Catholic New World: The Interview

Brazilian theologian finds solidarity in mission

Servite Sister Lina Boff is a Brazilian native, born in the country to parents of Italian, German and Austrian heritage. After joining her congregation, she became a missionary in her own country, working in the Acre region along the Amazon for 10 years. She also spent time as a guidance counselor for youth and a general councilor in Rome, and now serves as director of systematic theology for graduate and post-graduate students at the Centro Loyola de Cultura e Fe, which is tied to the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.

She visited Chicago in early October, lecturing at Catholic Theological Union and Assumption Parish (Illinois Street). She took time to speak with staff writer Michelle Martin, with the help of Servite Father Dennis Kriz as translator between English and her native Italian.

The Catholic New World: Tell me a little bit about your time in Acre.

Servite Sister Lina Boff: Acre is at the far western border of Amazonia—it borders Peru and Bolivia. When I went there, the only way to get there was by air in little aircraft. It was an adventure just to get there. I taught at the school in Rio Branco, which is in the capital of Acre, and Madurera and Xapuri. During that time, I knew and worked with Chico Mendez, who was a defender of the Amazon and especially of the rubber tappers, who collected rubber there. He was murdered in the 1980s.

TCNW: Discuss the concept of solidarity. How can Catholics be in solidarity with people so far away?

SSLB: By supporting simple social projects in Brazil. These projects that come from the bottom, from the ground up, as it were. These projects are bearing fruit. They are things like providing basic education to the common people in Brazil, providing basic medical care for them. These would be projects that would be worthwhile to support.

TCNW: Can you give an example?

SSLB: Bahia, where I live, is 75 percent Afro-Brazilian, and out in the countryside, the half-jungle as it is, are groups whoa re indigenous, but who are actually the descendents of African slaves. These people are very poor and the villages are very small, but through the television and so forth, the young children have learned that they can sell their bodies to make some money. Money for what? Food. There is a group in Italy, associated with the labor unions over there, who having heard of the problem through the Servites over there, have sponsored a program to provide housing for the street children of this year—these are villages, yet there are people in the street. There is also a need for housing for the elderly.

They also provide basic education better than what is available in the public schools, and they provide basic food, so they don’t have to sell themselves—literally, 10-year-olds being able to sell themselves to eat.

TCNW: How do you develop the internal solidarity, to relate it to faith?

SSLB: Jesus himself was sent by the father to cure us of an illness—not just an evil—a deficiency in us, original sin, which is with us when we are born. This was the first clear act of solidarity between humans and God, when he came down to cure us of this fault, this thing that we are born with. The illness itself is born of forgetfulness of our original solidarity

The very fact that he became incarnate, became one of us to share our problems, share our joys, share our sorrows, share life with us was an act of solidarity.

People at the very beginning of their existence were collectors. They collected things and shared them with others. Later they became aware that they could hunt. With that entered the first violent acts of humanity, and the first time that people began to separate themselves, the string from the weak. With that entered original sin. The next big thing was agriculture, where people said we are going to rip our sustenance out of the ground, with tools we had to rip from the ground, and with that came more violence. All of these things separated us from each other. We learned to put people above, people below, and put people above creation.

Jesus came to remind us of that original state—that paradise lost of a time when people first became aware of each other, and people shared.

The incarnation was an act of solidarity with us. You go the whole trajectory of Jesus’ mission, and you see he kept bringing in people who were excluded. He talked to sinners, he talked to women, to the Samaritans, to people that others did not.

The final act of solidarity is that he was willing to accept even death. His whole life was a supreme act of solidarity that calls us to reach out like Jesus does, to the other, to the different.

TCNW: You are talking to theology students here. What do you want them to learn?

SSLB: First, I have seen that the people do feel a call to reach out to the other, and so have a deep desire to put this in concrete action. What I would like is that even the economic issues are important, they are ultimately secondary. What we should be striving for is not so much a rich world as a just world, that striving for justice rather than an accumulation.

We are all children of God, and God as a father does not want one child to be almost completely ignored while another child gets almost all the attention. A good father wants everybody to feel that they are listened to, that they are loved. We are all children of God, and each and every one of us ought to have a sense that we are children of God, that we count.