DEVELOPMENT: The South is not Poor – It Has Been Impoverished

By Tito Drago Reprint | | Print |

Tito Drago

MADRID, Jun 15 2001 (IPS) - The countries of the South, whether “underdeveloped” or “developing”, are not poor but have been impoverished, say Spain’s bishops in a document to be read out by the Social Pastoral Episcopal Commission on Sunday, when the national Day of Charity is celebrated on the occasion of the feast of Corpus Christi.

The Catholic charity Caritas Spain will also release its report on last year’s activities Sunday.

The report, to which IPS had access, shows that in the year 2000, Caritas Spain channeled around 130 million dollars into charity and social development programmes, and approximately 50 million into development aid projects in countries of the South.

Thirty percent of those funds came from government sources, and the remaining 70 percent from anonymous donations, the report adds.

Donations and work by volunteers “reflect the real face of the commitment of the Christian community and the citizenry to addressing the precarious living conditions of the poor,” Caritas Spain’s president José Sánchez Saba told IPS.

For its part, the Episcopal Commission document states that “the development of rich countries is inhumane, because it has been achieved through injustice and violence.

“The natural assets of the poorest countries have been plundered and continue to be exploited through unfair trade and an unjust debt. The countries are not poor, but have been impoverished. There are no rich and poor; there are poor because there are rich.”

The bishops maintain that the development of rich countries “is inhumane, because it does not extend to everyone, but only to a privileged minority of humanity.”

The Social Pastoral Episcopal Commission, which has a strong influence in Caritas, says “eighty percent of people cannot sit down at the well-provisioned table of the rich” because “360 people hold as much wealth as half of the world’s population, while 1.2 billion people scrape by on just a dollar a day.”

It is not necessary to have access to the statistics in order to perceive what is happening, says the document: “It is enough to look at the reality of an enormous multitude of men and women, children, adults, the elderly – in a word, concrete and unique human beings, who suffer the intolerable weight of abject poverty. There are many millions who lack hope.”

Spain’s bishops stress that they and all those who have social sensibility have a gargantuan task ahead of them.

“It is not a question of defeating hunger, or even of driving back poverty. The fight against destitution, while urgent and necessary, is not sufficient. What is involved here is building a world where everyone, regardless of race, religion or nationality, can live a fully human life,” the document adds.

The celebration of Corpus Christi is a sign of unity and reconciliation, say the bishops, an invitation to solidarity, which they define as fraternity and common-union – a play on words that links unity and communion, the act by which the Catholic faithful receive the sacrament.

The Eucharist “brings up to date the sentiments and attitudes of Jesus, he who opened his arms to the impure and the banished, he who knocked down the walls that separated men, he who wanted to become bread to be eaten by everyone,” says the statement.

A world in which no one was excluded would be an ideal world, like the one the bishops say they have always dreamt of, clean and characterised by solidarity, inhabitable for all.

Unfortunately, they add, “such dreams are far from becoming reality. The mirror of our dreams shatters into a thousand pieces each time we awaken. We find that the world in which we live is full of violence and injustice, poverty and marginalisation.”

Standing in the way of these dreams are war and terror, oppression and torture, slavery and persecution, intolerance and racism, all of which compound the underdevelopment of the world’s impoverished countries, the bishops lament.

With respect to North-South relations, they point out that “the development achieved by the rich countries does not respond to the real needs and requirements of man.

“It is based more on tecnique than on ethics, on the exigencies of the economy than on the needs of people, on the values of the stock exchange than on those of the spirit.”

The bishops praise the work of volunteers, because “the volunteer is the son of solidarity and charity.

“Volunteer is he who has the will [voluntad in Spanish] to help and serve, he who opts for the neediest and the dispossessed, he who wants to give something of himself, his time, his talent, his charisma, and trains himself to do that. We hope volunteers will grow in number and quality.”

The document ends by calling on churchgoers to work as volunteers for others, and states “we can dream about a world in which no one is excluded. It depends on you.”

Sánchez Saba said Caritas Spain, which has around 60,000 volunteers and 3,000 paid employees, “has focused its interventions on the social groups hardest hit by poverty and the imbalances of our economic system.

That includes “older people who live alone or have low incomes, young people and women in difficulties, victims of drugs or AIDS, vulnerable children, immigrants, the inhabitants of the most neglected rural areas, and Third World peoples hit by poverty, violence or natural catastrophes,” he concluded.