Justice issues gone from synod
agenda
By GARY
MacEOIN Special to the National Catholic Reporter
Justice, once so central to the churchs role in Latin
America, has been all but erased from the documents that will guide discussion
at the Synod for America.
The elimination of justice as a primary element in the
churchs role apparently occurred gradually from the time in 1992 when
Pope John Paul II first advanced the idea of a synod. And its disappearance
seems to have led to a jettisoning of other elements that, in previous
documents and statements on the church in Latin America, were essential
themes.
Some 250 bishops, the majority chosen by their fellow bishops of
all the countries and territories of the American continent, will gather in
Rome from Nov. 16 through Dec. 12. For this first Synod of Bishops for America,
the 24 episcopal conferences involved have elected voting delegates according
to the number of bishops in each conference. Cardinals heading dioceses and
other designated office holders are also voting delegates, as are heads of
curial departments and 21 nominees of the pope.
Preparations for a synod are in the hands of the General
Secretariat of the Synod, a curial body.
At the 1992 meeting of CELAM, the Latin American bishops
conference, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, the pope proposed a
still wider exercise of episcopal collegiality. The bishops of the entire
continent, he said, might find ways to solve the dramatic situations of
vast sectors of the population who aspire to a legitimate overall progress and
to more just and decent living conditions.
Two years later, in his encyclical for the upcoming millennium,
the pope offered a significantly different emphasis when he confirmed that the
bishops both of Latin America and of North America had agreed to the idea of a
synod.
The primary focus was now the new evangelization, but
the synod would also deal with the themes of justice and international
economic relations, taking into account the enormous difference between North
and South.
The introduction to the working paper for the synod substantially
repeats this modified program: to foster a new evangelization; to increase
solidarity; to shed light on problems of justice and international economic
relations among the nations of America.
Inexplicably, however, the next paragraph of the document
eliminates the third objective.
It still insists that there are three elements, but now they are
conversion and communion (both aspects of evangelization) and solidarity. This
is a key to all that follows.
Justice has been operationally eliminated.
The churchs role is reduced to charity, a worthy role
indeed, but far from the totality of the mission to which we were all summoned
by Vatican II in its Constitution on the Church in Todays
World.
Four-fifths of the working paper deals with the new
evangelization, which is defined as guiding the consciences and
hearts of all men and women of good will toward an encounter with Christ,
helping them to experience the full depths of the mystery of redemption,
achieved once and for all in the Son of God.
The issues are discussed very positively. The Christology has a
good biblical basis. It is highly individualistic, however, concentrating on
St. Lukes Gospel and Acts while ignoring other traditions in Paul,
Matthew, John, Peter and the Apocalypse.
Jesus not only showed us a way but called us to a historical
project, the building up of the community of God. Evangelization as defined
here is a very important part of the churchs task but obviously far from
the totality of the mission of Jesus as he himself formulated it, repeating the
words of Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4:18).
The basic and irremediable defect of this document is that the
Signs of the Times, which Vatican II raised to the status of a theological
theme through which God speaks to us and challenges us, are absent. The
look-see-act approach, used to such good effect by Pope John XXIII and his
council, is abandoned.
Instead, the message to be announced is defined in advance in
neo-scholastic style without asking who are the people to whom it is addressed
or what is the reality in which they are immersed. The method is abstract and
deductive; the focus, doctrinal and institutional. The result is an
unbelievable rejection of the contribution of the economic, political and
social sciences for an understanding of the phenomena and challenges of reality
that Christians in the Americas face in their task of evangelization.
Inevitably, such analyses as have been gleaned from the answers to
the questions the Vatican asked of every bishop of the Americas are anecdotal
and superficial. Lacking is a scientific and global presentation of the
concrete and structural problems that affect justice and solidarity in
North-South relations.
There is no analysis of the danger to the world that is posed by
the free-market system now being imposed globally by the United States, with
its tendency to exclude the majority of humans from the benefits of society,
and also to destroy nature. Nor is there analysis of the savage capitalism of
the Third World and its neoliberal ideology that is totally contrary to
Christianity.
Something as basic for the indigenous peoples and peasants as land
ownership is ignored. We learn almost nothing about such new approaches to
evangelization as the pastoral of the land, the pastoral of marginalized women,
of street children, of the landless, of the homeless, of migrants and nomads,
or of the crucial role of popular reading of the Bible.
The importance of evangelizing not only individuals but culture is
treated at length, but it is an evaluation from outside and above. The
underlying assumption seems to be that the culture of Rome is the norm, so that
the task is to bring other cultures into the same framework, with cosmetic and
decorative recognition of differences.
This mentality makes it impossible to begin to discuss what true
inculturation of Catholicism in cultures other than Western would involve. It
sees indigenous cultures as a legacy of the past, has no awareness
that in much of the continent they are a major and growing reality. The way in
which the document reports what it calls a tendency to overvalue certain
elements of the indigenous religions of America reveals its bias.
In consequence, the major structural changes for the entire church
involved in inculturation are not even mentioned.
The document also seriously misunderstands the differing
ecumenical situations in North America and in the rest of the continent.
In the North, it says, there is a more positive situation in
ecumenism and in interreligious dialogue. That is true at the level of formal
structured dialogue at the institutional level.
What it ignores is the totally different and more vital situation
in the South where the dividing lines are not between Catholics and Protestants
but deep within both groups.
Why has the working document chosen to eliminate from what it
describes as the proposed agenda for synod discussion all reference
to what in 1992 was defined as the purpose of the synod, namely, to deal with
the intolerable social conditions in the continent?
Perhaps a clue to Vatican thinking can be found in a statement by
Auxiliary Bishop Karl Josef Romer of Rio de Janeiro when Pope John Paul was
visiting Brazil in October. Lamenting the growth of what the working document
calls sects in Brazil, Romer said that the leakage would have been
even greater if the church had not shifted its political emphasis. Radical
liberation theology had starved people spiritually, he asserted, while
advancing a Marxist agenda.
What Rome seems to be saying is that the preferential option for
the poor, embraced by the church at the Second Vatican Council and developed to
its full theological significance by liberation theology, explains why people
are leaving the church.
The way to reverse the outflow would then be to return to support
of the rich and powerful in the hope of persuading them to be nice to the
poor.
Put in those terms, the project seems utterly callous. Yet that is
the logic of the working document. The spirit of Vatican II is lacking. Equally
lacking is the prophetic voice of the 1968 Medellín conference of Latin
American bishops, which denounced international monopolies and the
international imperialism of money, the reality of intolerable
institutionalized violence, the injustice that cries to heaven.
Nor is it easy to imagine that the omission of any description of
Latin American reality is other than a deliberate decision not to mention
anything that might reflect favorably on liberation theology or the church born
of the people in suffering.
A deserved tribute is paid to Rose of Lima, Martin De Porres,
Peter Claver and others who gave witness to the faith in the Americas. But
where is Oscar Romero, who insisted that our Christian faith requires
that we submerge ourselves in this world, who knew that one committed to
the poor risks the fate of the poor, which is to disappear, to be
tortured, to be captive, to be found dead?
Where are the four martyred U.S. religious women slandered by
Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick as not just nuns but
political activists? Where are the 42 catechists slaughtered in Arcatao,
El Salvador? Where are the thousands of Guatemalan indigenous massacred because
they were Christians?
Ignoring these tragic signs of the times represents an
inexplicable refusal to recognize the conflict that is the most obvious
phenomenon of the American continent today.
National Catholic Reporter, October 31,
1997
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