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25 1 LOCATION: BLOCK 30, VILLA DE RETIRO TRANSPORTATION: SUBWAY STATIONS: RETIRO (C LINE). BUSES: 5, 6, 7, 9, 20, 22, 23, 26, 28, 33, 45, 50, 56, 70, 75, 91, 100, 101, 106, 115, 126, 132, 143, 150, 195. TRAIN: RETIRO STATION (MITRE, BELGRANO, AND SAN MARTÍN LINES). Av. Alvear alvear av. A v. A n ta rt id a A rg e n ti n a A v . d e l o s I n m i g r a n t e s Gendarmeria Nacional Av. del Libertador M y . A . P . L u i s o n i p a r e r a Posadas L ib e r t a d M o n t e v i d e o C e r r it o R a m o s M e j i a P. Zanni 3 Est. Retiro ESTACIÓN TERMINAL DE ÓMNIBUS ESTACIÓN RETIRO FCGSM FCGB FCBM AUTOPISTA ILLIA RETIRO 3 . Chapel of Christ the Laborer – Father Carlos Mujica The “shantytown priest” Carlos Mujica Echague made a radical commitment to working with the poor even though he had been born into an upper -class Buenos Aires family . Mujica was born on October 7 , 1930 . His father Adolfo Mugica was a Conservative party congressman and later Minister of Foreign Affairs in the government of Arturo Frondizi . His mother Carmen Echague was the daughter of landowners . Mujica was murdered by the Triple A* (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance) on May 11, 1974 . “We must stand with the people now more than ever, ” he said before dying . He began to study law after completing high school . At age twenty-one he abandoned his legal studies and entered the seminary to study for the priesthood . In 1954 he began to take part in mission work conducted by the Parish Church of Santa Rosa de Lima in tenements and poor neighborhoods . He was ordained in 1959 and spent most of his first year as a priest working alongside the Bishop of Resistencia in the Chaco region of the province of Santa Fe . Upon returning to Buenos Aires, he was assigned to tasks in the curia and began teaching theology at the University of Salvador . In 1966 Father Mugica participated in a rural mission in the province of Santa Fe together with the three men who would go on to found the guerrilla movement known as the Montoneros*: Gustavo Ramus, Fernando Abal Medina, and Mario Firmenich . Two years later he traveled to France, where he deepened his relationship with the priest Rolando Concatti, a leader in the Movement of Priests for the Third World (MSTM, Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo) . He later traveled to Madrid, where he met Juan Domingo Perón . CRISTO OBRERO CHAPEL. 26 In a 1973 interview Mujica observed that one episode in his life had transformed his ideology . After the fall of Juan Domingo Perón’s government in 1955, he said, “I went to work in a tenement as usual . I had to cross a dark alley and suddenly, in the very dim light of a single light bulb, I saw that someone had written in chalk: ‘There can be no nation and no God without Perón . Down with the crows [a slang term for priests] .’ The poor were clearly in mourning, and if they were mourning, I appeared to be on the wrong side . ” Movement of Priests for theThird World The massive ecumenical gathering known as the Second Vatican Council of 1965 proposed that the church renew itself to better address the needs of the twentieth century . From that moment on, European experiences of “workerpriests ” and the “dialogue between Christians and Marxists” were reproduced in Latin America . Many priests followed radical versions of this “option for the poor . ” One of them was Camilo Torres, a Colombian priest who joined the Colombian guerrilla movement known as the National Liberation Army (ELN, Ejército de Liberación Nacional) . The reforms undertaken in the 1960s by the progressive popes John XXIII and Paul VI were part of this tendency toward change within the Catholic community . In 1967 Brazilian bishop Hélder Câmara led a group of eighteen bishops from Latin America, Asia, and Africa who drafted a document denouncing the exploitation of impoverished Third World countries by multinational corporations . Two hundred and seventy Argentine priests signed this document in December of that year . The Movement of Priests for the Third World would eventually count 524 full members . In March...

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