By REY FLORES
About 20 years ago I learned a fact about the city of Rio that has stuck with me ever since. At that time, I learned that Rio had the highest number of homeless children who were addicted to huffing inhalants. That is, using anything in an aerosol can, like household cleaning products, insecticide, glue, paint thinner, nail polish remover and lighter fluid, in order to get high.
These kids weren’t just rebelling or trying to have fun. These children as young as five years old were trying to mask the starvation and pain that stalked them for their entire short lives.
Like any other injustice which I have learned about, I cannot unlearn it. These injustices are forever stuck with me and that is what has driven me to much of my life’s work in at least trying to bring light where there is darkness.
Sometimes I wish I had never heard of any human suffering or injustice, and had remained an inconsequential soul, living in blissful ignorance. I don’t say this for self-aggrandizing purposes, but I say it because sometimes the pain is too much to even think about. I wish I had never known.
Nevertheless, many of these children have been abandoned, left to the wolves in the streets to do with them what they will. Unspeakable horrors haunt the lives of these kids, including rampant child prostitution which involves torture, rape, and murder.
Today it isn’t all that much different and if anything, the worsening economic situation has only served to exacerbate the situation.
In recent videos circulating throughout the Internet social media sphere, tourists from around the globe are seen having their cell phones, purses, wallets, headphones, and anything not permanently attached to their bodies get stolen. Personal items like these are snatched by an army of small, skinny youths who are feasting on the fatted Olympic tourists, who should have realized what kind of hellhole they were getting themselves into.
Brazil’s street waifs have learned how to survive through lying, cheating, stealing, and selling their frail and molested bodies for a couple of dollars to sick men who keep a diabolical child-sex industry thriving.
When one thinks of Rio, or at least I used to, I imagined a glamorous resort city with the Christ the Redeemer statue looking over Corcovado while the night lights twinkle over the bay. I could almost hear The Girl From Ipanema playing in my head.
Rio may have been like that as late as the 1960s, but since it has become one of those places on earth where pain and suffering are immediately handed to its citizens who are impoverished.
The Brazilian Conference of Bishops reports that over 64 percent of Brazil’s population identifies as Roman Catholic, yet because of the rampant abuse and exploitation of children, and adults, it is hard for the Church to try and save the souls of this “city of the damned.”
In an article published by The Mirror in 2014 during the World Cup Soccer tournament, also hosted in Rio, a 13-year-old prostitute is quoted as saying “Sniffing the glue makes me feel dizzy and numb and it stops me feeling hungry so I don’t need to eat….It helps me cope with the violence and danger on the streets.”
If that doesn’t break your heart, I’m not sure you have a pulse, let alone a heart. How does our world allow for such pain to exist? How can we call ourselves merciful when the cries of desperate and hungry children go unheard? Worse yet, these cries are ignored.
While the television cameras focus on the Olympic athletes who get to go home after the fanfare, the underbelly of Rio will continue to chew up and spit out these little innocents. Instead of learning their ABCs or having a mother and father taking them to the park, instead they spend their nights in the clutches of filthy sexual deviants.
Am I painting the picture for you clearly enough? Am I horrifying you with what I have typed? Will you toss and turn in your comfortable bed tonight as you remember these words you have read?
What do we do about all this? Do we pray? Do we fast? Absolutely. Do we give money? Let’s be sure about whom we donate to.
For decades now, Catholics have contributed to the CRS Operation Rice Bowl, hoping to help the poor in Third World, and impoverished developing countries like Brazil.
But see this week’s News Notes column for a Lepanto Institute report on CRS employees’ political donations to pro-aborts.
“A full 98 percent of political contributions made by Catholic Relief Services (CRS) employees go to candidates that actively work to support the abortion and contraceptive industry, according to the report, based on public records dating to 2002,” says the LifeSiteNews article about the Lepanto report.
Is this whom we want deciding how our charitable contributions are spent?
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(Rey Flores is a Catholic writer and speaker. Contact Rey at reyfloresusa@gmail.com.)
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