http://vinnies.org.au/files/pdfs/National/SocialJustice/20080716-SJ_IntheWorld

In the world to change the world

Keynote presented to St Vincent de Paul Society International Youth Gathering

Sydney, 16th July, 2008

Dr John Falzon Chief Executive Officer St Vincent de Paul Society National Council johnf@svdpnatcl.org.au

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I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners and custodians of this land.

I dedicate this speech to the Indigenous Peoples of Australia and of all lands that have suffered the brutal history of colonisation and dispossession.

In the words of the revolutionary teachings known to us as the Beatitudes: “Happy are you who hunger and thirst for justice, you shall be satisfied.�

Kathe Kollwitz was a German sculptor and painter who gave her life to the struggle for justice alongside the poor and suffering. She once proclaimed of her life: I am in the world to change the world.

I have taken these words as the guiding theme of the words I wish to share with you.

In the world to change the world.

This, for me, describes, very simply and very beautifully the vocation of the Vincentian.

In a world where we are taught to consume, the gospel is telling us to create.

Our society and our economy are built on the practice of making us all feel a need that only the market can fulfil. We are made to feel that our job is to consume; that only by consuming can we be happy.

In fact, the people who are pushed to the margins are often denied the rights of normal citizens because they commit the unforgivable sin of not being able to consume at an acceptable level.

The real crime, according to the values of the gospel, is not the failure of the poor to consume. No; it the crushing of people; the denial of their potential to create!

It is the job of all of us, but especially the young, to resist this key message of our consumer society. It is our job, especially the job of the young, to create.

What it is that we are called to create?

You know the answer, my friends.

We are called to create a society built on justice and compassion. We who live in a world dominated by greed and the structures of division and oppression; we are called to build on the foundations of love.

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This is not an appeal to the emotions or to sentimentality. No; it is a hard calling at the same time as it is a calling flooded with joy. It is the very concrete call to be a force for transformation.

New forces and new passions spring up from within society. These new forces and new passions emerge in full flower from time to time in history.

Sometimes loudly on the streets; sometimes very quietly. Old structures are threatened by them and seek to put them down. But the force of love, the passion for justice, will never be put down.

As the scriptures tell us in that most eloquent of love poems, the Song of Songs: “Love, no flood can quench, no torrents drown.”

As Dr Honner put it in his book, Love and Politics, the Revolutionary Frederic Ozanam: “Frederic saw love as having political force. In the social turmoil of his day, in the struggles between haves and have nots, Frederic saw the force of love as being of utmost importance if chaos and brutality were be avoided.”

Let me share with you now a story from the Uraguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. It is a brief story about both the absence of love and the presence of love : ‘Fernando Silva ran the children’s hospital in Managua. On Christmas Eve, he worked late into the night. Firecrackers were exploding and fireworks lit up the sky when Fernando decided it was time to leave. They were expecting him at home to celebrate the holiday.

He took one last look around, checking to see that everything was in order, when he heard cottony footsteps behind him. He turned to find one of the sick children walking after him. In the half light he recognised the lonely, doomed child. Fernando recognised that face lined with death and those eyes asking for forgiveness, or perhaps permission.

Fernando walked over to him and the boy gave him his hand.

“Tell someone,...” the child whispered. “Tell someone I’m here.”’

Love was absent because the little boy was completely desolate, completely forgotten, completely left out.

But love was present because the good doctor, Fernando Silva, a man renowned, incidentally, for healing people by telling magical stories that come

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from the ordinariness of life; Fernando Silva looked for the boy. He saw him.

His heart went out to him. Now, on the other side of the world the boy is still remembered. His story has not been swept aside.

The people who are pushed to the margins of society are, in many ways, forgotten like this boy. Left out of the party and feeling guilty for having been left out; they are convinced that their poverty must be their fault.

It is our great privilege to tell the world that this little boy is here, in the midst of the prosperous and festive city. The forgotten ones, the excluded ones, are right here, where it hurts.

For us, they are nothing less than the sacramental presence of Christ. They are where we seek, and find, our God. It is time for me to say something that some might find controversial. It is my job to do this. It would be far too easy to simply say things that are familiar to everyone and comforting in their familiarity.

I wish to address the issue that is referred to by some as “secularism”.

I am aware that there are many in the church for whom this word is a signal for fear. They are afraid, sometimes understandably, of their faith being threatened by what they see as being the “worldliness” of society.

I have already made a point of saying that the real battle is between the structures that crush and the forces that liberate; the structures that oppress and deny creativity on the one side and the power of love that makes the space for creativity and dignity on the other.

Our faith should not be threatened by this struggle. Rather, it should be strengthened.

I say this unequivocally and without apology. Christ destroyed the division between the sacred and the profane.

In Christ there is no separation between the sacred and the secular. In Christ the secular is sacred. The world is sacred. The people of the world are sacred.

The longing for a new world, a more just and compassionate society, is sacred.

The great Jesuit scientist and mystic, Teilhard de Chardin, put it well when he said: “We have the right and the duty to be passionate about the things of the earth.” Why? Because as he wrote in The Divine Milieu: “By virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.”

The pro-fanus is a reference to the area outside the gate of the temple. In Christ there is no “Outside the temple”. No one is outside. Nothing is outside.

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We are on the side of those who are made to feel that they are excluded, pushed outside. But for us, in Christ, there is no “outside”.

We know this instinctively from our learning at the feet of those who are oppressed. We humbly learn from their experience, from their perspective.

We learn to analyse the world through their eyes; to think from below, rather than from the privileged positions above.

As the Rule tells us: “The distinctive approach of Vincentians to issues of social justice is to see them from the perspective of those we visit who suffer from injustice.”

Paulo Freire, the great educational theorist and developer of mass literacy campaigns with the poor of Brazil, wrote: “The oppressor cannot find in their power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves.

Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.” (Friere 1972: 21) I believe with all my heart that it is the oppressed of the world who have the most to teach us. When we assist our brothers and sisters; when we stand in solidarity with them, they entrust to us their collective pain, their dreams, their sacred stories, their collective yearnings that another kind of world is possible.

The church has, I am sad to say, been guilty of sometimes assuring them that the only other world that is possible is the one that comes after death, thereby discouraging any kind of struggle for social justice.

This, however, was never the way of Frederic Ozanam and his young companions.

Charity, he wrote, is the Samaritan who pours oil on the wounds of the traveller that has been attacked. It is justice’s role to prevent the attack.

The modern Rule of the Society is faithful to this vision when it makes clear: “Where injustice, inequality, poverty or exclusion are due to unjust economic, political or social structures or to inadequate or unjust legislation, the Society should speak our clearly against the situation…”

But when we do speak out we make many uncomfortable. Our acts of charity sometimes assuage the consciences of those who wish to maintain an unjust status quo. They are comforted to know that we will be there to pour the oil on the wounds of the traveller who has been attacked by unjust structures or

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laws. But when we advocate on behalf of our marginalised sisters and brothers we are trying to prevent the attack in the first place and this is seen as being a threat to the status quo.

We are, of course, simply following the precepts of the gospel and the guidance of the Rule. We are sharing the stories that have been entrusted to us by our sisters and brothers on the fringes of society.

Still, we are doing something dangerous, something risky. We have, as Frederic put it, gone over to the side of the barbarians, in the eyes of the powers that be.

When some years ago, the St Vincent de Paul Society in Australia was accused of being communist because we dared to ask questions about the causes of poverty and inequality, we were able to quote those beautiful words of the Archbishop, Helder Camara, a man who was educated in the realities of exclusion by the marginalised in the North-East of Brazil: “When I give bread to the poor, people call me a saint. But when I ask why they have no bread, people call me a communist.”

What were we doing? What is it we still strive to do? We are trying to follow the imperative of the scriptures: Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, protect the rights of those who are helpless.

Speak out and pronounce a sentence of justice, defend the cause of the wretched and the poor."

(Proverbs 31:8-9) The harder challenge is to empower the marginalised to speak for themselves.

This is truly powerful. As the Rule reminds us: “The Society helps the poor and disadvantaged speak for themselves. When they cannot, the Society must speak on behalf of those who are ignored.”

Frederic, like Jesus of Nazareth before him, became one with the oppressed.

You will recall that he unequivocally took the side of the workers during the Paris revolutionary uprising of 1848.

As Dr Honner pointed out, Frederic was aware how conservative Catholic opponents might react to his own advocacy for justice, charity and equality: in 1848 he wrote to priests, asking them to work in the city’s poor suburbs, warning them ‘not be dismayed even if the hard-hearted rich, offended by your attitude, should accuse you of communism’.

7 When he stood for election to the National Assembly in 1848, his political platform ran to only two hundred words. He declares that he sees in the February Revolution a secular version of the Gospel expressed in three words: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

His desire to transform the Paris of his day, to usher in a spring-time of justice, was driven by love. To become one with the oppressed: isn’t this the meaning of compassion? To suffer with? As the poet Bertolt Brecht put it so well, “the compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed is indispensable. It is the world’s one hope.”

It is the world’s one hope. We, in the St Vincent de Paul Society across the world, are in the position to be instrumental in making this happen.

When we try to take on these huge tasks by ourselves it is easy to lose heart and to be overwhelmed. This is why, just as the pain of the poor is a collective pain, so is the task before us a collective task.

As the Indigenous Brazilian proverb goes: “When we dream alone it is only a dream. But when we dream together it is the beginning of reality.”

Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the whole world."

Where hope has been stolen and dignity trampled upon there is a crying need for the space to imagine a better life and a better society.

If we don’t try then we have already failed.

If we listen to the whispers of hope from the edges of society, we are compelled to believe that another kind of world is possible Our creative mission is both personal and collective. The last word must therefore be the collective word to the wise from Lilla Watson and a group of Aboriginal activists in Queensland in the 1970s: “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”