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The Church in Port-au-Prince, Haiti Today February 21, 2010

Bishop Joseph Lafontant is now taking care of the church of Port-au-Prince. There are 125 diocesan priests who survived the earthquake; 8 were confirmed dead, including Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot; but the exact number of deaths among the clergy is not yet known. 5 priests are known to be injured. 15 seminarians of religious congregations died; 2 religious priests and some 35 sisters were confirmed dead. It will probably take some time to really determine the number of deaths among the clergy, sisters and seminarians, even after the assembly of the diocesan clergy last February 3, and of the religious congregations last February 6. Many parishioners and parish leaders perished in the earthquake; close estimates will probably come only after the memorial celebrations to be held in all parishes of the Dioceses of Port-au-Prince and Jacmel from February 12-17.

From the diocesan seminarians that survived, only 28 seminarians in their final year of priestly formation will continue. A place will be found for their continued formation.

75 churches collapsed, including the cathedrals of Port-au-Prince and of Jacmel. 12 churches were destroyed in the city of Port-au-Prince alone. The pastoral centers are also gone. Sacraments are being celebrated in creative ways, in patios and open spaces, without the church buildings. The pastoral care of the people has not stopped. Accompaniment by the priests and the religious continues in the midst of destruction, in the “tent cities and among the injured and the hungry”. The diocesan radio is back on the air. It also serves to accompany the people.

The need to save church archives or whatever is left has become paramount. This means finding a new suitable place for the archives. Then there is a need too to rebuild the libraries for the continuing formation of the 28 seminarians. Finally, an inventory of the things needed to celebrate the sacraments in the destroyed parishes and to replenish what is lacking have to be done.

From the reports of 52 priests, it is clear that thousands of the parishioners are living in the tent cities. The estimates are some 1.2 million people, in the city of Port-au-Prince alone and another 1 million may be found in the surrounding cities outside of the capital. People by the thousands have been encouraged to go to the provinces. And many have done so. Though the exact number of those who have gone to the provinces have yet to be determined, at the present there are problems arising from this movement from the city to the countryside, like land availability and tools for economic productivity. Concluding almost every report was a persistent question: Where is the promised aid? – Fr. Ben Alfroque, MSC

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Haiti Invictus (1)

Since my return, I have received numerous invitations to speak about my experiences in Haiti. I have gladly accepted the invitations, while taking to heart the request of my Haiti friends to re-tell their own understanding of their own Haitian history. Fr. Pascal, MSC, pastor of the Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Parish, and Rector of the MSC Formation House, oriented me on Haiti’s modern-day self-understanding of its history and people.

Haiti, and the whole island of what is now Hispaniola, was colonized by Spain in 1492. Spain totally wiped out Haiti’s indigenous population and supplanted them with slaves from black Africa. In 1697, Spain ceded to France the western third of Hispaniola. As early as 1751, slave rebellions broke out in the French-dominated part of Hispaniola. Volunteer Haitian slaves, in the command of a French admiral Count d’Estaing, left for Savannah, Georgia and fought against the British in the American Revolutionary War. In 1793, the British occupied Port-au-Prince from the French; in 1795, Spain surrendered this time the eastern part of Hispaniola to France.

It was in January 1, 1804 that Haiti’s revolutionary forces won victoriously in their struggle for independence against France under the leadership of General Jean-Jacques Dessalines. This was a remarkable triumph of black slaves in a small country against the most powerful European imperial power at that time, France under Napoleon Bonaparte. But Haiti’s new nation had to pay the price: the world’s oldest black republic had to pay France 150 million gold francs – later reduced to 90 million – as indemnity to the losing western colonizer! This was in 1825, when Haiti reeled from the crippling economic and political embargo imposed by France, Britain and the United States. To pay France, Haiti had to borrow high interest loans which it was able to pay in full in 1947.

In 1915, to protect its economic and political interests in the area owing to the political instability of the young nation, the United States began its 19 years of occupation of Haiti when it sent 3,000 US marines under Admiral William B. Caperton. In 1937, some 17,00 to 35,000 Haitian in the Dominican Republic were massacred by the Dominican military on orders of President Rafael Trujillo whom the then-US Secretary of State Cordell Hull dubbed as “one of the greatest men in Central America and in most of South America.”

The brutal dictatorship of Francois Duvalier and his son, Jean Claude, began in 1957. In 1986, due to strong popular anti-dictatorship movements, Baby Doc Duvalier fled to France. The 21st Century Haiti continues to experience political power changes, thereby further eroding its capacity to stand as a nation-state. So where lies its hope?-Fr. Ben Alforque, MSC

Haiti Invictus (2)

The groaning soul of Haiti is very much essentially linked to its soil, its land. Once called the “The Pearl of the Antilles”, Haiti provided wealth to its French colonizers by producing sugar, cotton and, later, tobacco. But the producers of this great wealth were the hands of slave labor, of black slaves from black Africa.

It was said that Montesquieu had articulated, thus: “This sugar could be more expensive if it were not for the slaves who produced them. These slaves are black from head to foot And God in His wisdom has inserted a soul, especially a good soul, into an entirely black body.” On the other hand, “God had placed a whip into the hands of a foreman. The slaves are not distinct by virtue of their desire to work. Blacks were slaves by nature, and nature ordained the social order, and nature was God’s creation.” More generously, David Hume did give a tribute to the negro: “he can develop certain human abilities, like a parrot that can speak some human words.”

The total and unpardonable humiliation of the Haitian spirit was in its victorious struggle and declaration of national freedom and the independence of their land from foreign conquerors. The land of Haiti was completely devastated by monocropping, its forests denuded by mines and deforestation, and rent by the calamities of wars. And then the blockade was declared against Haiti and its people. She was condemned to complete isolation.

And so, this is the way Haitians I talked with interpret their life. Haiti's lands and resources were exploited to the hilt by the colonizing powers. Its domestic production was imposed and designed to satisfy the needs of the colonizing people, not of the Haitian population. Under the weight of colonial oppression, Haiti is on record as the first nation to wage victoriously a war of national independence on this side of the globe. Because of this victory and separation from France, the three colonizing powers made Haiti an example to other nations in the Caribbean. For the crime that Haiti committed, the reclaiming of their dignity as a people, Haiti must not be allowed to self-develop. Thus in its history as a nation and people, Haiti continues to suffer under the four layers of oppression and injustice. First, there was the yoke of colonial domination and the loss of a national soul; second, continuing neo-colonial rule and economic isolation; third, neo-colonial national government neglect and corruption; and finally, the people’s deprivation of education and literacy. The existing phenomenon of massive poverty and private commercialized technical training are symptoms of this historical national malaise.

The most recent experience of destructive earthquake, after the last one of 200 years ago, might arouse the Haitian people and call the attention of the world on the reality of Haiti. Haiti must develop in its own terms; to help Haiti is to understand the spirit of her people. – Fr. Ben Alforque, MSC

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Haiti Invictus (3)


Questions have been asked about the political-economic events in Haiti, especially in these last 20 years. The first democratically elected President of Haiti, a priest and once a member of the Salesian order, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was ousted from office. Haitians I spoke with talked of the Aristide administration, its fall and return, and finally, of Aristide’s exile to South Africa, with fondness, questions and regret.

Fondness because Aristide was perceived as an inspiring leader who did so many things to recover the Haitian spirit, restore the dignity of the poor and reform the political-economic landscape of the nation in favor of the land and human labor.

Questions abound regarding the conspiracies between the local coup leaders and the foreign interventionists policies of France and the US. There was the UN-led new economic embargo that crippled Haiti’s capacity for a self-reliant survival. Aristide’s resistance to the demands of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for economic structural adjustments was unpardonable. In 1994, US forces again occupied Haiti in the name of democracy. A year after, the United Nations Mission in Haiti took over occupation forces. Political instability and election deadlock between Aristide’s party and the opposition led to another rebellion in 2004. This time, Aristide claimed he was kidnapped by US forces. The interim leadership of Haiti called for the UN peacekeeping force, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH, French: Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti), to stay. My Haitian acquaintances say that forces destroyed democracy in the name of democracy.

Regret because they perceived that some of their leaders, Aristide included, succumbed to the pressures of international powers, and, perhaps, to corruption too.

But more telling is their realization that: the THEORY OF NATURAL DISASTER IS A LIE. There are no natural disasters, only natural phenomena like earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and the like. But these natural phenomena have been converted into disasters by human beings: by the invisible hands of the few, and their concrete political and economic interests. We become their accomplices if we limit ourselves to being sorry and being in charitable solidarity before this man-made tragedy.

I saw this in the structural engineering used to construct the buildings of Haiti. Our MSC Formation House, for example, and the huge edifices that fell, had strong posts with steel support in them. But between the posts were hollow blocks piled on top of one another with hardly any steel bar in them. I showed this to friends, but they could hardly believe me because they were always used to this way of constructing a building. – Fr. Ben Alforque, MSC