Friend to the downtrodden
18.08.2009
Shortly after I arrived in Chile 39 years ago I became acquainted with Fr Roberto Lebeque. He was a French missionary working on the northern fringe of the city of Santiago, an area still basically rural but gradually being settled by poor working class families in search of a place to live. Roberto used to celebrate Mass in a little church on what had been the landlord's estate. Some of the landlord's family still attended Mass and sat in a special bench with a carpet underneath. One Sunday when the people arrived for Mass they found that the special bench had disappeared and the carpet spread at the doorway to welcome all. Roberto was putting some of his theology into action.
As a young man he had joined the resistance movement in France and was a member of General Leclerc's army at the Liberation of Paris. Towards the end of the war he was wounded in action in Germany. After the war he became a priest and was very much involved in the worker priest movement in France.
In 1960 he came to Chile. He was well aware that the Kingdom of God also has a ‘this world' dimension and worked tirelessly to promote a fraternal society where there would be justice and equality for all.
He was not present in Chile when the repressive Pinochet led military coup took place in 1973. The new government refused him permission to return.
He worked in Venezuela until 1980 and eventually managed to return to Chile where he worked in the Diocese of Copiapo in the Atacama Desert some 600kms north of Santiago. I was assigned to work in the same diocese in 1986 and I got to know him well. Although we were separated by miles of sand there were closer relationships between all of us who worked in the parishes in the towns and villages of the desert than there were in the big city of Santiago.
I found that Roberto hadn't changed. His life was based on that passage of the Gospel of St Luke where Jesus talks about coming to free the imprisoned, to bring good news to the poor. He was a man of prayer, the Bible was his handbook. Everyone who was in trouble or who felt they hadn't got a fair deal seemed to seek him out and received a hearing and support from him. He always lived in the simplest way in the poorest section of his parish. His French Army pension was used to finance a summer holiday camp for poor children.
Roberto died suddenly. His last act of Christian witness was set out in his will. He directed that he should be buried in that corner of the graveyard reserved in times past for unbaptised babies, unknown strangers and suicides.
Roberto was laid to rest in that little visited corner which has become the best kept part of the cemetery.
Fr Patrick Egan has been a missionary in Chile since 1962.
