Social-justice news December 2000

Social justice news
December 2000

U.S. bishops issue new statements on Middle East, U.S justice, abortion, and more
U.S. bishops call for Palestinian state
Does the pope prefer low-tech food?
Greenhouse gas agreement goes up in smoke at Hague conference
Church commemorates American missionaries killed in El Salvador

U.S. bishops issue new statements on Middle East, U.S justice system, abortion, and more
The November annual meeting of the U.S. Catholic bishops ended with the release of some surprising new position staements from the bishops, including, for the first time, a call for Palestinian statehood (see article below) and the unanimous adoption of a statement calling for various reforms in the U.S. criminal-justice system. "Responsibility, Rehabilitation, and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice" calls the current system "broken" and challenges trends toward mandatory prison sentences and for-profit prisons. Instead, the bishops recommend new efforts to rebuild the shattered lives of victims and offenders and to "reweave a broader social fabric of respect for life, civility, responsibility, and reconciliation."

The bishops proclaimed that a Catholic approach to crime and criminal justice is paradoxical: "We will not tolerate the crime and violence that threatens the lives and dignity of our sisters and brothers, and we will not give up on those who have lost their way."

The bishops statement says in part that "the current trend of more prisons and more executions, with too little education and drug treatment, does not truly reflect Christian values and will not really leave our communities safer. We are convinced that our tradition and our faith offer better approaches that can hold offenders accountable and challenge them to change their lives; reach out to victims and reject vengeance; restore a sense of community and resist the violence that has engulfed so much of our culture."

Besides offering several public policy directions, the statement provides suggestions encouraging action by individuals, parishes, dioceses, and state Catholic conferences to instill Catholic principles and values in the criminal justice system. Key among these suggestions is an appeal to all those at the crossroads of crime and community, violence and justice, fear and hope—prosecutors, police officers, probation and parole officers, victim advocates, jail and prison ministers—to bring these principles and values to bear in their work.

The bishops also issued statements: decrying a U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that threw out a Nebraska law prohibiting partial-birth abortion; lamenting the slavery, torture, executions, religious persecutions, and discriminatory laws by Sudan's political and military leaders; and urging Congress and the new president to revise the nations immigration laws and policies to uphold immigrants' dignity and human rights. (see links below to all the November statements).

Related story:
Get-tough-on-crime legacy hits the streets

In support of the bishops' statement on criminal-justice reform, Bishop John Leibrecht, Chairman of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) announced that CCHD has set aside $1 million to help communities confront violence, comfort victims, and reintegrate offenders into society. That money will help but more will likely be needed.

U.S. penal experts say that after years of an unprecedented population and building boom in the U.S. prison system, U.S. communities must now confront an equally unprecedented explosion in the population of inmate returnees to society. As many as 600,000 prisoners will be paroled from U.S. jails and prisons this year—up from 170,000 in 1980. Many parollees, advocates say, will return to the streets woefully ill-prepared because of cutbacks in prison job-training and education programs and the last two decades' emphasis on punishment over rehabilitation.

See: "Often, Parole Is One Stop on the Way Back to Prison" from the New York Times

Links to the full text of the November 15 statements:
Sudan's Cry for Peace
Welcoming the Stranger Among Us: Unity in Diversity
Responsibility, Rehabilitation, and Restoration:
A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice
Abortion and the Supreme Court: Advancing the Culture of Death
Returning to the Path of Peace in the Middle East
Built of Living Stones: Art, Architecture, and Worship
Resolution on Immigration Reform
Letter to Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem

U.S. bishops call for Palestinian state
Catholics are being asked to take a pass on eggnog and fruitcake this year in solidarity and support of peace in the Holy Land. In a special message on the Middle East crisis, the U.S. bishops have urged fasting, abstinence, and prayer during the Advent and Christmas seasons. The statement, "Returning to the Path of Peace in the Middle East," also contains the bishops' first explicit endorsement of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state.

"The Holy Land must be a symbol of peace, love, and unity, not a source of religious hatred and violence," says the statement, which was unanimously approved November 14 at the bishops' annual fall meeting in Washington D.C. "Despite the events of the past six weeks, it is not naive or utopian to insist that the season of peace in the Middle East has not passed, that Palestinians and Israelis are not destined for yet more years of conflict."

In introducing the proposal, Cardinal Bernard Law, chair of the international policy committee, told his brother bishops: "We could not meet this week without addressing the crisis in the Middle East." More than 200 people have died and thousands have been injured since the renewed violence in the Middle East and the suspension of the peace process this fall.

The brief but wide-ranging statement also calls for respect for Israel's right to exist and urges the United States to work tirelessly to revive the peace process. It also expresses concerns about the status of Jerusalem, the continued involvement of Syria in Lebanese affairs, and the increasing marginalization of Christians in the Holy Land.

It is the bishops' call for a Palestinian state, however, that has proved most controversial. "A just peace demands speedy implementation of relevant U.N. resolutions and other provisions of international law, and the establishment of an internationally recognized Palestinian state," the statement says, but then immediately adds: "A just peace equally demands respect for Israel's right to exist and flourish within its borders."

Jewish groups, including the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, expressed disappointment. "In the efforts to deal with this issue evenhandedly, [the bishops] sidestep the underlying problem of the Palestinian Authority's unwillingness to curb the violence or to protect Jewish holy sites from being vandalized and desecrated," said ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman.

But at least one Arab American organization welcomed the statement. The Washington D.C.-based American Committee on Jerusalem praised the bishops and urged other leaders of Christian communities around the world to rally behind the Palestinians in their quest for statehood. "The status quo of occupation is intolerable, illegal, and untenable," says a ACJ statement. "Palestinian Christians and Muslims in East Jerusalem cannot be asked to suspend their rights to accommodate Israeli occupation."—Heidi Schlumpf
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Does the pope prefer low-tech food?
On a day he dedicated to the world's farmers, Pope John Paul II urged developers of new biotechnologies to keep a "healthy balance" with nature and avoid putting people's lives at risk. The pope offered his warning on biotechnology and farming during the November 12 Jubilee of the agricultural world.

John Paul didn't cite any specific kind of biotechnology during his homily, but his comments followed a speech the previous evening in which he urged rigorous scientific and ethical controls of biotechnology in agriculture to avoid possible "disaster for the health of man and the future of the Earth" from new agricultural technologies. During the Mass, the pope told farmers "if the world of most refined techniques doesn't reconcile itself with the simple language of nature in a healthy balance, the life of man will run ever greater risks, of which already we are seeing worrying signs."

The pope didn't describe these "worrying signs," but genetically altered or otherwise hi-tech food has become an issue of great concern in Europe, Japan, and among many consumers in the United States. Many European nations refuse U.S. meat imports because of the heavy reliance on antibiotics among US ranchers. A ban also applies to any genetically modified (GM) US agriculture products.

Food safety and agricultural activists argue that GM food products have not been adequately tested for safety and that raising GM crops could have incalculable effects on the environment. Already corn modified to produce its own pesticide and intended for animal feed was inadvertently used for consumer food products in the US and activists charge that genetically re-engineered crops are escaping from test sites and killing Monarch butterflies.

Though the pope's comments on biotechnology drew the most attention from world media, Robert Gronski, the Rural Life Policy Coordinator for the Des Moines-based National Catholic Rural Life Committee, said the pope's message included as strong a call for justice and dignity for the world's farmworkers. Noting the often difficult circumstances in terms of working conditions and subsistence wages faced by farmworkers in the US and around the world, Gronksi said the pope's message included a demand that farmworkers not be turned "into servants who provide food for us."

Gronski said the pope's homily included a call to "respect the integrity of creation." According to Gronski, the pope may have hoped to discourage biotech corporations from continuing their efforts to re-engineer creation if mere profit remains their overriding interest in the project.

"In the past he has criticized globalization," said Gronski, "and now he is connecting that to what is happening in the agricultural world. He's calling for just compensation for farmworkers, the right to their own land, the right to property. Everyone has a right to live off the fruit of the Earth. We have a lot of food, but people are still hungry."

Gronski was in Rome for an international conference of Catholic agricultural advocates and heard the pope's Saturday night message in Rome and attended the Mass on Sunday. Throughout the Holy Year to mark the start of Christianity's third millennium, various fields of work have had their day at the Vatican, from politics to journalism to circuses. John Paul told the farmers to "resist the temptations of productivity and profit that work to the detriment of the respect of nature." Saying God entrusted land to mankind to take care of it, the pope said: "When you forget this principle, becoming tyrants and not custodians of the Earth, sooner or later the Earth rebels."—Kevin Clarke

More:
The pope's homily (November 12)
The National Catholic Rural Life Committee
A scary chapter in biotechnology

Related news:
Catholic Bishops Call for Justice in the Poultry Industry
Just in time for the holiday season, 41 Roman Catholic bishops are calling the nation's attention to patterns of injustice in the poultry industry that produces chicken and turkey products for homes everywhere. Behind inexpensive poultry prices are, in many cases, dangerous work conditions in processing plants and difficult financial arrangements or ecological worries for the farmers who raise the birds. The new pastoral letter, "Voices and Choices: A Pastoral Message on Justice in the Workplace from the Catholic Bishops of the South" was released during the general meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops on November 15.

Full text of the letter in English and Spanish is available at http://www.poultry-pastoral.org.

Greenhouse gas agreement goes up in smoke at Hague conference
The putative president-elect of the United States may have his doubts about global warming, but for more than 7,000 participants representing 182 governments and 323 organizations meeting in The Hague last month, the issue was not whether or not the "greenhouse effect" is real but exactly what countries—particularly developed countries—should do about it.

The conference made progress toward outlining a package of financial support and technology transfers to help developing countries contribute to global action on climate change. But the key political issues could not be resolved before the meeting ended. After two weeks of negotiations, ministers and diplomats suspended talks on how industrialized nations will meet their commitments to reduce net emissions of greenhouse gases according to standards set in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

At issue were an international emissions trading system whereby countries that achieve emissions reductions beyond their targets can trade those surpluses as "credits" to other countries; a "clean development mechanism" allowing industrialized countries to meet some of their commitments through investments in projects in developing countries; rules for counting reductions from carbon dioxide "sinks" such as forests and properly managed farmlands; and a compliance regime.

In particular, the inability of the United States and European negotiators to agree on the role of these "sinks" brought the talks to a standstill. European officials rejected a proposal on this issue as too harmful to the environment and too favorable to the United States, whom some observers saw as wanting too much for too little. The U.S. and other non-European developed countries like Japan and Australia have been pushing for "flexibility mechanisms" that allow countries to meet some or all of the Kyoto Protocol targets through emissions reductions outside their borders.

A compromise text, proposed at the last minute by Jan Pronk, the conference chairperson and The Netherlands' environment minister, was tabled but will be forwarded to the next meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which could be held in late May in Bonn.

The reality of global warming remains in doubt primarily in the political world while most climatologists are satisfied that the earth's surface is warming and that human activities, especially fossil fuel emissions, are contributing to the problem by pumping large quantities of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. Deforestation and other changes in land-use in developing countries also contribute 20 to 25 percent of emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas. A significant increase in the average temperature of the earth's surface, scientisits say, would endanger human health, increase the intensity of extreme weather such as storms, floods, and droughts, and damage fragile ecosystems.

The Kyoto Protocol is the key international climate treaty aimed at reducing the threat of global warming. When fully ratified, it will commit industrialized nations to a definite timetable for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to specified levels

Official conference documents can be found at www.unfccc.int. Analysis can be found at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Church commemorates American missionaries killed in El Salvador
December 2nd marks the 20th anniversary of the martyrdom of four U.S. missionary women—Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan. "Their rape and murder by national guardsmen in 1980," according to Tom Quigley, U.S.C.C. policy advisor on Latin America, "did more to inflame the debate over El Salvador in the United States than any other single incident."

Two retired Salvadoran generals now living in Florida have just been acquitted of responsibility in the case, but "commemoration of the martyrdom is particularly important for this anniversary year," Quigley says. They include a number of public forums throughout the country, including two in Washington, sponsored by the Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico titled, "The Challenge of the Central American Martyrs," at Holy Trinity Church Thursday, November 30, and a memorial Mass on Saturday, December 2, at Trinity College.

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