This is a translation of a pamphlet written by Mario Calderon in an 
unknown date. It was broadly distributed during his funeral the day 
after his brutal assasination. Mario Calderon was killed with his wife, 
Elsa Alvarado, and his father in law, Carlos Alvarado, in Bogota in the 
morning of may 19th, 1997.

"Right to Heresy" portrays the best description of what Mario was: 
one of the few heretics of our society. To reproduce and distribute 
this pamphlet is a way to remember him.


>The Right to Heresy

>By Mario Calderon

>Heresy is a word used to set apart the stubbornly unorthodox. The 
unorthodox are those persons who do not conform to the dogmas of 
society, who maintain an opinion removed from the ordinary. 

>Opposed to the Heretics of our world are the orthodox, those who 
have the correct, ordinary, accepted, decent, profitable, serious, 
homogeneous, legitimate opinionsÖ

>Heretics are seen in a negative light. They are inconvenient. They 
are the bad guys in the movies.

>In order to explore the said qualities of the Heretic, let us turn to a 
few examples:

>The first of our examples belongs to the world of Greece 2600 years 
ago; the great fable writer known as Aesope. A freed slave, he 
stuttered and was ugly and hunchbacked, yet ingenious and subtle. 
He traveled around much of the Hellenic world. When he established 
himself at Delphi, which was the equivalent of today establishing 
oneself in the Vatican, the heart of orthodox religion, he challenged 
with his imagination the religious establishment. His fable about the 
bull and the frog, or the one about the fox and the grapes were 
intolerable darts thrown at the businessmen of the Oracle. They 
threw him off the cliffs of Hiampea to get rid of him. 

>Our second example lived approximately 2000 years ago, in 
Palestine, when its inhabitants found themselves under the yoke of 
Roman domination. His name was Jesus and he was born in Nazareth, 
a small town from which "nothing good could have come". Today he 
is known as Christ, the messiah, or the anointed one, long awaited by 
the people of his time. He enlisted in his group the impure, the blind, 
the lame, the lepers and the poor. He marked the Pharisees as 
hypocritical whitened tombs, and King Herod, who mediated, along 
with the Sanedrin between the empire and the people regarding 
tribute, as a fox. The Sanedrin decided to eliminate him for the sake 
of the nation. They condemned him to a punishment reserved for 
non-Roman criminals: the cross. 

>Our third example hails from the east, from India. Mohandas 
Karamchad Gandhi, known as the Mahatma "the great soul", practiced 
law twenty years in South Africa, defending fellow countrymen who 
had been relocated by the British crown. He then moved his struggle 
to his native land. He practiced civil disobedience, ignoring the 
government, ignoring the British army. He attended negotiations in 
London in sandals, glasses and a precarious white veil, almost naked. 
He was killed by a nobody. He was killed by the empire. Because 
nobody had the power to destroy his great spirit. The Encyclopedia 
Unversalis has these words to say about this prototype of pacifism: 
"between cowardice and violence, one must chose violence". 

>Our fourth Heretic is Giordano Bruno. Born near Naples in 1548, he 
studied philosophy, mathematics and theology. He was for a time a 
member of the Dominican order of preachers, until the Inquisition 
forced him to flee Italy. He found refuge in Paris. In a work titled 
"The Expulsion of the triumphant beast" he attacked the intellectual 
vacuum of Catholic Virtues. In "The Heroic Furies" he praised 
intelligence and truth. Calvinists threw him out of Geneva and 
Anglicans out of London. He was pegged as a pantheist, as if 
sustaining that divinity is natura naturans were dangerous for the 
environment. As if his morality, founded on a love of a deified 
universe, were perverse. One of his patrons turned him in to the 
Inquisition. He was burned alive at the age of forty eight in Rome. 
Just before they lit the fire the executioners asked him if he was 
afraid. He replied that he had less fear in his heart than they.

>Other cases: Camilo Torres, who proclaimed that the students of the 
National University, murdered in Bogota [in 1962], were not taken to 
hell by the devil. The editors of El Tiempo, a liberal newspaper, 
disagreed, as did the Cardinal of Bogota. And the vicar of Medellin, 
and the parish priest of Sevilla-Valle. They threw him out of his post 
at the university, pushed him out of the clergy and out of the city 
and even dragged him out of the mountains, dead. "One bandit less" 
said Gillermo Leon Valencia, hunter of ducks and President of the 
Colombian republic. 

>And the last case, Biofilo Panclasta. He was born in Chinacota [in 
Northern Colombia], and his last name was Lizcano. Let us allow him 
to introduce himself: "To live as a soldier, as an adventurer and an 
artist. A complex and strange life. To live as a knight, without title, 
horse or money. Life, a woman in the end, is capricious and 
treacherous. She has made me prince and pauper, lord and beggar, 
bohemian and colonel. I have feasted at the table of great lords, and 
drained the cup of astronomical drinkers. I have slept in the golden 
bed of dreaming harlots and have shivered in nights of misery on the 
banks of the river Plata and the river Sena. I dressed in the red tunic 
of the altar boy, my first ideal was to be a clergyman's apprentice. I 
prayed with the senseless fervor of the recently converted. I was a 
fanatic and a mystic. As an anarchist I bordered on the insanity of 
Caligula, but at the same time I've always cared little for the vile 
human herd. . . Justice is to me a cult, but like any other god, mine 
exists only in my imagination, his reality depends on my will. I hate 
hate. I love love. My admiration for everything beautiful is the 
flower of my soul. My ethic is the aesthetic. I praise water, I profess 
vice and care little for the vice ridden, but I drink wine and 
everything elseÖ 

>" To all of you Cirineans, patrons, Magdalenas, Oasis-souled, or 
Judases, who have placed on the path of my life a flower, a thistle or 
a thorn, to all of you I consecrate these Yellow Pages of the Road . . . 
written with the last of my tears"(Bogota, Tuesday 13th of August, 
1929). 

>Orthodoxy and heresy are two sides of the same coin; one exists 
because of
>the other. But they play opposing roles. 

>Orthodoxies often times are the result of the stagnation of former 
heresies. Other times heresies produce the ruptures in the dikes of 
orthodoxies which allow the free and liberating flow of truth. 

>How many technological, musical, and theoretical achievements do 
we humans
>owe to bold and strong willed heretics, irreverent breakers of 
standards monopolized by the authorities of the establishment! 

>Heretics are first cousins to prophets. Prophets, not in the ordinary 
sense
>of the word, that is, diviners. No. Prophets in the etymological sense 
of the word: pro-fari , he who speaks before the important, the 
serious, the accepted, the ordinary, the decent. He who speaks to 
unmask and reveal. 

>Prophets and Heretics are emblems of the processes of 
insubordination in
>society.

>Heretics have no rights. The orthodox fight them, reminding them 
only of
>their obligations. The obligation to submit, to be decent, serious, 
legitimate, correct, profitable, accepted, ordinary. 

>The rights of Heretics do not die out, but establish themselves in 
micro-zones of society, despite it's resistance. Because heretics are 
infinitely more defenseless than the congressmen of our republics, 
they have no alternative but to resist, to disobey, to be tough and 
indestructible. In this endeavor they share the luck of the great 
souled pacifist or the prophet. The orthodox take pleasure in the 
legitimate use of violence to hunt heretics down.

>Heretics are not thought well of in the palaces of kings, nor in the 
palaces of governments, nor in palaces of bishops, particularly in 
those of John Paul II.

>Heretics always leave a bad reputation, cigarette buts and gossip in 
their
>wake. They leave behind them fires with light but no flame. Later 
on there might appear another class of migrant wanderer to bring a 
new wind to bear on the heretic's fire, so that a new flame will rise 
from which they will forge the weapons for the fight for the rights of 
heresy. 

>Weapons of tolerance
>weapons of words
>aesthetic weapons
>weapons of gestures
>weapons of anarchy
>weapons of self management
>(white weapons of milk and petals)

>Old Horse,
>Bishop of the diocese of the East
>ea263@is7.nyu.edu