Strategic Alliance

On Sunday August 4, 1946, when we all finished lunch at the home of my grandfather Patricio Antonio Badia Peña in his company and that of his wife and children, our mother and hers, I visited the family caregiver of a farm that had been the property of Felipe Badia my deceased great-grandfather, located about two hundred yards in front and to the east of my grandfather´s home, on the road leading to El Monte de la Jagua and El Corozo.

It was around one o'clock in the afternoon and when I got there the family still had members who had not finished swallowing their lunch meals. Such fact drove me to remain standing up under the shed waiting for my friends to finish their lunches so we may share after lunch games and conversations.

I was still standing when suddenly I felt everything swinging at such great a magnitude that I ended up on my knees flat on the floor. While striving to stand up again, I saw at the distance a cloud of dust in the direction of one of the two churches in town. It was that the church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was plummeting.

Nobody, young or mature, adult, adolescent or child, had ever felt an earth tremor, let alone an earthquake. Yet there was a consensus, expressed immediately, at first by adults, followed by their eldest children, by beating their breasts with their own fists to symbolize the sought of God's forgiveness for the deliverance of such disgrace in punishment or retaliation for their sins.

Nothing was more common than this fanatical awarding of self-culpability expressed verbally with the phrase "my fault", seasoned with promises of renewal of conduct to avoid further punishment from the God of Vengeance.

Returning later to our home, we found my father tuned to a foreign radio station which reported that we had just gone through a strong earthquake and that strong waves had also caused destruction in Nagua (then Julia Molina).

Next day, people said that the sea had entered into Matancitas and Julia Molina, that happenings was God's punishment for our evil actions, and contrite believers, supported and lead by the Catholic church, which had lost an important building of worship, organized processions and activities to plead God for forgiveness and to rebuild their damaged assets, a task which in the case of Moca took about twenty years.

As I was then just an infant of only seven years old, every time I recount this event, which changed my views about divinity, I get as reply that my recollection probably was about a later event. Yet, I vividly remember the questions I asked my mother, as well as I recall her answers.

I asked my mother, why such a fuss every day asking for forgiveness? --"Because people believe that the earthquake was an act of God's to punish our sins”. Have you done something to deserve getting punished? --“No. Those are old beliefs”.

The Dominican nation spent the rest of the year seeking forgiveness for their sins, to ensure with their actions that sins be redeemed.

Yet nobody ever thought to ask pardon or forgiveness of God for having a cruel government that killed and never allowed any freedom. Not even those who knew better, such as church officials, that were learned about the evil dictatorship that crushed us, murdered us, and was leaving us without the ability to know freedom, democracy and justice, felt a need to ask for forgiveness for the Dominican people, for permitting such a criminal satrap to govern us.

I recently learned that Monsignor Pittini had reached understandings with Trujillo for the use of Trujillo´s strong and virile image in association with and for the benefit of the Catholic Church. Such association of the church with a criminal that ruled us for 30 years, until exactly 50 years ago, is a diabolical and abominable political alliance. And that alliance is something about which the Catholic Church should apologize.

At least our Cardinal, whose family delivered many martyrs to the cause of freedom during the Trujillo regime, should promote such forgiveness, so we may forget pains caused by the actions of Pittini.

Marcos R. Taveras is Private Consultant