A RETREAT

Last weekend the Catholic University of Honduras had a “retreat” for the professors and administrators of all the seven or so distinct campuses of the University. About 800 attended the retreat in a center owned by the university in Valle de Angeles outside Tegucigalpa.

This year the retreat – on the Catechism of the Catholic Church – was led by Padre Roel from Santa Rosa. Father Roel gave a number of spirited talks in which he explained several parts of the Compendium of the Catechism and related them to the reality of life in Honduras. His critique of governmental policies was very strong and probably aroused a little ire from some of the attendees. Recently he has become very concerned about global warming and the environment and so, in response to the sections on creation, he showed most of Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth. The film makes a strong case about global warming – and talks abut the need for action.

However, the film left me uneasy. Up to the point where the film was stopped so we could go for lunch, there was almost nothing about the need for changes in life style. (Perhaps there is something toward the end.) I’m not just talking abut recycling and reforestation and the like.

I really believe that a major part of the problem is the consumption levels of the developed countries of the world together with the models of development which emphasize consumption. I believe that China and India are affecting global warming, not because of their poor, but because of the growing demand for high quality meat and consumer goods. I fear that many of the students (and faculty) here in Honduras may buy into the dream of being like the US with its life style of consumption.

I fear that the critique of this life style found in Pope John Paul II’s 1987 encyclical On Social Concern is easily ignored.

...side-by-side with the miseries of underdevelopment, themselves unacceptable, we find ourselves up against a form of superdevelopment, equally inadmissible, because like the former it is contrary to what is good and to true happiness. This superdevelopment, which consists in an excessive availability of every kind of material goods for the benefit of certain social groups, easily makes people slaves of "possession" and of immediate gratification, with no other horizon than the multiplication or continual replacement of the things already owned with others still better. This is the so-called civilization of "consumption" or "consumerism", which involves so much "throwing-away" and "waste".

Pope John Paul II, On Social Concern - Solicitudio Rei Socialis, ¶28 (italics added)

Struggling against global warning does not make sense without real conversion – a conversion to a Christ who became poor fro our sake, who lived simply, who shared with those in need. Conversion to a community of faith where there were no needy among them, because they shared. Conversion to what Jesuit father Ignacio Ellacuría, the martyred rector of the Central American University in El Salvador called “the civilization of poverty,” an ideal that “makes the universal satisfaction of basic necessities the principle of development and makes the growth of shared solidarity the foundation of humanization.”

Perhaps I feel so critical because of the trip we made for the retreat and the site of the retreat. We traveled the seven hours each way in an air-conditioned bus which is understandable. But as I looked out the window I saw hundreds of poor houses of mud and bamboo, or tin. But the site that most haunts me was the child sitting atop a large dumpster at the side of the road, searching through the garbage.

It’s for that child that I am here – and I pray that I may find the ways to respond and to help others see the need, respond, and work for a country and a world where all may share in the Lord’s banquet – not only in heaven, but here on earth.

If the first Christians tried to see that there was no poor among them (Acts 4:34), why don’t we?