A former priest strove to aid Haitian farmers

Published 10:57 am Thursday, November 21, 2013

MIAMI — When Yvrose Gilles heard Haiti’s long-suffering peasants had lost a valiant voice, with the passing of former Foreign Minister Jean Renald Clerisme, she couldn’t help but note the unfortunate timing.

“He was truly needed as a diplomat at the OAS meeting of Oct. 29 to represent Haiti,” Gilles, a human rights activist and South Florida resident, wrote on Facebook. “Haiti and the world will need seasoned diplomats like Dr. Clerisme to ensure that human rights and the citizenship rights of all Dominicans are respected regardless of their ethnic background or the color of their skin.”

Clerisme, a former Roman Catholic priest and expert on the plight of Haitian farmers in the Dominican Republic, died Oct. 29 in Port-au-Prince.

He was 75.

That same day, the Organization of American States in Washington listened to discussions about a Dominican Republic court ruling that strips citizenship rights from Dominican-born children of Haitian immigrants dating back to 1929.

Clerisme fell ill at the end of a political meeting and was rushed to a hospital. The cause of his death is still being determined.

His life and work on behalf of Haiti’s rural poor will be celebrated today at St. Louis Roi de France in Port-au-Prince’s Turgeau neighborhood. A 10 a.m. funeral Mass will be conducted by the Montfortains order, the community he belonged to as a priest. It will follow a 9 a.m. civil ceremony led by the foreign affairs ministry, which will escort the body Saturday to Clerisme’s hometown in Arniquet in southwest Haiti. There, he will be buried in his family’s plot.

Clerisme was born Nov. 7, 1937, in Chateau, a community in Arniquet, into a rural Haitian family. He served 22 years as a priest, pastoring to the poor on one hand and helping them organize into unions, on the other. His fight for land rights and a literacy program on their behalf often put him at odds with the church hierarchy, and Haiti’s militarized regime. A friend of former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, he also was a friend and collaborator to Jean-Marie Vincent, a fellow Montfortain priest and well-known peasant movement organizer who was assassinated in 1994.

“Renald believed Haiti’s future should lie with those who formed the backbone of the country’s historical strength: the people still known in Haiti as the peasants,” said author Amy Wilentz, who called him a friend and mentor. “He came from that class, and as a priest in the Northwest Department in the turbulent 1980s, he witnessed firsthand the peasantry’s continuing struggle against powerful local families, politicians, and armed militias, just trying to hold on to the small plots that provide subsistence living in such areas.”

Haiti’s farmers and their families, Wilentz said, “should be very sad now, because there are few people with access to power who care about them today the way Renald did throughout his life.”

Outside of Haiti, Clerisme was instrumental in the founding of the Parish Twinning Program of the Americas. About 300 U.S. Catholic parishes are connected to Haitian parishes and projects through the program.

After leaving the priesthood, Clerisme became a liberation theologist. Later, his activism temporarily detoured into academics and evolved into politics.

In 1996, he earned a doctorate in anthropology from Yale University, where he first met his wife, Linda Marc-Clerisme. His dissertation thesis was on Haitian migrant peasant workers in the Dominican Republic.

A former Fulbright fellow and authority on Haitian culture, religion and its rural class, Clerisme also held master’s degrees in sociology and anthropology from the State University of Haiti and New York University. He also had an undergraduate degree from France.

In the early 2000s, he served as either Haiti delegate or ambassador to several global organizations including the World Trade Organization.