A Dominican truck driver

This appears on the international website of the Dominican Order.

The man is dead but how lovely it is to read about a Dominican who lived this sort of life.

It's another world to prancing about in perfectly tailored habits, talking about angels and waking up thinking of the Immaculate Conception.

This man seems to have been a real, kind human being, who had no time for piosity, codology, humbug.

It's profoundly sad to observe what's happening the Dominican Order in some provinces.

It seems as if the Order in some countries is being influenced by a right-wing fundamentalism, which has its origins in the Unied States. Trump-style Christianity. Bizarre.

A chapter in international solidarity with Brazil’s embattled rural poor closed on Sunday 26 November with the death of Dominican priest and lawyer, Henri des Roziers.

Henri had worked in Brazil since 1978, using his skills as a lawyer to defend rural workers’ unions and to bring to justice the landowners who ordered the killing of so many of their leaders.

The tributes paid to Henri at his funeral in Paris on 1 December put his commitment into a broader context.  

Born into what the French call a family of the haute-bourgeoisie, Henri showed very early that he wanted to follow a different path by visiting poor families in Paris slums, an example of what was later called the ‘option for the poor’.

He studied philosophy and law at the Sorbonne and later in Cambridge.  In Cambridge, he met a French Dominican theologian, Yves Congar, who had been banned from speaking by the Vatican and was in a kind of exile in Britain.

Congar’s influence made Henri decide that the Dominican order would enable him to develop his Christian commitment to justice;  His first post was as a chaplain to students at the Centre Saint-Yves in Paris, the only student centre that did not close during the student revolts of the 1960s.

He later became a priest worker, a lorry-driver and a worker in a chemical factory in Besançon.

Later, in Annecy, he had a job inspecting and closing the squalid accommodation to which North African migrants were condemned, using his legal skill