By Scott Wright
2006 Spring
With this issue of Signs of the Times in the Americas, we want to contribute to building a stronger network of Faith and Solidarity in the Americas, and to invite your support for this endeavor. In times like these, marked by the globalization of economic and military violence, we want to bear witness to the globalization of solidarity and hope.
Today we are at a crossroads in our nation. The Bush Administration’s response to September 11th has been marked by a reckless disregard of international human rights conventions and the laws of the land. National security is elevated at the cost of individual security, and corporate globalization is pursued at the cost of the common good and welfare of the poor.
This neglect of human rights and resort to war and torture abroad has been combined with a neglect of the poor and justice at home. The response to Hurricane Katrina, and the threats to deport 12 million undocumented immigrants are but the most visible face of this disregard for the welfare of our most vulnerable citizens.
On the other hand, we witness the hopeful emergence of people across all sectors of life who are beginning to challenge the direction that our nation is taking, and to call for a fundamental change of course. Millions of Latino immigrants have taken to the streets and given birth to a new civil rights movement in the nation. Military families have become outspoken critics of the war in Iraq. Victims of Hurricane Katrina are calling for equal justice.
We see, too, the emergence of a more courageous witness on the part of our faith communities and churches, exemplified by Los Angeles’ Archbishop Roger Mahoney’s call to Catholics to offer humanitarian assistance to undocumented immigrants, even if it means breaking an unjust law.
For people of faith throughout the Americas, this is a season of repentance and a season of hope.
For us in the U.S., an attitude of repentance is particularly appropriate at this moment of history, as our government and U.S.-based transnational corporations have done so much for which we need to ask forgiveness and offer redress for such wrongs.
Today we find inspiration in other calls to repentance and other witnesses to hope. In 1967 Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. called America to “break the silence” and end the Vietnam War.
In 1980 Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador wrote a public letter to then-president Jimmy Carter pleading that no further military assistance be sent to that country. Weeks later he publicly called on Salvadoran soldiers to obey their conscience and the Law of God which says, “Do not kill!” rather than a military order of their commander to kill their own brothers and sisters.
This year also marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who was executed April 9, 1945 for his faithful opposition to the Nazi regime.
Today we take up once more the mantle of Dr. King, Archbishop Romero, and Pastor Bonhoeffer. In this season of Holy Week and Easter, we affirm once more that every human life is precious, and we acknowledge our complicity as a nation and as Christians in the loss of each life.
For three years, our government has been engaged in an unjust and protracted war in Iraq, one based on lies and deception. Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed, victims of Iraqi insurgents, sectarian violence, and U.S. military aggression. Three years later we still see no end to the hostilities which our country initiated.
Our Holy Week and Easter witness calls each of us to a greater commitment to seek peace and to pursue it, and to follow the path of nonviolence in calling our government to end its part in the violence in Iraq, withdraw its troops, and seek a peaceful and diplomatic solution to the conflict under the leadership of the United Nations.
The United States military has condoned and used torture in the Abu Ghraib prison and in Guantanamo, Cuba.
Our Holy Week and Easter witness calls for an end to torture and its disregard for the rule of law, and the imposition of severe sanctions on all those responsible for these crimes – including those at the highest levels of office.
Thousands of refugees and migrants continue to cross our borders seeking safety and economic survival in the United States. In the name of national security our government is implementing border policies that endanger the lives of these sisters and brothers, and legislation that will declare undocumented immigrants “criminals,” and make it a crime for health care workers and social workers to assist them in any way.
Our Holy Week and Easter witness calls on the U.S. Congress and the Bush Administration to replace these measures with those that will ensure the security of all immigrants. Further, we call on our government to implement more humane refugee policies and to withdraw any proposal to make it a crime to provide humanitarian assistance to undocumented immigrants.
The divide between the wealthy and the poor grows daily in the United States and globally. For example, trade and debt policies are in place which favor U.S. corporations, create conditions of slave and forced labor around the world, and destroy the earth. Hurricane Katrina has revealed in a dramatic fashion this divide, and the economic and environmental racism that continues to target poor African American communities in our nation.
Our Holy Week and Easter witness calls on our government to pursue just trade initiatives; to cancel the debt; to join the international community in protecting the natural environment; and to ensure that essential resources and services – land, water, health care, education – become available to all human beings. We call in a special way for our federal government to commit all resources and provide all the jobs necessary to rebuild the neighborhoods and communities of those displaced by the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the social disaster of poverty and racism in our nation.
In this Season of Repentance and Hope we commit ourselves to public action on behalf of the tortured, those terrorized by war, the poor and those who suffer in misery across the globe. We raise our voices in public actions and in private prayer to echo the words of popes Paul VI and John Paul II: “No more war, war never again!”
As we enter this time of Cross and Resurrection, we strive to be faithful to the Gospel and to the many prophets who have gone before us, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Oscar Romero, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We open our hearts to the suffering people in our world, helping to take them down from the many crosses on which they are dying, crosses in many cases created by the policies of our nation.
We believe that by these Holy Week and Easter actions for justice, peace and the integrity of creation, God will “pour out a portion of the Spirit upon all people,” that “the sons and daughters shall prophesy, young women and men shall see visions, old ones will dream dreams,” and a Day of Jubilee will dawn.
