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From an article in the Wall Street Journal on Honduras Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez:

Cardinal Rodríguez sees the rule of law as an important link to development. "The key is to assure justice," he says, "because if you don't have legal security, you are not going to invest. Investment is very important. With investments there are more jobs for our people."

Speaking of investors, the cardinal says, "of course they are not all saints," and human rights must be protected. "But what should we do without those jobs?" he asks. Then he adds, "Maquilas [assembly plants] are especially important for women, because their jobs have been a source of dignity. When they earn their own money they are no longer slaves to the macho man in their lives, who often is not even their husband."

From a press release for a new book from Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR):

“Gabriela Saavedra worked seven days a week in a Korean-owned sweatshop in Honduras. Her days typically began at 7 a.m. and ended at 6 p.m. … Employees were given an ultimatum: either they worked mandatory overtime or they lost their jobs. Some days Gabriela had gone without sleep because she had been forced to work until 5 a.m. She had little time to eat or go to the bathroom.”

A civilization of poverty

Twenty years ago today six Jesuit priests at the Central American University in San Salvador and two women, a worker in the university and her daughter, were brutally killed by troops of the Salvadoran army, an army financed by the United States.

The crime of the Jesuits was to take a stand for the poor and to demand justice. The crime of the women was to be poor and to be witnesses to injustice.

Padre Ignacio Ellacuría, the rector of the university, had written on “the civilization of poverty.” The concept – paradoxical as it may be – has captured my imagination and I really would like to pursue it more thoroughly. It’s related to concepts of austerity and moderation but it implies much more. Ellacuría wrote:

“Rather than capital accumulation, the civilization of poverty proposes as dynamizing principle the dignifying of work, of work that will have as its principal object not the production of capital but the perfecting of the human being. Work, viewed at once as the personal and collective means to assure the satisfaction of basic needs and as a form of self-realization, would supersede different forms of self- and hetero-exploitation and would likewise supersede inequalities that are both an affront and the cause of domination and antagonism.”

Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J., “Utopia and Prophecy in Latin America,”
in Towards a Society that Serves Its People, p. 75

Jesuit Dean Brackley has noted that this approach subordinates the production of capital to production to satisfy the basic needs of everyone. What a different world that would be.

Good news and bad

The Santa Rosa de Copán diocesan assembly ended today, a day earlier than planned. It was a fruitful meeting with about 100 priests and lay leaders meeting with the bishop to plan for the coming years – and to prepare the way for the diocese’s third pastoral plan.

The third pastoral plan will be prepared by a commission based on the deliberations and recommendations of several diocesan assemblies as well as meetings of the priests’ council. The diocese hopes to have it written and approved some time next year. It’s a twelve year plan to be reviewed every three years.

In the bishop’s official naming of the commission he noted the six theological pastoral principles for the diocese:

1. Option for the poor
2. Participation, Communion, Liberation
3. Three fold ministry [prophetic, liturgical, social]
4. Proclamation of the Good News of the Kingdom
5. Creation and Life
6. Common Good, Faith and Life

Not a bad choice of basic principles, I’d say. If course they fit well with the diocesan general objective:

to work for a diocese organized in church base communities which are in solidarity, prophetic, missionary and transformative, contributing to the integral formation and liberation of the human person, preferencially those most in need, to make presence the Kingdom of God.

During the assembly Caritas did a little survey to pull together some data on the 41 parishes of the diocese. The results will be tabulated later but I did a quick look and found out, to my surprise, that there are more than 5630 church base communities formed or in process of being formed in the diocese. That’s impressive and provides a very useful means for the diocese to continue its process of evangelization.

The meeting, though, closed early because of two deaths. The mother of the priests died of cancer and some were going to her funeral.

But what had really shocked the assembly was the violent death of a Capuchin Franciscan priest who served in the parish in Nueva Ocotopeque and in the Capuchin community there. (Nueva Ocotopeque is in the diocese of Santa Rosa.) Padre Miguel Angel Hernández Salazar. ofm cap, a Guatemalan, had been missing since Saturday when he went to an area in nearby Guatemala, reportedly to buy some materials for religious education. His body was found on Tuesday. It does not seem that this was politically motivated since the area in Guatemala where he was passing through is known for its crime and, according to one report, he was not very politically engaged. However, he was somewhat involved in the local church's ministry to migrants.

But at the assembly we also heard of another case of threats against a priest in the diocese, in addition to the one I mentioned yesterday. Padre Julián Diez, CP, a Spanish Passionist priest, is pastor of the parish of San Juan Bautista in Quimistán, Santa Barbara. He has been supportive of the diocesan position against the coup and received threats for his stance.

Where this will lead I do not know. But as the November 29 elections come closer and as there seems to be no hope of a solution of the constitutional crisis, the next two weeks are bound to be tense.

Veering from my normal course:

And now for a bit of my commentary on my own country.

I hear a lot of people here stating that the US was behind the coup. I’ve tended to be somewhat skeptical about such claims.

However, in my estimation, the US has not played a very good, just, or even-handed role in regard to coup. It has been half-hearted in its calls for a reversal of the coup. It has been quick to critique Zelaya and slower than a turtle in critiquing Micheletti. It has been almost silent in the face of human rights violations and repressive measures of the coup. The statements of the US representative to the Organization of American States have been disgraceful. Its latest maneuvers in the face of the failed San José/Tegucigalpa accords, especially the remarks of Shannon intimating that the US will recognize the elections, have set back the possibility for a just solution. I fear that the US administration – especially the State Department – has not supported the cause of justice, human rights, and democracy.

I would have hoped for better.

With the diocese

This week the bishop, the priests, and lay leaders of the diocese of Santa Rosa de Copán, more than 100 of them, are meeting to evaluate the past year and to plan for next year – as well as to work on the third Pastoral Plan of the diocese. The plan has been in the works for a few years, but as the bishop said at Mass the other night it will have to be looked at again, since the situation in Honduras is different since June 28, the day of the coup.

The meeting is taking place in a difficult time for Honduras with elections scheduled for November 29 and no solution in sight to resolve the mess created by the coup.

Tonight I took a walk and had a wonderful conversation with a leader from a town in the hills of the department of Lempira. He insisted on buying me a Coke! We talked about his life, his family, his eight year old son who is, in his eyes, a little genius. (I’m only slightly exaggerating.) We talked about all sorts of things. His wife is a primary school teacher, but because many of the openings for teachers are given out based on one’s political politics, she leaves on Monday and returns on Friday. We also talked about how the economy has worsened here – mostly due to the world-wide economic crisis but also partly due to the effects of the coup.

Many are saying elections are the solution. I have even heard that there are some church programs and priests urging people to vote. But Monseñor Santos, our bishop, told the priests not to tell the people either to vote or not to vote. He sees the need for long-term resistance to the economic and political injustice which pervade Honduras.

But that could be costly.

This became a little more real when Sister Nancy pointed out a priest to me who had been getting death threats, presumably because he had been speaking out on the coup. About a week ago the deanery issued a public statement in his support. A translation follows:

Public Statement

The priests and the pastoral workers in the Deanery of the North of [the department of] Lempira, in the face of the political instability brought on by the coup d’état of June 28 declare in the following terms:

1. We are in solidarity of the pastoral work of Father Salomé Peñate on behalf of Justice, Truth, and Peace.
2. We reject the campaign of slander and calumny which some individuals of the traditional [political] parties, anonymously, are making against Father Salomé Peñate and other priests of the diocese.
3. We forcefully condemn the death threats against Father Peñate and the psychological pressure against some pastoral workers.
4. We hold responsible the traditional [political] Parties for whatever political and moral harm may come to any of the priests and pastoral workers of the deanery and of the diocese (of Santa Rosa de Copán).
5. We vehemently request the entities (both civil and military) in charge of the security of the civilian population to take note of this [communication].
6. We exhort all Catholic Christians to remain faith and firm in their commitment to Christ and his Kingdom – a Kingdom of Justice and Truth of Peace and Love. We recall what Saint Peter said in the Acts of the Apostles 5:29:

“We must obey God before humans.”

Released in Lepaera, Lempira, November 4, 2009.

“Yes to Justice and truth; no to lies and corruption.”

So many witnesses

I have this attraction to saints and holy people. Some would call it devotion, but it’s more than that. I have even put together a calendar of saints and witnesses with quotes from many of them.

November is a month particularly full of saints and witnesses. Today is the birthday of Dorothy Day (1897-1980) as well as the feast of Blessed John Duns Scotus, the medieval Franciscan theologian and philosopher from whose name we get the word “dunce” who died on November 8, 1308.

Dorothy Day’s witness of simple care for the poor and advocacy for justice has been an inspiration for many years. I was in her presence a few times. Once in the early 1970s, it was after a Friday night "Clarification of Thought" at the New York City Catholic Worker. I don’t remember much except that she came across as a simple caring grandmother.

Maybe that is the secret of her appeal. As she once wrote:

People say, "What good can one person do? What is the sense of our small effort?" They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. We can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and the fishes.

This morning I read a little on John Duns Scotus in Daniel Ellsberg’s Todos Santos that also spoke of love - in a slightly different way. One quote struck me (translated by me into English): “I am of the opinion that God wished to redeem us in this way, above all by attracting us [enticing us] to his love.”

Maybe this is why I love to go out to the countryside.

Yesterday I went out to Dulce Nombre. I attended part of a meeting of pastoral workers from one of the zones, but I also spent a fair amount of time with about eleven young people who are helping the parish prepare part of the parish grounds as a soccer field. The associate at Dulce Nombre, Padre Julio César Galdámez, has been working with the youth and was there with them – raking the land and spreading earth. But it was amazing to see these young people, mostly guys from the town of Dolores, working hard and then, after lunch, playing hard.

It’s a blessing to be able to be with them.