this leaning towards the left of some members of the Comillas church. However, not all priests who have participated in politics have been notable. That is the case of Bernardo Holus, who was the first mayor of Barranquilla by popular election and repeated in nineteen hundred and ninety- eight. However, in two thousand thirteen he was sentenced to ten years in prison for committing irregularities in the purchase of two lots for the construction of twenty- five zero housing units of social interest. I looked for Father Daniel Salda Arriaga, founder of the Bogotá Food Bank, and asked him what is the Church' s current role in politics. This I was told I consider that the role of the Church today is to be the voice of those who have no voice. We do not occupy a place in public

22:56 life as politicians, nor are we pretending politicians, but we do have to be attentive to serve justice, to serve the truth, to be in the midst of our communities, to motivate those who can exercise the positions or offices of the political, so that there are actually more people with principles and Christian values who intervene and serve a more just society, a more fraternal society, a society that respects and cares for the common house and a society where the reality of poverty and the reality of hunger do not return to our landscape. I think that we are living a time in which, very close to us, there are many talented people waiting to have the opportunity to exercise in politics, a trade, to exercise in the midst of society, a leadership.

23:51 And with all these, especially young people, we have a very big commitment to accompany and motivate. Finally, there is a priest who has done his job differently. If, on the one hand, the abbey revolutionaries, academics and peace managers, there is one who has brought his vocation to the masses using social networks and the media. Who I' m talking about technically is no longer a priest, but it' s inevitable to see it this way. And if I call him Alberto Linero, it might sound like him. But if I tell Father Linero, you know who I' m talking about. He has had spaces on national television, on radio, published countless books and has become a kind of influencer on his social networks. Although he hung the cassocks thousand eighteen which was a national news, because he was sucked out of solitude. However, the former parent is still a kind of spiritual guide.

24:47 Now he looks more smiling than before, something I never thought I' d say about someone as grieving as him. And, of course, we cannot leave out a father who has become famous for his appearance on television. The passage of Jesus Herrador Fuela, better known as Father Chucho jumped to fame with his healing program for the soul, but in time he gained the affection of the parishioners. He has not been without controversy, like when he had a fight with Kenney' s local mayor for his outdoor masses in the Marseilles neighborhood or more recently for being in Israel with several parishioners on a tour of the Holy Land as the war progressed. Father Chucho is so famous that his Instagram account has about 120 zero followers, and his YouTube channel, where he broadcasts his Masses every day at five in the morning, has over three hundred zero subscribers. I see these success stories, and I wonder what social networks are to bring in more parishioners. I looked for Father Alberto Olinero to answer this question and this he said yes to me. I am sure that social networks are a timely space to meet people and make them the existential proposal of Jesus of Nazareth. Let us not forget that Paul speaks to the Greeks there in the Areopagus, which is a totally new space for them. But he understands that this is where he should talk about the Gospel, because that is

26:19 where people are now, what is important is that it is done in the language and dynamics of social networks. We cannot pretend that the language of the pulpit, which has very particular characteristics, succeeds in the middle of x, or, of Facebook or of any of today' s networks. It is necessary to adapt without losing the essential, without losing the doctrinal, but having an inclusive language, a language that answers the questions that human beings today have. I believe that the Church has to make a presence on social networks, because it is there that believers, parishioners, especially young people, can be found, especially those who are no longer so linked to the physical space, but to the digital space. So, my answer is yes, the main question in this chapter could be answered very easily. Colombia has so many famous priests, because we are a Catholic and conservative country. However, I choose to give you another explanation. This is because many of them chose to leave their churches and parishes to speak and approach the community. They decided to feel their vocation to the limit. Priests are not very different from us. Civilians have a life and passions, only that their vocation is concentrated in me.

27:47 For those who are not spiritual believers, talking about a call or a vocation may sound like a perch. However, I think this ikigai we all feel differently, but no matter how. The important thing is to respond to that call by accepting it. I am Roberto Pombo, esteemed listeners in your hands, I deliver chapter seventy- six of my questions that already happened and the next one that comes from this moment. This chapter of my questions is available on all podcast platforms. This episode was made possible by Kafam, inspiring Smiles. Dirección Roberto Pombo, Producción General, juan Abel Gutiérrez, Editorial Advisor Daniel San Pero Espina scripts juan Abel Gutiérrez and Johnny Rodríguez. Field production Marcela Salazar and Lucía Beltrán. Post- production of audio Carlos Bernar