Letter urges Congress to guard pro-life protections in foreign spending

Mexico City, Mexico, Oct 25, 2019 / 12:38 am (CNA).- As violence continues to plague parts of Mexico, one priest in the country stressed the importance of strong families in overcoming the drug trade and establishing peace.

“If you think about it, the family may be one of the most attacked institutions in recent years. And it’s in the family where values arise, where citizens are formed,” said Fr. Omar Sotelo, director of the Catholic Multimedia Center, which tracks violence in Mexico.

He called for “a process of re-civilization,” adding that “the best school for re-civilizing society, without any doubt, is the family – there’s no other more powerful factor, no other more dependable institution.”

“The fundamental weapon for counteracting the violence we are going through is in the family,” he insisted.

Sotelo spoke to ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish language sister agency, about the increase in violence in Mexico. According to government figures, there have been more than 23,000 murders in the country so far this year. The El Universal newspaper estimated that the first half of the year was the most violent in the history of Mexico.

The priest said that drug trafficking has so deeply infiltrated Mexican society that “we have to speak about ‘narcoviolence,’ ‘narcopolitics,’ ‘narcoeconomy,’ ‘narcosecurity’.”

“If we look at a map of the Republic, we are surrounded by cartels and they are imposing the rules for the survival of a country,” he warned.

Those who enter organized crime, Sotelo said, have gradually lost a sense of respect and love for others. Many times, they are pushed into drug trafficking out of desperation, when they could not find any other work to support themselves, he said.

“Drug trafficking feeds on men and women whose course in life has been curtailed or perhaps trampled on.”

He warned that “today we have complete generations of drug traffickers, from small children to adults…We have one or two generations of drug traffickers in Mexico and so it’s going to be extremely hard to eradicate it.”

Fighting the drug trade, he said, “is like kicking a hornet’s nest,” and it’s easy to grow discouraged after years of effort with little success.

Still, the priest maintained, “the vast majority in Mexico can still reverse this deplorable evil.”

Solving the problem will take more than words, and will take cooperation from all sectors of society, he said. “It’s not just the problem of a president, of a government, of a political party, of an NGO. It’s everyone’s problem.”

But while the challenge may seem daunting, failure to act would be come at a high price.

“If we remain silent, things will continue like this,” he said. “If we don’t do something, those who are children right now…in 5,6,8,10 years may be the next drug traffickers, the actors of organized crime in our country.”

This article was originally published by our sister agency, ACI Prensa. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.

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Denver Newsroom, May 11, 2021 / 17:08 pm (CNA).
A bill threatens to ban University of California health systems from partnering with institutions that follow Catholic ethics, prompting concern ideological motives on abortio… […]

Washington D.C., May 29, 2020 / 04:00 pm (CNA).- Cardinal Peter Turkson has said that the principle of “non-violence” extends beyond opposing physical violence, and must include the protection human rights from exploitation.

Acknowledging the week’s protests and rioting in Minneapolis, the Vatican cardinal made the comments during an event to mark five years since the promulgation of the papal encyclical Laudato si’.

“There’s a lot of talk within the same church about Christian non-violence,” said Cardinal Turkson, head of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, making reference to the social unrest in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.

“Christian non-violence is not only when you [do not] hold a gun or a knife to the throat of somebody. Christian non-violence is also when you do not do violence to people’s dignity, people’s rights,” he said.

When the conditions necessary for human flourishing are not met in society, then the “cry of the poor” can be heard, he said, pointing to prayers for victims of racism and injustice in the wake of the Minneapolis riots.  

Cardinal Turkson made his remarks as he led an online panel discussion on Friday. The event “Laudato Si After Five Years: Hearing the Cry of the Earth and the Cry of the Poor” was co-sponsored by the Vatican and Georgetown University’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life.

Kim Daniels, associate director of the initiative, began Friday’s event with a prayer for George Floyd “and all those who suffer from acts of racism and injustice,” after a “tragic week” where large riots and protests had occurred in Minneapolis, New York, and other cities in the U.S. Daniels was appointed by Pope Francis to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication in 2016.

The protests followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Monday after a police officer was seen kneeling on his neck for several minutes while arresting him. Floyd, moaning and crying out in apparent pain, said repeatedly that he could not breathe in a video of the incident taken by bystanders. 

Floyd appeared unconscious several minutes into the video, and according to the police department was later taken to a hospital where he died. Four police officers involved in Floyd’s arrest were fired from the department, and one was arrested on Friday and charged with murder and manslaughter.

Noting the prayer for Floyd and other victims of racism and injustice at the beginning of Friday’s event, Turkson said that “it’s just a cry for people to recognize that every human being requires a minimum of social conditions to enable him to live, and live successfully and happily.”

Both human beings and the environment need to be cared for, he said, and when they are not “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” is heard—a key message of Laudato si’.

The “cry of the poor” occurs because “what they need to constitute their thriving, prosperous environment, is denied them,” the cardinal said. “And that’s why we talk about justice.”

The human and economic toll of the new coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has also taught ecological lessons, he said. 

Turkson pointed out that lockdown conditions have resulted in emissions drops, causing cleaner air in India and China, but the sudden unemployment of millions of people as a result of the economic shutdown challenges the very sustainability of the current economic system.

Cardinal Turkson said that Pope Francis’ letter was the “result of a lot of teaching” from previous popes.

Pope St. Paul VI’s encyclical Populorum progressio stressed care for nature and established ecology as “a set of conditions which constitute an environment which enables something to thrive,” Turkson said, while Pope St. John Paul II talked about human ecology and the environment of moral conditions which one needs to live well, and Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate taught that “society itself also has an environment that needs to be respected.”

Integral ecology, he said, is “ecology of nature, ecology of the human person, ecology of society, ecology of peace.”

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