THE DIGNITY OF THE RURAL POOR---A GOSPEL CONCERN

THE DIGNITY OF THE RURAL POOR---A GOSPEL CONCERN

Dear People of God in the Philippines,

In response to the Pope Benedict XVI's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God is love), we declared 2006 the Year of Social Concerns (CBCP Pastoral Exhortation, May 11, 2006). For the God who is love bids us to be love too. In our Pastoral Exhortation naming 2006 the Year of Social Concerns, we expressed the hope that we would be able to educate ourselves more intensively in what the social teaching of the Church is all about. For that teaching in the end comes to only one thing: love of neighbor because of God's love for us.

The over-riding social concern of the Church of the Philippines has been all these years centered on the inequitable distribution of the nation's wealth and the endemic social injustices that underpin that evil. We would like in this statement to focus our attention on the greatest victim of our unjust economic order, the rural poor, and the diminishment of their dignity as people and as citizens. We cannot put it too strongly, but this diminishment is a negation of Christian love---and hence of the God who is love. (Cf. Jubilee of the Agricultural World Address of John Paul II, Nov. 11, 2000l also, Land and Agrarian Reform, Pastoral Exhortation on Philippine Economy, no. 54, CBCP, 1998).

Our Situation

The greater number of our poor are in the rural areas. The poor abound in our cities too, and we must be as concerned for them as for our rural poor. But if the urban poor are growing in numbers, it is largely because of rural folk crowding into our cities to escape the debilitating poverty of the countryside. It seems obvious then that to attend to the first problem (rural poverty) would be to help lessen the second (urban poverty).

The one big effort of the government at alleviating rural poverty has been its on-going land reform program, the CARP (the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program). The law instituting it was passed years ago but its full implementation is still far off in the future---if ever. The law was defective in the first place, emasculated in the very beginning in a landlord dominated Congress, further watered down in its implementation. At this stage, a year before the scheduled end of the program, there is much that has not yet been done and the general situation of our farmers is still as bleak as ever.

The lack of vigor and determination shown by the government in its poor implementation of the law mirrors the still over-powering opposition of the landed classes, the traditional political and economic elite of our country. What this means simply is that selfish class interests outweigh concern for the common good---the main target of the Church's social teaching. And that selfish unconcern in turn translates into sheer neglect of the poor, an utter disregard of the dignity of a whole class merely because of their bad economic plight.

This disregard is horrendously displayed in the recent extra-judicial killings, perpetrated by groups from both the right and the left, of farmers whose only "crime" is their continuing struggle for agrarian reform or their inability to pay the "revolutionary tax" demanded of them by the NPA. As a religious people---and it doesn't matter whether we are Christians, Muslims or adherents of other religions---we must vehemently condemn the continuing murder of such rural folk.

We condemn too, just as vehemently, the un-abated killing of unarmed men and women on the mere charge or suspicion that they support or belong to leftist political groups.

Our Response

Condemning evil is not enough. As we must have learned from our consideration of the Church's social teaching this past year, we must try bringing an end to evils that harm people and their good.

As always, our first reaction to national problems is to call on government to do what it is supposed to do. We do so here. We ask that the CARP, defective as it is, be finally completed next year as it has been targeted. And if it is not sufficiently implemented by then, the program should be further extended and funded more seriously and generously. But we asked that the law itself must be reviewed and improved.

The government and the military's response to the shameful "extra-judicial" killings of unarmed crusaders for justice and equality is most unsatisfactory, their protestations of concern not too convincing. The greater and more effective performance of their duties as guardians and protectors of our peace---this too we must demand as strongly as we can.

Putting the burden of action on people whose responsibility it is to act, however, is not enough. We must ask ourselves: What do we do as individuals, as families, as communities? What must we do? The responsibility to act is just as much ours as those who have the official responsibility.

For years now we have been pushing the development of BECs or BEC-type Church communities and organizations. And we do so because such communities are, or should be, fully participative communities. Problems, national or local, big or small, weighty or light---and the problem of the rural poor we are speaking of here now is probably our weightiest---all must be looked at and become community concerns for the solving of which their participation is needed. Involving themselves in meeting those problems, they must do so according to the social teaching of the Church which always looks to the achieving of the common good. This demands continuing discernment from all of us, both as individuals and as communities. The answers will be varied, but, we trust, all issuing from genuine Christian charity.

On our part, and in view of what we are asking you to do, we make a very specific proposal.

A Rural Congress

The year 2007 is the fortieth anniversary of the National Rural Congress of 1967. It was at this Congress that the participants, most of them diocesan and parish social action workers, came to the crucial conclusion that the Church must go to the barrios. The reason was the heavy realization that the rural parts of the country were the most neglected by both the government's development programs and the Church's pastoral care.

To commemorate that crucial event in our life as a Church---and to make us meet in true Gospel fidelity our present social concerns---we propose that we revive the memory of that Congress by holding one again this year.

But this time our farmers must do that speaking by themselves, the discerning, the proposing of their own ideas, the planning of how we must as a people come together to work for the common good of the country and of ourselves. Doing so, they will be effectively asserting the dignity that for so long has been denied them. And the rest of us, participating with them in their reflections and deliberations, we will be honoring their inborn dignity as children of the same Father in Heaven.

Possibly a small thing. But in the larger picture of the country's many ills, we see that it is in not honoring the dignity of the least of our brothers and sisters among the poor that we contribute not a little to the injustices and inequalities that have become deeply ingrained in our national life; and today the murders and killings, the corruption and thieving, the crimes that are being committed daily with impunity against our poor, these we see too are all rooted in the practical denial of the basic human dignity and rights of our very poor. Christ himself acknowledged and honored their dignity, identified himself with it: "If you did it for one of my least brothers or sisters, you did it for me" (Mt. 25, 40). Because he did, so must we.

Today we see only too clearly the need for the reform not only of our national institutions but of our very moral fiber as a people. We start meeting that need by acknowledging the God-given dignity of the least of Christ's---and our---brothers and sisters. And not only in word but in act. That in itself is reform.

The Lord who loves the poor be with us in this, our common task.

For the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines,

+ANGEL N. LAGDAMEO, D.D.
Archbishop of Jaro
President, CBCP

28 January 2007

ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI

TO A DELEGATION OF THE THEOLOGICAL FACULTY
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TÜBINGEN IN GERMANY

Paul VI Audience Hall
Wednesday, 21 March 2007

Dear Bishop, esteemed Dean, distinguished Colleagues, if I may be permitted to call you such!

I thank you for this visit and I can say that it makes me deeply happy.

On the one hand, an encounter with one's past is always beautiful because there is something rejuvenating about it. On the other, however, it is something more than a nostalgic meeting.

You yourself, Your Excellency, said that it is also a sign: a sign on the one hand of how dear to me theology is -- and how could it be otherwise? -- because I had considered teaching to be my true vocation, even if the Good Lord suddenly wanted something else.

At the same time, however, it is also a sign on your part, that is, that you see the interior unity between theological research, doctrine and theological work, and pastoral service in the Church, and thus the total ecclesial commitment for the human being, for the world and for our future.

Yesterday evening, of course, I started rummaging among my memories with a view to this meeting. So it was that a memory came to mind which fits in with what you have just said, Mr Dean: in other words, the memory of the Grand Senate. I do not know today whether all the appointments still pass through the Grand Senate.

It was very interesting that when, for example, a chair of mathematics or Assyriology or the physics of solid bodies or any other subject was to be assigned, the contribution from the other faculties was minimal, and everything was resolved quite quickly because almost no one dared to speak out. The situation in the humanistic disciplines was rather different and when the chairs of theology came up in both faculties, in the end, everyone had their say.

Thus, it was evident that all the professors of the University felt in some way competent in theology; they had the feeling that they could and should participate in the decision. Theology was obviously very dear to them.

Consequently, on the one hand it could be perceived that their colleagues in the other faculties in a certain way considered that theology was the heart of the University, and on the other, that theology was precisely something that concerned everyone, in which all felt involved and somehow also knew that they were competent.

In other words, come to think of it, this means that precisely in the debate concerning the chairs of theology, the University could be experienced as a university. I am pleased to learn that these cooptations exist today, more than in the past, although Tϋbingen has always striven for this.

I do not know whether the Leibniz-Kolleg of which I was a member still exists; in any case, the modern University runs a considerable risk of becoming, as it were, a complex of advanced study institutes externally and institutionally united rather than being able to create the interior unity of universitas.

Theology was evidently something in which the universitas was present and in which it was demonstrated that the whole forms a unit, and that precisely at its root are a common questioning, a common task, a common purpose.

I think, moreover, that one can see in this a deep appreciation of theology. I consider this a particularly important fact.

It reveals that in our time -- at least in the Latin countries where the secularity of the State and State institutions is emphasized to the extreme and therefore the omission of all that has to do with the Church, Christianity and faith is demanded -- interconnections exist from which it is impossible to separate that complex reality which we call theology (which is also fundamentally linked with the Church, faith and Christianity).

It thus becomes evident in our collection of European situations -- however secular, in a certain perspective, they are and must be -- that Christian thought with its questions and answers is present and accompanies them.

I maintain, on the one hand, that this fact shows that theology itself continues in a certain way to make its contribution and to constitute what the University is.

But on the other, it naturally also implies an immense challenge to theology to satisfy this expectation, to be equal to it and to carry out the service entrusted to it and expected of it.

I am pleased that through the cooptations which have now become visible in a rather practical way -- far more than they used to be -- that the intra-university debate makes the University truly what it is, involving it in a collective self-questioning and responding.

However, I think that this is also a reason to reflect on how far we are able -- not only in Tϋbingen but also elsewhere -- to satisfy this need. The University and society, humanity, in fact, need questions, but they also need answers. And I hold that in this regard there emerges for theology -- and not only for theology -- a certain dialectic between scientific rigour and the greatest question that transcends it and constantly emerges from it: the question about truth.

I would like to make this clearer with an example. An exegete, an interpreter of Sacred Scripture, must explain it as a historical work "secundum artem", that is, with the scientific rigour that we know in accordance with all the historical elements that require it and with the necessary methodology.

This alone, however, does not suffice for him to be a theologian. If he were to limit himself to doing this, then theology, or at any rate the interpretation of the Bible, would be something similar to Egyptology or Assyriology, or any other specialization.

To be a theologian and to carry out this service for the University, and I dare to say for humanity -- hence, the service that is expected of him -- he must go further and ask: but is what is said there true? And if it is true, does it concern us? And how does it concern us? And how can we recognize that it is true and concerns us?

In my opinion, in this regard, even in the scientific context, theology is always also requested and called into question over and above the scientific perspective.

The University and humanity are in need of questions. Whenever questions are no longer asked, even those that concern the essential and go beyond any specialization, we no longer receive answers, either.

Only if we ask, and if with our questions we are radical, as radical as theology must be radical over and above any specialization, can we hope to obtain answers to these fundamental questions which concern us all.

First of all, we have to ask questions. Those who do not ask do not get a reply.

But I would add that for theology, in addition to the courage to ask, we also need the humility to listen to the answers that the Christian faith gives us; the humility to perceive in these answers their reasonableness and thus to make them newly accessible to our time and to ourselves.

Thus, not only is the University built up but also humanity is helped to live. For this task, I invoke God's Blessing upon you.