It is said that the Basque language was among the languages of Babel. That is what José Saramago wrote to us in the novel Caín. There is no life without death, and he lived and died too. Saramago’s sharp and unexpected views, his politeness, his critical imagination deserve my admiration and respect. His novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ deserves my eternal love and gratitude. After the death of the Portuguese writer, literary enthusiasts such as Ibarretxe, Zapatero and Raxoi remembered the Nobel Prize in the newspapers the following day. After the funeral chapel was opened in the library that bears his name, in the town of Tias in Lanzarote, the remains of the writer José Saramago were transferred to Lisbon. The municipal employees confessed that they had never seen such a tribute in the Lisbon City Hall. The Portuguese government ordered national mourning. They were not afraid to say that even the Vatican did not forget. In the newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, published by the Pope's Bishop of Rome, he was defended as an "extremist populist", "a man who lived on his knees in the face of historical materialism, that is, Marxism.

Against the Crusades and the Inquisition, yes, but the gulags of the Soviet Union, which are said to have forgotten the purges, the genocides, the attacks by culture and faith.” Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! It is worth seeing the passion for evangelization that God’s office leaders are showing in this last period. When the Vatican newspaper reviews the career of the Portuguese writer and looks at the novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), it considers him “irreverent”, “a threat against the memory of Christianity”. Jesus, Mary and Joseph! The Church of Rome has a truly unbounded heart, with a true capacity at the bottom, one that can be materialized in genuine convictions, not trivial, like that of Saramago, mine and so many others. It was precisely the unsympathetic response of Catholics to the publication of The Gospel according to Jesus Christ and the decision of the then Lusitanian Government in 1992 not to present this same book as a candidate for a European literary prize that forced Saramago to leave his country and go to Lanzarote. In our country, the Bishop of San Sebastian, Monsignor Munilla, has just asked the Franciscan provincial and vicar to send the Franciscan Joxe Arregi not to Lanzarote, but to America, to work with the poor, as a “measure of grace”, as an “opportunity of grace”. I thought it was his raison d’être, but it is said that some new peculiar punitive technique is now for the Church to care for the poor, something like punishing the jealous of Azpeitia and Peralta to give bitterly passionate kisses to the Spanish flag. “Dirty water,” they say, “that pollutes not only those inside the Church, but also those outside.” I loved the Dirty Water Parable, and I'm going to do the following from now on: This dignity of the Church, this doctrine, this maturity, this fraternity, this freedom, this benevolence, this decision, purify every day with the dirty water of heresy. We need heretics like Joxe Arregi everywhere, his heterodox, innovative, hopeful messages, the new wind of heresy everywhere. More dirty water against this new kind of clean fountain. I also agree with the French writer Georges Bernanos: “The best that religion has given is heterodoxy.”