Tending the Dead in Haiti
February 24, 2010
IN THIS EXCELLENT piece by Matt Labash, Father Rick Frechette buries the dead of Haiti. Labash writes:
Haiti might be the only place where death with dignity entails being buried five-to-a-cardboard coffin. But it is moving and beautiful. Yet, I suggest to Frechette, it seems futile. Why do this? However horrible their lives were, this isn’t going to change that. Why spend so much time and energy serving people who’ll never know they’ve been served?
Frechette thinks about it a long while, then says, “If the dead are garbage, then the living are walking garbage.”
Jake Jacobsen writes:
It may be beautiful but this feels like moral grandstanding to me. This seems to me like the kinds of “aid” that, the moment they’re removed, are as if they’d never been. You cannot ‘be moral’ for someone else, whites cannot provide a moral conscience to blacks.
Every missionary I have ever spoken with (and we’ve attended several missionary churches) has told me that doing missionary work in a black country feels like a waste of time. I do not claim to have the answer for that as the Bible and the Great Commission provides no racial outs, I know that, but I do think blacks and black bring out the worst condescending paternal impulses of white Christian liberals.
Laura writes:
I recommend reading the entire piece. Frechette, who did not appear after the earthquake but has been there all along, does not seem a show-off. He’s well aware of where he is. He’s a priest, not a socialist or reformer. Perhaps some missionaries feel it’s a waste of time because their ambitions are immodest. Perhaps they do not take literally Christ’s admonition, “the poor you will always have with you.” Given that politicians and celebrities have flown in and out of Haiti, and used it as an occasion to induce white guilt and prove their own virtue, the way Frechette went about simply burying the piles of bodies with no fancy equipment was moving. It appeared to be work that wouldn’t have been done with that kind of dignity otherwise. Haiti is a hellhole. It is not the fault of whites. But the work of saving a few souls and praying for the dead could not be useless. Christ didn’t advocate the abolition of suffering but said it had meaning.
