Friends,
Dick Ochs was released
late Monday night, and charged with Illegal Entry for standing some fifty feet
from the OAS building. He appears in Superior Court in D.C. on May 9 for
a status hearing. I find it difficult to believe that the government will
proceed to try Dick on this bogus charge.
Kagiso, Max
Jesuit: Without the
Amazon, ‘we all go under’
Apr 2, 2019
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE
A man attends Pope Francis's meeting with
people of the Amazon in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, Jan. 19, 2018. The president of
the Latin America Jesuit Conference said without the Amazon, "we all go
under." (Credit: Paul Haring/CNS.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. - At the start of a mid-March gathering
at Georgetown University, organizers asked church leaders, activists and members
of indigenous communities to think of a person they knew who had worked in
defense of the environment and to call out his or her name.
One called out “Berta Caceres,” a well-known
Honduran environmental activist killed in March 2016. The soft-spoken Bishop
Guy Charbonneau of Choluteca, Honduras, called out “Juan Lopez,” the name of a
parishioner from the Church of San Isidro de Tocoa, a “delegate of the Word,” a
Catholic Honduran jailed and, and like Caceres, threatened for speaking out
against mining industries.
The Catholic Church in Honduras, as
well as in the Amazon and elsewhere, supports those like Lopez suffer because
of the situations and consequences caused by the exploitation of natural
resources and destruction of the environment. These situations include poverty,
unemployment and insecurity, Charbonneau told Catholic News Service March
19.
Charbonneau was one of some 200 church
leaders, activists and members of indigenous communities present for a historic
three-day international gathering March 19-21 at the Jesuit university in
Washington. Some of those who gathered there also will attend the Synod of
Bishops on the Amazon in October, a gathering that Pope Francis has called for
at the Vatican to discuss environmental issues, how they affect the region’s
indigenous communities and what its environmental degradation means for
humanity.
“Without the Amazon, Latin American
goes under and, without (the benefits of) the Amazon for the planet, we all go
under,” Jesuit Father Roberto Jaramillo Bernal, president of the Latin American
Jesuit Conference, told CNS March 20 about the importance of finding
a path forward on issues affecting the resource-rich South American region,
home to a rainforest that, with its greenery, absorbs global emissions of
carbon dioxide.
Fighting for the Amazon is an ethical
matter, not just of defending God’s creation, as well as of defending “the
least of these,” but what’s happening in the Amazon affects immigration
patterns, hunger, poverty, medicine, political systems, not to mention the
irreversible damage to a planet that humanity calls home and one that can’t be
replaced, said Jaramillo.
“Sooner or later, this won’t just affect the indigenous
people (of the Amazon), because natural resources are not infinite,” said
Jaramillo. “This will affect the rich countries obsessed with consuming. They,
too, will suffer the same consequences.”
The model of endless resources some
countries tout is built on a lie, said Jaramillo, and it’s best to look at the
finality of those resources to figure out how to act going forward. One way to
do that is to change the mindset of people, he believes.
“Look at Romans 12:2,” Jaramillo
implored. “St. Paul says renewal begins with the mind.”
For Jaramillo, changing that mindset,
particularly about the limits of natural resources, is imperative in changing
behavior that will mitigate any damage already done to the planet. In South
America, the Catholic Church, through the Pan-Amazonian Church Network (known
as REPAM for its acronym in Spanish) has done great work toward that goal,
producing gatherings such as the one in Georgetown to figure out what the
church must do, Jaramillo said.
“But it’s still a baby,” he
said of the network, which will play a prominent role at the Vatican gathering.
However, the work of the REPAM network
is a ray of hope in the business of changing minds, he said.
The importance of the
environmental mission in the eyes of the church was apparent by the prominent
names of those present at the small Georgetown meeting: Cardinals Luis Antonio
Tagle of Philippines, Claudio Hummes of Brazil, Charles Bo of Myanmar, Pedro
Barreto of Peru and John Ribat of Papua New Guinea. At least two Vatican
officials attended: Cardinal Peter Turkson, head of the Dicastery for Promoting
Integral Human Development, and Cardinal Lorenzo Baldiserri, general secretary
of the Synod of Bishops. Archbishop Bernardito Auza, permanent observer of the
Holy See to the United Nations, attended.
Bishops, activists, and members
of indigenous communities from all continents discussed the science of
environmental destruction; its socio-economic effects; the spiritual, economic
and social connections made by indigenous communities and nature and what
others can learn from it; the role of women in the fight of the environment;
and possible ways the church and its members can help.
The higher rungs of the church also
have some changing to do. Luxembourg Archbishop Jean-Claude Hollerich said
during the gathering that Catholic institutions can look deeper into the
environmental effects and practices of companies in which they might have a
corporate stake.
“I urge Catholic
institutions to continue divesting from companies that focus on fossil fuels,” he
said.
After all, customs and practices must
be modeled from the top, and the church can show leadership in the way it, too,
behaves in the marketplace, said Hollerich, president of the Commission of the
Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union.
Some participants mentioned some
of the environmental successes that have come about with help from the Catholic
Church. One of them includes El Salvador, where Catholic leaders were
instrumental in passing a law banning metal mining in 2017, making the small
Central American country the first in the world to outlaw the industry. The
local church opposed metal mining because of the potential to harm El
Salvador’s dwindling supply of clean water, and the Archdiocese of San Salvador
is now fighting against the privatization of water, saying it will only harm
the poor.
Those like Jaramillo also see
part of the solution in learning from the indigenous communities and their
relationship to the environment, “finding a more contemplative, more open way,
more careful manner in caring for creation,” he said, before it’s too late.
“We need to change the parameters,” he
said. “We’re not here to dominate creation, but to live with it.”
© 2018 Crux Catholic Media Inc.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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