EXCERPT: Product of a Basque-language upbringing and elementary education at Notre-Dame de Belloc, Saez was twenty in 1978 when he joined the ETA. The decision was a young man’s revolt against the repression around him. During concert tours in Basque Spain, he had witnessed raids where police, lurking at nightclub exits, took men into custody and raped their dates. He even witnessed an onlooker shot to death in Pamplona in 1977.
“At the time,” he later said, “the ETA still represented the myth of the glorious days of the struggle against Franco. Joining up was a kind of exaltation for me, but I quickly went clandestine,”—in fact, he was made part of the ETA’s most secret commando unit, taking his new code name Txistu (the name of the Basque flute he played and taught).
The ETA trained Txistu in small arms combat, explosives, and bomb-making. In November, 1978 he drove getaway in the killing of a Spanish industrialist. In January, 1979 he took part in assassinating a general in Madrid, and that May he was sentry for a grenade attack that killed three Spanish army officers and their driver.
The next day he realized he had had enough of armed resistance, especially since negotiations had begun between the ETA and Spain’s post-Franco government. So Txistu got the ETA’s permission to quit, and he kept quiet until 1987, when he repented his acts, confessed them – and one year later entered Notre-Dame de Belloc as a Benedictine novice!
He later explained he had felt called to monastic life even before joining the ETA. Now Txistu acquired his third name, Frère (Brother) Jean Philippe. He set about learning theology and cheese-making.
God’s ways are certainly unlike ours, when such troubles over borders and power and violence find their final rest in the serene life of the Benedictine abbey of Notre-Dame de Belloc, amid rolling hills and grazing sheep.
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