CCCB FORUM WITH NATIONAL ASSOCIATIONS

SOCIAL JUSTICE – FROM WORDS TO ACTION

Presentation by Robert Letendre, the past Executive Director of the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace

Challenges to overcome for greater justice in our world:

Must we reinvent our way of being prophetic?

Ottawa, Saturday April 24, 2004

The Mother House of the Sisters of Charity

“The devil is not the principle of the matter, the devil is arrogance of spirit, faith without joy, truth that is never touched by doubt.”

Umberto Eco

I would like to thank the organizers of this meeting who have given me this opportunity to share with you some thoughts on the challenges of social justice in today’s world; particularly at this time of the liturgical year when the gospels remind us of the attitude of the first Christians who, through the strength of their faith in Jesus Christ and in his resurrection, bore witness while establishing communities of sharing and of solidarity. “They were recognized as Christians,” people said, “by the love they had for each other.” In the eminently materialistic world in which we live, this is currently in the process of happening again. Our way of being Christian - not only in our daily lives, but in our social and political commitments - might often be the only gospel that some citizens of our country will ever see.

As a resource person at this meeting, I am obviously intimidated to be following Joe Gunn, who has participated in so many struggles for greater justice in Canada and abroad, and also, of course, Fr. Michel Côté, who for the last few years has accompanied so well the members and staff of Development and Peace in their reflections on the spirituality of our movement. Also, as I have just left the management of Development and Peace, this provides me with an opportunity to look back on my experience of the last three years and to share a few lessons that I can draw from it.

Furthermore, I see a very enriching common theme or thread in the work of the forum of the national associations, which, last year, examined the question of Christian witness in today’s world based on a reflection by Fr. Bill Ryan. His presentation raised several fundamental questions. Clearly, our faith demands a certain vision of human communities that we want to build and ideals that we wish to defend. In this sense, a new examination of what he called “secularism” is required. However, as the news reminds us increasingly each day, it is wrong to think that religion has only a tenuous place in the unfolding of human affairs. No one today can doubt that ideas, ideologies and religion also have the power to kill.

As Umberto Eco’s character, William of Baskerville, says so well in the dialogue where he unravels the intrigue of the novel, The name of the Rose, “The devil is not the principle of the matter, the devil is arrogance of spirit, faith without joy, truth that is never touched by doubt.”

In one way or another, my presentation today will deal with the very uncomfortable situation we place ourselves in as Christians when we engage in the fight for greater social justice based on our values and on the social teaching of the Church. Furthermore, we are obliged to do so without being dogmatic; in a certain way, we’re even supposed to do so with a smile.

My presentation will be in three parts. In the first part, I would like to address the major social justice issues in our world today. In this respect, I asked that there be included in the documents that were distributed to you the text of a talk given by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, Coadjutor Archbishop of Dublin and former representative of the Vatican at the United Nations in Geneva, at the last plenary assembly of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. I also noted that the CCCB booklet Calling Out the Prophetic Tradition includes many references to international problems and to the actions of the CCCB in this area over the past 50 years.

In the second part, I will try to answer the sub-question expressed in the agenda of our meeting, namely what are the major education campaigns where Development and Peace really had the impression of touching parishioners and of helping them do something in favour of greater justice. I will also consider other campaigns that were not as successful.

In the third part, I would like to ask the question that I have used as a sub-title for my presentation today. Must we reinvent our way of being prophetic? If so, how and based on what strengths?

1. What are the main social justice challenges facing the world today?

Let us begin with the talk given by Archbishop Martin last fall to the bishops of Canada who were gathered for their plenary session. In his talk, Archbishop Martin reiterated the great principles of the social teaching of the Church that are applicable to the building of a more just world at the international level. In doing so, he also raised the main issues facing the world in terms of social justice.

According to him, there are four major principles that should guide our actions.

The first one is charity that encompasses justice and that is the expression of the love of God for himself as the Trinity, for his children and for all of creation. This type of charity is not only a virtue, it is the very basis of our faith and of the world that we want to build.

The second principle is the unity of the human family. On this earth, we are all brothers and sisters, and we have towards each other the same obligations as we have towards members of our own family.

The third principle is the universal destination of material goods as formulated in Gaudium et Spes and then raised once again by Pope Paul VI in his encyclical Populorum Progressio (#22). If you don’t mind, I will quote this principle in its entirety as it is central to the discussion that we are having today:

“God intended the earth and everything in it for the use of all human beings and peoples. Thus, under the leadership of justice and in the company of charity, created goods should flow fairly to all.”

Finally, the fourth principle is the preferential option for the poor that leads us to bind ourselves in solidarity to the less fortunate; to put ourselves in their skin, so to speak, and to do everything we can to allow them to put this poverty behind them.

These are the principles that should guide our action. Let us now move to the major issues confronting our world today.

A first problem - and unfortunately we have almost been desensitized to it - is the extreme poverty in which more than one billion members of the human family live. You are no doubt familiar with the official statistics: one billion people survive on less than one dollar a day and two billion people live on less than two dollars a day. Eleven million children under five years of age die each year in southern nations from sicknesses that are entirely curable in the countries of the North. A woman dies each minute because of a poorly accompanied pregnancy. Thus this challenge is poverty, a lack of access to essential goods such as drinking water, a situation that is a stain on the conscience of all humans, as well as an un-namable scandal.

A second problem area that is also cruelly obvious is related to the wars and conflicts that, over the past 100 years, have produced dozens of millions of victims. If the international community has registered notable improvements in preventing conflicts between countries, it often remains confused and powerless in situations of failed States and of civil war such as those that we have witnessed in Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Congo.

Over the past twenty years, we have seen super-powers intervene militarily when there was no justification to do so (as in the case of the American and British war against Iraq) and, unfortunately, abstain from acting when, on the contrary, the international community had the moral obligation to do so (to end the genocide in Rwanda, for example).

A third group of problems is related to protecting the environment and to issues of sustainable development. Here, once again, we must admit that we are heavily borrowing our current opulence from future generations. If things continue at the present rate, it is not obvious that our planet will be able to continue sustaining life and, at the very least, it seems clear that our children and grandchildren will be confronted with terrifying problems. Only a few days of weather irregularities - and I am thinking here of the ice storm that hit Quebec and Ontario in January of 1998 - should have made us realize at what extent we are vulnerable.

There are, therefore, three major groups of justice-related problems: the extreme poverty of a third of humanity; wars and conflicts we seem unable to defuse; and the destruction of our environment that we will pass on in a very sorry state to our children.

2. Development and Peace education campaigns

Let us now move to the public education campaigns of Development and Peace. When it was created by the Catholic bishops of Canada in 1967, Development and Peace was given a dual mission: on the one hand, to assist the people of the Third World in their development and, on the other, to sensitize Canadians to international solidarity.

This work of educating people about solidarity and of awakening them to situations of injustice is accomplished by Development and Peace in the context of two major activities.

The first is the Share Lent collection that is held on the fifth Sunday of Lent and that distinguishes itself precisely by the fact that it is not only a fundraising campaign, but also a Christian reflection on sharing, on our lifestyles and on our conversion to poverty.

The second activity is related to our fall campaigns that are truly popular education campaigns dealing with a specific theme such as, for this year, access to water and, last year, the issue of genetically modified seeds.

These campaigns are generally supported by a whole range of pedagogical tools, and Canadian Catholics are usually asked to take some specific action such as signing a petition or mailing in a card addressed to a minister. The campaigns mobilize a considerable amount of energy; that of the staff of the national office, that of the 14 regional coordinators who work for Development and Peace throughout all of Canada and that of hundreds of volunteers who implement diocesan and parish campaigns after having participated in training sessions on this subject.

Among the educational activities, allow me to briefly mention that all major organizations for international cooperation are increasingly using dialogue, debate and lobbying activities on subjects that are of importance to them. This is happening either because their opinion is being solicited by national governments or the multilateral development agencies or because their partners in the South are confronted with dramatic and urgent situations and interventions here could be useful. An example would be the important role that the churches - including the Catholic Church, the CCCB and Development and Peace - played in the 1980s in order to dismantle apartheid in South Africa. A more recent example is the many iniatives in favour of peace in the Congo.

Since 1968, Development and Peace has had 35 education campaigns directed principally to Canadian Catholics, but also to the public at large.

As you can easily imagine, several themes were treated during these campaigns. In the first few years following the establishment of CCODP, questions of international development were raised on numerous occasions. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was an increase in the number of references to questions of social justice.

In the 1980s, the campaigns were mostly focused on certain specific international situations: the campaign by the grandmothers of Argentina to find their children and grandchildren, the repression in Guatemala in 1981 and, on three occasions, the fight against apartheid -1978, 1988 and 1989.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Development and Peace started implementing campaign themes over a three-year period. From 1990 to 1992, the theme was “Building the Americas”. From 1993 to 1996, it worked on a campaign called “People First” that, in 1995 and 1996, challenged companies such as Nike and Levi-Strauss on their treatment of workers - and particularly children - in developing countries. From 1997 to 1999, Development and Peace launched decentralized campaigns on the theme of solidarity where different regions of Canada worked on specific problems: the dioceses of Saskatchewan worked with the movement of landless peasants in Brazil, the Archdiocese of Toronto with groups from Chiapas and the Atlantic dioceses, with a national fishing collective in Senegal. In the fall of 1998, this program was interrupted by the international campaign for the cancellation of the debt of developing countries, the Jubilee campaign of the year 2000. I’ll have the opportunity to speak about it again.

Two other major three-year campaigns have been implemented since then. From 2000 to 2002, Development and Peace tried to make Canadians aware of issues related to economic justice. I’ll come back to that. In 2000, in collaboration with other non-government organizations that were part of the Halifax initiative, Development and Peace launched a campaign on responsible investments.

During the two years that followed, the organization focused on the issue of patenting human life and on seeds in particular. In the long term, such patents could eventually deprive farmers of the developing world of their age-old right to set aside their own seeds from their crops. This year, Development and Peace is campaigning on the issue of water.

How are these campaign themes developed? After its implementation, each campaign is evaluated by the diocesan councils, and these evaluations are then analyzed by a sub-committee of the Council, the educational program committee. The themes are approved by an assembly that meets every three years and that includes representatives from all of the dioceses of Canada, members of the national council and a certain number of resource persons from partnering organizations in both the North and the South. Working within the educational programs committee, the employees of the national offices in Montreal and in Toronto and the animators play an important role in streamlining and preparing the campaigns. Over the years, this group has developed a certain number of criteria for these campaign themes. There are five which I will list quickly. The theme must be of strong interest to both members and the Canadian population. The theme must establish specific links with our partners in the South. In the same way, it must also offer the possibility of working with partners in the North. It must offer a basis for common action on the part of the two preceding social movements. Finally, the theme must foster long term changes to economic, political and social structures. As Executive Director, I admit that I would have liked for us to rework these criteria and I’ll have an opportunity to tell you why in the last part of my presentation.

Finally, it is important to highlight one last parameter. The reality of education campaigns varies tremendously when it reaches the diocesan and parish level. Every type of approach is possible here. In one of my parishes, I saw a campaign take the form of an entire homily. In another parish, within the context of the 30 seconds that were allotted to the campaign, a member of Development and Peace indicated that our bishop supported the campaign and that you had to sign at the bottom, on the left.

In light of what I have just told you, what campaigns can we consider as being absolute successes? Obviously, such a question is partly subjective. These are popular education campaigns. Therefore, one could say that those that succeeded the most were the ones that opened parishioners to new horizons. Our arithmetic as Christians is not the same as that of economists, and it reminds us of a line in the movie Schindler’s List, “who saves one person, saves the world.” That said, we can apply the criterion of consensus here.

If you ask a committed member of Development and Peace which popular education campaign of the past few years has been the most successful, he or she will answer nine times out of ten, without hesitating, “the Jubilee campaign of the year 2000.” You’ll find a good description of this campaign in the booklet Calling Out the Prophetic Tradition, on pages 40 and 41. This was an international campaign that was conducted in several countries and that received the support of Pope John Paul II in his apostolic letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente. Its purpose was to obtain, in the tradition of the Jubilee, the cancellation of the debt of the poorest countries in the world.

You are no doubt aware of the problem. Many of these countries had to direct a substantial part of their national budget towards the repayment of their debt to other countries, making them incapable of offering basic health and education services to their citizens. At the beginning of the 1990s, economists had identified an inversion of the flow of capital between industrialized countries and developing countries. At this time, there was more money being transferred from the countries of the South to the countries of the North for interest payments and debt reimbursement than there was money going from North to South for foreign aid and investments. Finally, it is important to note that these debts were often incurred through prestige projects that were sold to these poorer nations in a completely irresponsible way. In terms of injustice, this was thus a terrible situation.

The results of this campaign were spectacular. In Canada alone, 645 000 people signed a petition asking the Canadian government to support debt cancellation, and 470 000 of these signatures were collected by Development and Peace. The campaign had a very high visibility in the media, in Canada and abroad. The question of canceling the debt of the world’s poorest nations was one of the dominating themes of the G8 Summit in Cologne and the dominating theme of the subsequent summit held in Genoa that adopted a mechanism for canceling the debt of the poorest countries. Therefore, this was a campaign that touched a lot of people in a personal way; it gathered a lot of media attention (thereby allowing it to attract more people) and, it actually changed something in today’s world. If it were not for September 11, 2001, the development agenda would surely have remained a major preoccupation in our countries. Bin Laden not only destroyed the World Trade Centre but also this hope.

On the other hand, since you’ve asked me to give an example of a campaign that was not as successful, I would mention the campaign on responsible investments which questioned certain practices by EDC, the Export Development Corporation. This Crown Corporation of the Government of Canada has as its mandate to guarantee exports and investments by Canadian firms abroad. Even though its own internal regulations force it to examine the environmental impact of the investments that it guarantees, let us say that EDC generally passed over these concerns very quickly. With our partners, we were able to document pathetic cases where natural environments and communities had been destroyed, including fishing communities in Marinduque in the Philippines. If my memory is correct, we had managed to gather nearly 140,000 cards addressed to the minister of International Trade, the Honourable Pierre Pettigrew, asking him to better control the activities of EDC.

That said, in the opinion of people who worked on this campaign, the results were disappointing. First, very few Canadians knew about EDC. Secondly, it was very difficult to get the media interested in this issue that included very complex dimensions. Third, even though this campaign forced EDC to act, it did not necessarily do so in the way we had hoped. In fact, it spent several million dollars to change its name to Export Development Canada. An advertising campaign in the press and a televised publicity campaign were implemented to improve the corporation’s image. I don’t know if this was part of the sponsorship program, but it is clear that the main result of our campaign was to increase the wealth of certain advertising firms.

Nevertheless, the coalition that worked on this campaign could claim a moral victory as the Auditor General of Canada, Mrs. Fraser, blamed EDC for not applying its own environmental policy review. Did real change take place? I have no idea.

3. Must we reinvent our way of being prophetic?

I now come to the third and final part of my presentation that I have entitled, “Must we reinvent our way of being prophetic?” What conclusions can we draw from what I have just said?

As Canadian Catholics and as national Catholic associations, I am firmly convinced that we must invent a new way of promoting greater social justice. I will now offer my thoughts in a jumble and in no particular order, hoping that they will be useful in your discussions.

A vision of social change

I believe that a first challenge is to have a real vision of political and social change in our society. At Development and Peace, we have at times applied in far too literal a way the model of a prophet preaching fire and brimstone, without having sufficiently tried to bring people together or to have a true dialogue with decision makers on the changes we were proposing.

We have sometimes isolated ourselves in a type of moral purity, without really worrying about being heard. We have preferred to see the glass as half empty instead of half full, and have refused to use the technique of positive reinforcement.

However, it seems to me that Canadian Catholics do not only want to be educated. When they decide to undertake a specific action such as signing a petition in favour of a just cause, they hope that it will bring about real social change. This is hinted at in the brochure on social justice by the CCCB. Why was the publication of the CCCB text, Ethical Reflections on Canada’s Socio-Economic Order in 1983 such a success? There were three reasons. First, it addressed a real problem. You must surely remember the catastrophic unemployment rates in Canada in the early 1980s. Second, this text had a major impact in the media and, as a consequence of that, governments understood that something needed to be done.

We should not only have a prophetic word, make sure that it has impact. When Jonas walks through Niniveh today, he is learning the social sciences, mastering the world of communications and understanding the modalities of political change in order to change the world. There is nothing anti-Christian about being effective and ensuring the success of our projects for social change.

Recognizing complexity

A second remark deals with the issue of complexity. Already, in the 1950s, the thinker and theologian, Teilhard de Chardin, had developed a vision of the world that allowed us to understand the growing complexity of our social organization systems. He described this socialization as being similar in many respects to what had happened a million years earlier with the development of the brain in the hominoid. In his 1941 text, L’Atomisme de l’esprit, he writes:

“… at this point, in a decreasing way, none of us individually can manage to meet all of our needs. A series of new needs - that it would be childish and anti-biological to perceive as superfluous and artificial - is constantly created within us. We can no longer live or develop ourselves without an increasing ration of rubber, metals, gas and electrical energies of all kinds… We can tell ourselves that these links are superficial and that we can rid ourselves of them if we want to. In the meantime, they consolidate themselves further each day, through the combined interaction of the forces that surround us. History shows us that, in general, the network that has been created through the influence of irreversible cosmic factors has never stopped developing itself.”

The parallel established by Teilhard de Chardin between the functioning of the brain and increasing socialization is interesting in more than one respect because these are two areas where human knowledge and science still remain powerless. Even today, the question of economic development remains a very real mystery.

Here then is a challenge and it is a major one. The challenge is not to simplify unduly the problems we are facing by “moralizing” in a simplistic way. Even though the model of the good guys and the bad guys in the western films of our childhood has been useful, it simply does not apply to the very complex world in which we live.

Furthermore, if we go back to the major issues identified by Archbishop Martin, it is obvious that some of them can be and are in conflict. In the management of human affairs, equally valid principles oppose each other on occasion. For example, all Canadians believe that Brazil should protect the Amazon forest. However, are we ourselves very credible in this area? When we ourselves faced issues of poverty, didn’t we always give more importance to our economic development than to the protection of the environment?

A second principle then would be to recognize the complexity. If we do not do so, our action is not based on reality.

Resist an approach that is purely eschatological

A third challenge is that of resisting what I call an approach that is purely eschatological and that promises us better times ahead while constantly postponing true relief from poverty and suffering.

It can be very tempting to implement social justice work based on an ideal model, much as the Fascists and the Communists used to do. In this respect, I can only invite you to read and reread two chapters of L’Homme révolté (The Rebel) by Albert Camus that deal with these two ideologies in an eschatological way. Camus’ analysis is penetrating. Several generations of humans literally had their lives stolen. In our work for justice, an approach that promises corrective measures for later only is unacceptable. We must seek to correct now, or within a reasonable amount of time, situations of injustice which have been identified. The poor deserve better than promises and better than the vision of an ideal world if this vision does nothing to truly alleviate their poverty.

Putting an end to “againstism”

My fourth point - and I believe that Canada is behind Europe in this area - is that I believe that we need to be done with what I call “againstism”: that is, being against everything, of walling ourselves in, of abusing and cursing without proposing an alternative project that can mobilize people.

To illustrate what I am saying, I could use the example of the economic integration of the Americas. This integration is inescapable, much like globalization. Of course, we now know about several perverse effects of NAFTA, effects we must seek to fight against.

However, we must deplore the fact that the social justice movement in America has not succeeded in formulating a generous and convincing vision of what could be the economic integration of the Americas. As a Canadian, I am increasingly jealous of Europeans and what they are about to succeed with on their continent. European integration has brought about spectacular advances in the fight against poverty.

We will not stop history by crying and complaining. Rather, we have the responsibility to ensure that a Christian vision of socialization and of integration for our world is proposed to and adopted by the international community. Here again, the Europeans are steering us in the direction of where we should be heading in their excellent report, Global Governance - Our responsibility to make globalization an opportunity for all, published by the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union.

Opening up the social justice movement

The logical consequence of what I have just said is that we are challenged, as Catholics, to radically open up the social justice movement so that we are working for greater social justice in Canada and abroad. In this respect, I would like to honour the reflections of Fr. Michel Côté who has demonstrated that there are several levels of spiritual motivation - all of them equally valid - that can bring people to become involved in work for greater social justice. We must welcome these people.

In our Church, there is an extraordinary wealth of human resources: artists, writers, sociologists, economists, scientists, philosophers, theologians and political leaders with great qualities. What are we waiting for to become involved in a project such as the development of a Christian vision of what should be the integration of the Americas?

Development and Peace’s mission statement, for example specifies that, “In the struggle for human dignity, Development and Peace associates with social change groups in the North and South.” Unfortunately, we have sometimes used this to exclude rather than include, creating a trend of always speaking to the same people and of avoiding the development of new friendships. The organization has just launched an initiative to extend its membership, and I am very happy about that. I invite our bishops and pastors to support this initiative by inviting the greatest possible number of Catholics to join our movement.

Here then is my view of the challenges we need to do something about.

* * *

In conclusion, I would like to return to a remark by Archbishop Martin in his talk on the subject of charity. These days, charity doesn’t have a very good image, and my experience is similar to his. As Executive Director of Development and Peace, I was frequently reprimanded whenever I would invoke it.

As far as I am concerned, our action has no sense without Caritas that it is not only a virtue, but the very basis of our faith in a Trinitarian God whose love for creation overflows. Without this presence of love, the work for social justice has no true meaning; it has no direction.

If you ask me to summarize the challenges that we need to face, I would say that it is to put charity at the heart of our action. Tomorrow’s prophet will be everything but a judge. The prophet will be a person overflowing with love who is always ready, in a complex universe, to suggest new approaches so that all may benefit from the goods of this earth.

Robert Letendre

April 24, 2004