Father Gérard Jean-Juste died last week. He'd been sick for years-- diagnosed with leukemia while in jail in 2005-- but nobody would think of him as weakened. Arrested again and again in Haiti and the US for doing what he felt called to do (feeding the hungry, preaching redistributive justice, demonstrating for Aristide), he never learned his lesson, never left well enough alone, never concluded that it was somebody else's turn to save the world.

The kind of guy who would lie down in front of a bus in order to stop it deporting illegal immigrants didn't mind incurring the wrath of Papa Doc, Baby Doc, Gérard Latortue or his own ecclesiastical superiors. He was irrepressible. Throwing him in jail just gave him a new angle on injustice (the rotten conditions and overcrowding analogized the conditions outside in the streets of Port-au-Prince).

He made trouble both in Haiti and in the United States, rather than just making trouble in Haiti from the safe haven of Miami, or with the support of so-called civil society initiatives funded from the US. He scolded Haitian politicians for ignoring the plight of starving people; he scolded American politicians for ignoring the plight of those starving people who managed to drift across three hundred miles of ocean with hopes of picking oranges or maybe, if they were really lucky, mopping floors. National frontiers were invisible to him, and rightly so, since Haitian animosities followed him wherever he went. The bizarre episode of his arrest on charges of illegal weapons possession, despite a total absence of evidence, I read as a kind of homage to the power of his unarmed voice and persistence.

Let's imagine Haiti had been snatched up from the dust and injected with 8 to 10 percent annual growth every year since the departure of the Duvaliers. And let's imagine that some political figure or party took credit for the rising standard of living, to the point of portraying any rival party as traitors and imminent murderers of the golden goose. And let's give that smug party a basis of political support. Even under those madly counterfactual conditions, I'm sure Father Gerry would still be out there with his megaphone, making noise, being unreasonable, insisting on the rights of the poor, and getting himself thrown in new, improved and possibly air-conditioned jails.

So he's a good man to remember on June 4.