I apologise that this article is not directly related to Goa but makes very
relevant and informative reading.
Eustaquio Santimano
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Who needs a lifeline?
The Tablet Interview
Feature Article, 4 October 2008
David Gibson
Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga was in New York last week with
some timely - and pointed - words for a marketplace in meltdown. David
Gibson spoke to the Salesian after his address to a UN summit on global
poverty
He didn't plan it this way, but Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga's visit
to the United Nations last week could not have been more propitious, or
poignant.
Leader of the Catholic Church in Honduras and one of the most vocal
proponents of the Church's social justice teachings, Cardinal Rodríguez
arrived in the global financial capital just as the credit collapse was
pushing the world economy to the brink. And he was coming to the United
Nations to argue on behalf of its Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs,
for reducing poverty, just as Washington was trying to engineer a
$700-billion bail-out of Wall Street.
"Seventy billion?" The cardinal queries, incredulous at the figure, then
he realises his error. "No, seven hundred billion!" President of Caritas
Internationalis, the Vatican-based umbrella organisation for Catholic
charities in 162 nations, Rodríguez shakes his head and says: "I am very
sad that the riches of this country [the United States] are being used to
save big corporations who we don't know are honest or corrupt."
He repeats the astonishing sum: "Seven hundred billion. Can you imagine
that money, and only because people are not able to run their corporations
in the right way. How come it is always the money of the poor that is
lost? How come the money of the rich is always saved? I'm not blaming or
accusing, just putting the facts on the table. When it comes to
alleviating poverty, there are no resources. But when it comes to saving
the rich, there are always resources."
The cardinal was speaking shortly after addressing a high-level UN
meeting, convened by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to assess the MDGs at
the midpoint of the 15-year programme. Bill Gates was there, as was
Britain's embattled Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.
Launched in 2000, the MDGs were originally adopted by 189 countries and
comprise eight benchmarks, such as improving health care, reducing child
mortality, and fighting HIV/Aids, malaria and other diseases.
Environmental sustainability was the cardinal's topic, and he set out the
stakes: that climate change affects the poor disproportionately, even
though, once again, the poor "bear least responsibility for the pollution
causing global warming". Hurricanes are more destructive than ever, he
said, and resources are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few.
He then broadened his critique beyond policy prescriptions to a
condemnation of "an acute poverty of imagination" that afflicts wealthy
societies above all.
"We need to be able to imagine ourselves not in a Third World and a First
World but in one world in which our duties to the poor are shared. We need
to imagine a world in which the needless deaths of nearly 10 million
children a year are an abomination that cannot be tolerated," he said.
Rodríguez spoke to The Tablet at America House - the Midtown headquarters
of the Jesuit weekly America, and Rodríguez's home for two nights - about
greed, social justice inside the Church and out, and the need for limits
in a world of excess.
Rodríguez is well known in Rome, and was often mentioned as a Latin
American papabile during the conclave that elected Joseph Ratzinger. The
cardinal will see Benedict XVI during the synod, and he describes the Pope
as a man he can speak with frankly, someone who wants to hear other views,
especially from churchmen - such as Rodríguez - outside Benedict's
European base. But one also gets the sense that the cardinal from Honduras
has little of la romanità, the Roman spirit, that life in the Vatican
entails.
"I recall arguing a few years ago with a Roman prelate who was telling me,
?You are only about words, words, about the preferential option for the
poor! What are you doing in the concrete?' So I gave it back to him,"
Rodríguez says with a characteristic smile. He says he ran down some of
the accomplishments of the Church in his country where, as he says, many
live in Dickensian squalor: some 20,000 new houses, a network of health
clinics, a growing home schools system, and a micro-credit programme that
rueful Wall Street titans could learn from. "I know what I am doing,"
Rodríguez told the curial official. "What are you doing?"
At 65 his affability and openness make him popular with both flock and the
media, for he connects faith and works in a passionate yet accessible
manner that can be more influential than the most earnest homilies. (It
doesn't hurt that he also plays the saxophone and has a pilot's licence.)
What is more difficult to understand is how he maintains such enthusiasm
in the face of so many obstacles. The short answer is that Cardinal
Rodríguez has faith in the long-term prospects for the Church's message,
which is, quoting Pope Benedict, "only formative, but performative".
"Even if not too many people were present [at the UN summit], it is
important that the voice was present. It will resound," he says, noting
that financial crises and presidential campaigns will come and go and
adding: "Sooner or later, leaders discover that the crises could have been
avoided by talking honestly, not just diplomatic talk."
But Rodríguez is not a man to sit idly and wait for a better future to
arrive. He noted that in the three months before the financial crisis, 100
million people had sunk into poverty owing to rising oil and food prices,
and he was forthright about the prospects for the MDGs. Poverty reduction
"is not working", he declares, noting that improvements in health care are
fitful and explains: "The only capital of the poor person is good health."
The fight against malaria "is working to a degree, but reducing HIV/Aids
is not working, I believe", he says. He wants pharmaceutical giants - as
well as other multinationals - to show more solidarity with the poor. He
points to the "hidden monopolies" of multinational businesses that talk
about competition but then fight it in poor countries. "Modern
globalisation is only a mask for a monopoly. If you ask me how many banks
are in Honduras, I will tell you 15. If you ask how many banks are
Honduran, maybe three. What is the future of the economy when monsters
just expand and expand?"
Asked about the advent of populist governments and regimes in Latin
America, he is frank, saying: "We are moving backwards." He includes his
own Honduran political class when he says: "Our politicians are only
looking to the next four years. Then they get elected, and four more years
of piracy."
When I ask about the fierce debate in the United States about denying
Communion to politicians who support abortion rights, Rodríguez laughs and
says: "We don't have that because our politicians simply never go to
church." He cites the Church's need for better-educated future leaders,
but also cites the appeal of Protestant "sects", as he calls them, which
are drawing many away from Catholicism with what the cardinal unsparingly
diagnoses as the "spiritual sedative" of prosperity theology.
Rodríguez says that he is especially dismissive of Venezuelan strongman
Hugo Chávez and his empty "messianic" promises. He notes that the
president is using the oil profits that belong to the Venezuelan people to
influence elections in other countries and build huge stocks of weaponry,
even buying old Russian submarines. "What for? This is not socialism." I
ask him what he would call it. He chews it over for a minute. "Good
question," he says, then comes up with an answer: "Totalitarian capitalism
disguised as socialism ... They talk about helping the poor but it is
self-serving."
However, the cardinal does root for Paraguay's newly elected president -
and recently laicised bishop - Fernando Lugo, who he says represents a
genuine hope for that country after decades of dictatorship.
As for the Church's role in Latin America's development, he is
unapologetic about lobbying for societal change as well as individual
conversion. The current crisis reveals the problem not only of unchecked
greed but also a dysfunctional social ethic, Rodríguez says.
When I ask him about the state of liberation theology, he concedes that
"few people will talk about liberation theology these days". He himself is
not so reticent. Rodríguez recalled a conference on the Church's social
teaching two years ago in Mexico where Fr Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Peruvian
theologian considered a founder of liberation theology, was asked if the
movement was dead. "I don't know if it is dead. I was not invited to the
funeral," the cardinal says Gutiérrez quipped before adding: "Eighty per
cent of liberation theology is the option for the poor, and this is
alive." Cardinal Rodríguez himself seconds that view, and it is one he
always preaches at the Vatican, where he says officials "don't know the
reality on the ground". That reality, he says, is one of the markers
differentiating the Church in the underdeveloped South from that of the
industrialised North.
"In the North many times the Church is only understood by looking to the
hierarchy, and the work of the Church is reduced to the work of the
hierarchy. For us it is different. We are more lay-led. We have to be. In
Honduras we have just 400 priests and 30,000 lay ministers," says the
cardinal, while noting that numbers at the country's seminary are
increasing.
"Development is the new name for peace," Paul VI declared more than 40
years ago in his great social justice encyclical, Populorum Progressio,
and Cardinal Rodríguez sees the same challenge today. Yet this is not a
question of a one-way sacrifice, North to South, he says, rather it is
about rectifying an imbalance across the board. He points to labour being
concentrated in the South and capital in the North. He contrasts residents
in the southern hemisphere being held back by the basics they cannot
afford, while those in the North seek luxuries they cannot afford, and
adds: "When you do not have limits, you always need more. So you get this
vicious cycle that leads the economy to this crisis."
"Let's think of goals that are not economic," says Rodríguez. "It is a big
mistake to reduce life to the economic sphere. There is no time for
writing, thinking, reflecting - using your brain to be more, not to have
more."
"There should be limits. This is wisdom." And it may be wisdom that, for
all the cardinal's words, is only now being brought home by the collapse
of a marketplace whose dead weight he has warned about for years.
http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/12086
