"I feel like an addict in withdrawal". At 72 years old, the Pope has accepted the resignation of Juan José Aguirre as bishop of Bangassou, a gigantic diocese the size of his native Andalusia, which he shepherded for 26 years. Africa stole his heart from the moment he first set foot there, and his former diocesans—the orphaned children, the elderly with senility, the courageous mothers who know about daily miracles, "their" priests, "their" nuns, "their" seminarians, "their" collaborators… they go with him wherever this man from Cordoba goes, soon to Bangui. But what broke him was a heart condition that has filled his chest with "buoys".
However, not even that has been enough to appease his prophetic fervor, his denunciation of the injustices he saw grow lush like the Central African jungle while their responsible parties look the other way, nor has it diminished his clairvoyance regarding alarming analyses about what part of the world is doing to another. He testifies to this in this conversation with Religión Digital. Pure heart. And testimony.
Question. A few years ago you had already requested resignation for health reasons, and now Leo XIV has finally accepted it. How does it feel when the news arrives that somehow ‘unhooks’ you from what has been your home, your people, your family, for four decades?
Answer. I feel like an addict in withdrawal. I miss them very much. My priests, who have written me very beautiful letters (I wish all the bishops in the world received letters from their priests like the ones I have received). Anyway, in 28 years as a bishop, I have ordained almost all of them to the priesthood; it is normal to feel nostalgia. The nuns… I saw them as girls and how they grew up and consecrated themselves to the Lord with all their hearts, despite the very strong maternal instinct in the African continent. The orphans we accompanied for so many years who are now adults and work after university without needing to embark on a panga… The elderly with senility accused of witchcraft whom we defended tooth and nail. Then there are the endless years of war, shared suffering, bullets grazing our heads, death so cheap around me, so many tears when the missions were looted again and again, and we started over, and they stole everything from us again, except faith…
Q. Has Africa stolen your heart?
A. Well, it has been 46 years; I left at 28 and, except for a few years of missionary animation in Spain, until today, when I am 72. Precisely, you say stealing the heart… I had three heart attacks, and the Lord saved me from all of them in the jungle, with the help of doctors who were there by chance, and I have nine buoys in my arteries. And then the thrombophlebitis that made me stagger, the back with spinal stenosis due to so many years trekking through the jungle in the diocese of Bangassou, 135,000 km, through the jungle, not a single paved kilometer… And that is without speaking of the thousands of baptisms and confirmations, of the new missions financed by the Chapter of Cordoba, the 32 funded schools, several by Manos Unidas, the Provincial Council of Córdoba, so many projects with the people, hours and hours sitting studying a project that was going to be born as a new creature, so many moments of prayer, of shared celebration, of eating monkey meat and always saying it was good, laughing discreetly… or buying flip-flops for the toothless grandparents who don’t direct anything, who are nothing… but they are full of dignity…
Q. But you are returning to Africa, to Bangui… I imagine it won’t cost you much to return, although perhaps it is not the most convenient thing for your health…
A. I presented my resignation to Pope Francis six years ago, when I was still active, but they are giving it to me now that I am better. I am leaving a bishop in my place, a crack with much experience from Africa, who is going to focus on agriculture, the red coffee that often stays on the plant until it darkens, chapels that will be born. Because Africa is a nursery of vocations, of minerals, of dreams for the future.
Q. I understand that you are now going to take care of another type of ‘talents’. How serious is the matter?
R. There is no gravity; it’s simply that where things were not done well over the last three years due to lack of experience, let’s go back and do them right. The Central African Church receives a lot of help in the form of projects from the campaigns of Domund, Missionary Childhood, and Indigenous Clergy for local seminaries. Normally, the money collected in Central Africa for these OMP campaigns is not transferred and sent to the Vatican. They give us ten times more than what is raised in the campaigns we do, on the same dates as the entire universal Church. It must be specifically sent to the Dicastery for Missions, which is called Propaganda Fide. If it hasn’t been sent in some year, it must be corrected, and awareness must be properly raised so that it is done correctly in the future. That is why they have asked me to return after several years. I will be in the capital, Bangui, 750 Km from my beloved diocese of Bangassou.
P. Some say that this is one of the endemic evils of Africa. But it is also easy to perceive that other ills afflicting the continent are not born there… Why does Africa matter so little in the international concert?
R. What does Africa matter little in the international concert? No way! The 54 countries of the continent are important. Let them keep growing, as many countries and their multinationals wish, but let it be without making noise. So they can exploit them without publicity. Tantalum, rhodium, and superconductors used to manufacture among other things the electronic components of drones and missiles (which now pilot the vanguard of wars) are mainly in Africa; cobalt is in Congo (for electric batteries); gold in enormous quantities that Russia is taking from Central Africa, and diamonds… and the oil taken from Angola, or Equatorial Guinea, and the phosphates of Niger, and the gold in the desert in northern Chad that Boko Haram steals…. But be quiet! Let Digital Religion say nothing; it’s better if no one knows that Africa matters little in the international concert, so we can suck its blood by making less noise… The predators who run the world impose their law and take 80-90% of what is extracted from the continent, leaving crumbs and small pieces for the millions of people, the anawin of the Bible. That is how the world is: that’s how we have all done it.
R. Africa also has endemic diseases like malaria, and we have systemic corruption to the core, as often happens in Europe and other continents… Will the rebellion of the meek, of the Master’s favorites, ever come?
R. Then there is the white elephant in the hall of international aid, that which no one wants to see but is there, which is large-scale, shameful corruption; the money from aid that, part of it, stays for trips and vacations every month and a half, to round up salaries, exorbitant expenses on huge planes to carry mineral water up and down, unjustified projects… Or what the regime addicts put in their pockets with shamelessness, military or not, democratic or dictatorial… Here everyone gets rich, even though the poor cry out for crumbs and weep living on 1 euro a day…
R. This cries out to heaven; I have seen it with my own eyes, I have denounced it, and I have been criticized a lot, and many young people want to flee because without development there is no peace… Life expectancy at birth in Central Africa is 49 years or slightly more. It is aberrant that some have so little, my people of the jungle, and others swim in abundance, spend money to shed kilos from their bodies, and throw millions of kilos of food in the trash. That’s how we have all done it… our planet earth.
P. Leon XIV began his great international apostolic journeys through Africa. Outside the continent, he generated few press headlines. Have they paid him more attention inside? Does he expect changes in the line of messages he left in some of those countries in favor of coexistence, the fight against corruption, the commitment to youth, or respect and appreciation for democracy as a way of life together?
R. I believe that Pope Leon XIV’s messages have been high and clear. They have been listened to with attention and applause. From there, I do not think they are making an impact on the political lines of European society. Only large groups of young people have heard them with passion. There will be a revival of religious experiences and a discovery of Jesus as Lord of the world. But, I believe, the welfare society is very anchored in our culture. You tell someone, even priests or religious, that for spiritual hygiene, they should keep their phone off for an entire week, and they look at you mockingly. You tell generations of young people, many passionate about ecology and the conservation of a cleaner planet, to stop using plastics, and they get upset. You tell them that the greatest pollution of the planet is produced by the 140,000 planes flying around the world every day, intercontinental or not, and that because of this, one should travel much less by plane, and they look at you as if you’re crazy. I lived in the middle of the jungle for many years, enveloped in thousands of cubic meters of green, and the principles of ecology are easier to apply. But someone who is falling down through the Iguazu Falls and is already halfway there, with the whole current pushing him… it will be difficult for him to go against the current to return to the edge of the waterfall, I think.
P. From polarization, acceptance of the so-called “national priority” as a way to curb the irregular arrival of immigrants is already taking hold among political formations in Spain. There are Christians who even see it as reasonable. Do you believe that helping them understand the underlying reason by spending a couple of weeks, for example, in Bangassou or Bangui would help? Would you take some political leaders there? Do you think it would be possible for them to open their eyes?
R. That concept of “national priority” does not exist in Bangassou. Is it perhaps about the hundreds (or thousands) of talented Black people who fill our soccer or basketball stadiums? Do not call me cynical, because the entire Gospel speaks of welcome and fraternity. I met the father of a Combonian missionary, my colleague who works in Brazil. His father, already elderly, Manuel, cleaned the hallways of a residence in Paris. He had been there for decades, since he was 60, and France was his ticket to a better life. Of course, he and his family learned French, mixed with the community, queued up; they did not have fewer gratifications than the French people, they adapted to the laws of the host country, they did not sell drugs or were radicals. They only allowed themselves the luxury of eating Galician soup at the end of meals and not at the beginning, as is done in their native Galicia.
R. Many Europeans who distrust people coming with dignity to improve their quality of life, raise their life expectancy at birth, or flee horrific persecution in their country of origin are short-sighted people, without taking even an ounce of their dignity away from them. They simply think differently and have never read the Gospel. Yes, an experience in Bangassou would be a “reality check” for many. Furthermore, the hundreds of thousands of migrants who may come to Europe help us in jobs that others do not want to do; most wish to learn, they raise our birth rate and the number of living Spaniards… Most of the pyramid are “brothers” who need to live with dignity like my friend Don Manuel in Paris. It is another matter the top of the pyramid, those who appear on TV trampling on our culture, including fake news. How can we control that part of the migratory flow and exclude the undesirable ones in a balanced and just way?
P. What did you think of the messages about migration left by the Pope during his recent trip to Spain?
R. The welcome of the stranger is in Matthew 25,35 and is a prophetic, evangelical gesture. During years of war in Central Africa, I have lived dozens of times, in dozens of missions, having welcomed hundreds, thousands of people escaping blind violence and probable death. Many crossed the border of my neighboring countries and came to take refuge in the Catholic mission. Without papers, without visas, without strength to flee, just as many Central Africans fled the war and took refuge in Chad – around 500,000–, they saved their lives and nothing happened, and they survived death.
R. Look at the figures I am talking about! Only in Sudan are there 14 million displaced people, people who fled from Jartoun or Ondurman to go to the bottomless pit of misery that is Darfur. Multiply that by 53 African countries, because the millions of African displaced persons are among countries, within the continent itself. These were war refugees, but there are political refugees or exiles, famine refugees, refugees from simple misery, temporary displaced people, or people who are now fleeing looking for UN camps as they used to flee Syria years ago looking for the Greek islands.
R. Living in a camp of a million people, like sardines in a can, without water, without decent food, without security… is hell. We saw it on television in Gaza. That was not living; it was dying while alive. The sub-Saharan Africans who arrive in Spain are the tip of an iceberg of the millions of African displaced persons seeking refuge in Spain or Europe… Furthermore, I assure you, those who arrive at the beaches of the island of El Hierro are the first of their kind in their native countries.
R. In 2018, heavily armed mercenaries attacked the Muslim neighborhood of Bangassou. Two thousand Muslims went to their mosque and the neighboring houses, but they were killed like rabbits. When we learned about it at the Catholic mission, four priests and I went and put ourselves as human shields in front of the mosque. The bullets passed by our ears. God inspired us to do so and protected us. Three days: a lot of fright, but not a scratch. But inside the mosque, I was able to collect twenty-three corpses, children with a hole in their chest. Their mother –crying among the crowd of mothers at the mosque– had watched her son die impunished and now, twenty-four hours later, she was watching him decompose. The Imam gave me permission to dig a mass grave and bury them all. With every shovel load, I felt that God was there, crying with me, because as a friend says, “God cries in all wars.”
R. When that hell ended for my Muslim brothers with the arrival of Portuguese soldiers, those poor people, who knew that their houses and neighborhood had been looted and destroyed, asked us to go and take refuge at the Catholic mission. Two thousand people. In the minor seminary, facilities, chapel, and football fields. I asked my priests, and they told me that the Gospel was clear about what needed to be done. We liberated the seminarians; the educators left their rooms and families entered, hundreds of children and elderly people defeated, still with fright running through their bones. We thought they would stay for three or four months, until international organizations rebuilt their neighborhood in Bangassou, but it lasted four years, and it was a hard, very difficult, but rewarding experience. Evangelical, putting touches of tenderness where violence reigned supreme.
P. Has there been a country plagued by enormous difficulties, at critical moments, with broken coexistence, with massacres… How is the current situation processed in a Spain full of noise, with an increasingly polarized population and a political class generally behaving like chickens when compared to the coordinates where you have lived? What is failing?
R. Do not be angry if I state that whenever I return to Spain, I smell decadence. Just like in all of Europe. Just like there was in the Roman Empire until its fall.
R. The image of the prophet Daniel comes to mind in chapter 2, 32-33, when the prophet Daniel interprets a vision of the king of Babylon in which he saw in a dream a statue with a head of fine gold, chest of silver, thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of iron mixed with clay. Those feet were supposed to bear the weight of the rest, up to the head.
R. Without wanting to go into details that are not my competence, I imagine Europe and Spain as that statue of the prophet Daniel where the gold head was the intelligence and sensitivity of other times that led to the birth of the European mystics of the 15th and 16th centuries; that silver chest could be the development of Greek and scholastic philosophies; those bronze thighs could be compared to the industrial era, and the iron legs to new textile and artistic technologies…
R. When I return to Spain, iron and clay bear the weight of all the above: the iron of digital technologies mixed with the clay of almost systemic corruption, of advances in immediate communication procedures mixed with the uncontrolled manufacturing of weapons of all kinds that endanger the world; the outbreaks of spirituality and fraternity initiatives seen everywhere, but which are mixed with agendas of hatred, massacres of innocents approved in Parliaments, or campaigns for an exacerbated consumerism. When I return to Spain, I ask myself: “Lord, where are we going?”
Interview of José Lorenzo with Juan José Aguirre
Digital Religion