LIMA, Peru (AP) – Dressed in a white suit and dust-worn shoes, Venezuelan layman Ronald Marón is the only one to hold a funeral in a cemetery in the center of the capital.
At a time when the Peruvian government estimates that more than a quarter of Lima’s population would possibly have become inflamed with the new coronavirus, Maron is one of the few representatives of the Catholic Church that remains in the cemeteries alongside the mourners.
“What we are doing is seeking to give hope to other people,” said the boy who, until 2018, was a schoolteacher, ran a parish dining room in the Venezuelan town of Guacara and visited the sick. Regardless, he made vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience.
Catholic churches in Peru have closed their temples to avoid contagion while virtual masses on the Internet have multiplied, but a handful of bets, Adds Maron, that it is their duty to pray with the sick, provide help in cemeteries, and pray with the circle of relatives. victims.
Brother Maron carries a backpack with an e-book of worn leaves named Funeral Ritual, a silver cross and a copper sprinkler with which he splatters holy water at the end of the last prayer for the deceased in a cemetery that looks like a miniature village. wedged between two desert hills.
In his reflections, shortly before the coffins wrapped in clear plastic were buried, the profane quotes Job and the calamities he experienced, Ezekiel walking in a valley of dry bones and Tobias listening to his father’s recommendation on how to bury him.
Maron, a 30-year-old graduate of Carabobo University, arrives before noon and leaves at dusk when the cemetery in The Comas district of Lima, with more than a century of lifestyles and no electric light on the ground, empties the living and the dead remain.
When he cares about the deceased, he visits the surrounding neighborhoods where since 2018 he has taught catechism to about a hundred sons and daughters of masons, florists and sweet merchants so that they can obtain baptism and first communion in a nearby church. .
He left Venezuela after more than a decade of protests opposed to the socialist government and when in 2018 he became inflamed with tuberculosis, a doctor begged him to migrate to feed better.
His worn cell phone, with a broken screen in dozens of fragments, rings early in the morning with calls, audio and text messages from others asking him if he will be in the cemetery the next day to pray for the one who just died.
He is sometimes invited to pray in the deceased’s space after the first month of his death.
The presence of other lay people in spaces where the church never arrived summons neighbors dressed in masks who have come to pray.
Maron asks for a chair and reflects on the teachings of the Bible. He used undeniable words such as when he was an instructor in Venezuela, a career he painted until he went to Peru in search of paintings like 830,000 other migrants.
In Lima he sold hot coffee on the streets and slept in a car depot. Soon after, he met the parish priest of a church where he gave him a task as a janitor for a month before being sent to the cemetery for the convenience of the mourners.
Peru has a mortality rate consistent with millions in the Americas, ahead of Chile, the United States, Brazil and Mexico.
Currently, 395,000 are inflamed and 18,600 have died to date.