John Allen On Issue of Poverty at CELAM Meeting With Pope

John Allen will be traveling on the Papal plane offers this assessment of one of the key issues facing half the world’s Catholic living in the area represented by CELAM.

Poverty: According to the United Nations Human Development Report, Latin America has the most dramatic gap between rich and poor in the world, and Brazil has the widest such gap in Latin America. In turn, these disparities generate crime, corruption, alcohol and drug addiction, and violence.

The northeastern city of Recife in Brazil, for example, has a murder rate twice that of the most violent cities in the United States, with roughly 80 homicides per year for every 100,000 people. Honduras has a murder rate five times the global average, mostly due to the growth of maras, or youth gangs linked to the drug trade. This situation is of obvious concern to the church, since poverty and its discontents shape its daily pastoral experience.

The Catholic church has long been on the front lines of efforts to promote justice. For the past 12 years, for example, the Brazilian bishops have sponsored an annual march called the Gritos dos Excluidos, or “Cry of the Excluded,” in major cities to draw attention to the plight of the poor. Some priests, religious and pastoral workers have died to defend the poor. One prominent case in point is Notre Dame de Namur Sr. Dorothy Stang, an American missionary in Brazil, shot to death in 2005 by two armed men allegedly working on behalf of wealthy ranchers, who resented Stang’s defense of the Amazon and of poor farmers. Stang was executed at point-blank range; one of the killers later said that as she was shot, she was reading aloud to them from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

Many Latin American Catholics will be looking to Benedict XVI for encouragement in these efforts. It’s an especially important hurdle for the pope to clear, given that as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he led the Vatican’s crackdown on the liberation theology movement. Though Ratzinger insisted that his concern was with faulty theology, not with the church’s commitment to the poor, those experiences nevertheless made him an ambiguous figure in some circles in Latin America. In that light, the Brazil trip affords Benedict a crucial opportunity to exhibit his social concern.

There’s certainly a track record to build on.

On April 23, for example, Benedict wrote to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, current president of the G-8, demanding the “the rapid, total and unconditional cancellation” of the external debt of poor countries, describing it as a “grave and unconditional moral responsibility, founded on the unity of the human race, and on the common dignity and shared destiny of rich and poor alike.” In a recent message to the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences, Benedict highlighted three key challenges: 1) the environment and sustainable development, 2) respect for the rights and dignity of persons, and 3) the danger of losing spiritual values in a technical world. If he can weave these themes into his remarks in Brazil, observers believe he will go a long way towards winning hearts and minds.