In Chile, Joan Alsina, the people feel very much their own. He was not only a character linked to the Church, but a companion, especially in worker and peasant circles,” recalled this week the historian Jordi Roig, an expert on Chilean reality, in one of the events held in Girona in memory of the 50th anniversary. of the death of this Catalan worker priest, who was murdered by the military eight days after Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état.
Known in some circles as the ‘cura yeyé’, Joan Alsina Hurtós (Castelló d’Empúries, 1942) was assigned to the South American country in 1968 three years after being ordained a priest and spending time as vicar in Malgrat de Mar. Assigned to the port city of San Antonio, he soon went to work as an official at the San Juan de Dios Hospital in Santiago de Chile, which allowed him to come into contact with the working world and experience first-hand their problems and concerns such as the enormous economic inequalities. from that time.
“I am no longer simply the priest, that man who listens and advises them; I am the man who fights alongside them. If they have a union, so do I; If they are on a work committee, so am I; If they have meetings after the work day, so do I; If they are exploited, so am I; “If they charge a low price, I charge it even lower,” he wrote in a letter collected in a booklet El testimoni by Salvador Allende and Joan Alsina, published this year coinciding with the death of the religious, who was shot by a young soldier. of 18 years.
During his stay in Chile, Salvador Allende was elected president of the Republic and the Christians for Socialism movement emerged, with which he empathized. A social commitment that, according to what former priest Àngel Jiménez, who was a classmate of Alsina in the seminary and later, an archivist and historian, published in a 1995 article in the Girona Magazine, earned him some slaps on the wrist from the hierarchy. ecclesiastical, which recommended that he leave one thing or another.
But he didn’t pay attention to them. He continued in the hospital without abandoning the priesthood or the role of conciliar of the Catholic Action Workers Movement (MOAC). Social educator Flora Ridaura, who lived for a decade in Chile, explains that since her death, each year they continue to hold an event in memory of Joan Alsina.
“They sent him back to Catalonia, on ‘vacation’ so he could reflect, but he was very committed,” recalled this Thursday Lluís Sitjas, a colleague in Chile, who also lived through the coup d’état and who remembers the murdered religious man as someone “very normal and loved by everyone.” Sitjas, who left the habit while in the Andean country, pointed out that Alsina used to show up at the meetings he held at home with priests and ex-priests, “with a box of shrimp and clams.”
When the coup d’état took place on September 11, 1973, she continued working at the hospital despite being advised to hide in the Spanish embassy because she was considered “a dangerous person” by the Pinochet regime. But she continued with her companions.
One day before his death, he wrote his own will in which he expressed the fear he felt and in a way said goodbye. “He knew that they were going to kill him,” explains Jordi Planas, president of the Latin American Agenda Commission, one of the organizing entities, together with Justícia i Pau and the Joan Alsina Forum, of the events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of Alsina.
On September 19, upon arriving at work at the hospital, they detained, interrogated and tortured him before shooting him on the Bulnes Bridge and throwing his body into the Mapocho River. He died asking his murderers not to cover his eyes, so that he could give them his forgiveness.
A forgiveness that they also obtained from Alsina’s parents, who nine months after her death sent an open letter to her executioners, who still did not have a name or surname. It was not until 1990 when an investigation by priest Miquel Jordà found the shooter, recruit Nelson Bañados, who ended up committing suicide nine years later, tormented by what had happened.
The historian Jordi Roig recognizes that Alsina “was an uncomfortable person for the Church because he was a working-class priest and he was also uncomfortable for some left-wing parties, who did not understand that a priest could be next to the workers,” he says.
One of his legacies is the Joan Alsina Forum, born in 1999 and made up of priests who are in tune with an “open and progressive line” of the Church. One of its members, Mosén Félix Mussoll, from the Sant Cugat de Salt parish, highlights Alsina’s “commitment” and “firmness” to “the people.” The forum proclaims an “open, understanding gospel that embodies the concerns of the people.”
Joan Alsina’s nephew, who has the same first and last name as his uncle, claimed this Thursday in Girona, one of the most remembered phrases of the working-class priest. “We can only collaborate in the creation of a new world if we are involved in it.”
