From the Editor's Desk

Nourishing tenuous hope

Someday Latin America may be best known as the place that taught much of the world how to not only survive but also how to engage hope. Survival is the fundamental task in much of Latin America among the poor and those on the margins. It was especially difficult during the spasms of violence that have visited countries in the region during the past few decades.

Hope is quite another matter. Some paint it as a last refuge of the neediest. But I think it is more a matter of stories like the one out of Peru ( see story). There women, forgotten victims of war, have determined that hope, however tenuous, makes sense. And that hope is nourished in relationship with other survivors. The journey away from the effects of violence has required the process of a peace commission and the attention of people who understand the steps essential to healing. It has taken years and is nowhere near completed.

It isn’t easy to report on the kinds of events that Barbara Fraser regularly covers unless one can see beyond the pain of a particular circumstance to the larger hope.

You might recall that Fraser was half of the reporting team with Paul Jeffrey that put together NCR’s extensive series on Latin America in 2004.

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She also apparently finds rejuvenation in natural surroundings. Recently she let me know she would be out of touch for a few days because she was going into the Peruvian jungle on a bird-watching jaunt. When she returned she wrote an enthusiastic report of the trip. In her words: “There was a clay lick with scarlet and red-and-green macaws, as well as several kinds of parrots. There were woodpeckers, toucans, magpie tanagers and what was probably a king vulture, though he was a bit far away for my binoculars. And assorted herons and egrets. But the high point was probably the first day of the trip, when we were on a mountainside opposite the roost of half a dozen Andean condors. We were there when they woke up, left the roost, hung out on a sunny rock while their feathers dried out from the overnight mist, then launched and circled up ... and up ... and up as the air warmed and the thermals rose. We counted 15 in the air at once before they headed off over the hills in search of breakfast.”

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A sense of hope, this time in the long haul of working for change in the legal system, comes through, too, in the piece by Patrick Mulvaney about a nascent movement among the states to rethink the death penalty. ( See story)

Catholics, using the framework of the consistent ethic approach to thorny social issues, can certainly take credit for persistently questioning the logic of the death penalty. None has personally done more than Sr. Helen Prejean, author of the book Dead Man Walking, which was made into a successful movie. Most important to the movement, however, were advances in DNA technology, which allowed experts to show that convicted inmates were innocent, as well as dedicated grass-roots investigative work on behalf of prisoners believed to be innocent. The tide of opinion began to turn from support of the death penalty to skepticism when significant numbers of prisoners began to be exonerated by DNA evidence or revived investigations, many of which showed shoddy police and legal work. No one is expecting major changes soon, but some believe wide changes in death penalty law are on the horizon.

-- Tom Roberts

National Catholic Reporter, March 16, 2007