Cardinal calls for hope

Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez spoke at this year's Canisius lecture sponsored by the Jesuit Institute. Rodriguez is the archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and the president of Caritas International, an organization that coordinates church outreach and relief programs. His speech, titled "The Challenge to Love, the Call to Hope," addressed issues of Catholic social justice and the need for Catholic moral participation in politics.

Rodriguez spoke of the relief work undertaken by Caritas: "This service of charity is what we intend to promote in the Catholic social ministry," he said.

The first Caritas organization was founded in Germany in 1897. Caritas soon expanded to other nations, including the United States, in the early years of the 20th century, Rodriguez said. Caritas is primarily concerned with reinforcing the dignity of the human person through Christian morality and enacting the church's "preferential option for the poor," a teaching that attempts to target root causes of poverty and injustice.

Rodriguez said, "As a community, the church needs to practice love … this is what Caritas tries to do." He said that this is an essential aspect of the church's mission and a natural expression of its teachings. "Within the community of believers," he said, "there can never be room for a poverty that denies a good quality of life."

Rodriguez said that he sees America as being particularly in need of moral introspection, a process that should include the opinions of the Catholic populace founded on proper Catholic social teaching. Rodriguez said that the Christian message should be "performative" as well as informative. "A just society can become a reality only when it is based on the transcendent dignity of the human person," he said.

Instead of sitting back in the face of social challenges, maintaining a defensive moral high ground, Rodriguez said that the church must take a proactive role in spreading the Catholic-Christian social message. "There are many Christians who say that the clergy should not mix in politics … of course, this is not the gospel of Jesus Christ, who told us to be witness to the truth."

Rodriguez said that the clergy in Latin America has faced particular challenges in spreading a message that preaches social justice and the dignity of the individual human being. He also spoke of his work campaigning for the cancellation of Third World debt. It is hope, Rodriguez says, that allows Catholics to go on in the face of these challenges. "Amongst the biggest challenges we face today, hope is the virtue by which we can face the present," he said.

Rodriguez said that a church community that is active in the politics of its society is not a violation of the healthy separation of church and state. "The social doctrine of the church is not an intrusion into the government of countries," he said. "It intends to instruct and illuminate the consciences of people."

Governments, Rodriguez said, should ideally protect the diverse and vital aspects of religious expression, allowing all traditions an equal voice in society. "The just ordering of society and the state is a central responsibility of politics." Rodriguez said that a balance of faith and political action forwards the just state. "Faith liberates reason from its blind parts … and helps to see its blind parts more clearly. This is where Catholic social doctrine has its place.

"It is not the church's responsibility to make this doctrine prevail in social life," Rodriguez said. The church must act as a catalyst for change in recognizing the dignity of every human individual, he said. "There will always be loneliness, there will always be situations of material need in which acts of the concrete love of neighbor will always be needed," Rodriguez said.

"The formation of just structures is not directly the duty of the church, but is within the sphere of politics," he said. "A just society must be the achievement of politics, not of the church." Of the church's role, he said that the faithful must work toward developing a social consciousness that is able to recognize violations of human dignity. "Building a just social civil order is an essential task which every generation must take up anew," Rodriguez said. Of the church, he said, "She has to play her part through rational argument."

It is through the exercise of charity that the church can always be a force for creative social solutions, Rodriguez said. "The Catholic community brings to the political community a consistent moral framework," he said. "A Catholic seeks to advance the common good. We must be prudent in discerning what public policies to support."

Rev. T. Frank Kennedy, S.J., and BC '71, is the director of the Jesuit Institute. This year's lecture was the third in the Canisius series, which hosts one lecture a year. "It is an academic lecture," Kennedy said, "in general around issues of faith and culture, in the broadest sense."