Bishops Push Relief for Poor Nations

VATICAN CITY —  Voicing “dismay and alarm” over the income gap between rich and poor countries, Roman Catholic bishops wound up their first Pan-American gathering Friday with a plan to push for debt relief for the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nations.

Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles and co-president of the gathering, said church officials from across the region will form a lobbying group to meet next year with international creditors, aiming to hasten debt relief negotiations already underway.

“We look at this issue as pastors who are trying to put a human face on the debt problem,” Mahony said in an interview. “We’re not economic specialists or bankers, but we can be catalysts and conveners . . . using whatever moral force we have to keep the spotlight on this issue.”

Latin America’s $607.2-billion debt rose repeatedly in the monthlong synod as a cause of what the bishops, in their closing message, called “conditions of utter human misery that cannot be reconciled with the dignity which God has bestowed equally on each of his children.”

They endorsed Pope John Paul II’s appeal for a reduction or cancellation of the poorest nations’ debts before 2000.

Creditor nations, including the United States, have been reluctant to offer debt relief without stringent economic reforms that the poorest countries usually find too difficult to carry out.

Mahony said the World Bank has agreed to give the church support and advice as it lobbies to overcome such obstacles for impoverished debtor nations including Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and Bolivia.

But some Catholics are skeptical that the church can sway international debt negotiations.

*

The Rev. Thomas Reese, a theologian at Georgetown University who attended the synod, said the bishops’ grasp of economics and finance, in their debates here, was limited.

“I don’t know how much people will listen to them when they simply talk in generalities,” he said.

The bishops’ message emphasized that debt relief “will only begin to lift the burdens of the poor” and that other reasons for poverty--including corruption and excessive military spending--must be attacked as well.

John Paul summoned bishops from North and South America to the Vatican for one of a series of special regional synods to shape the church’s message for the third millennium of Christianity.

After listening to them speak for weeks on how to revitalize the church, the pope said at a farewell Mass on Friday: “We have heard echoes of the first great evangelizers” who reached the Americas five centuries ago.

The bishops broke no new political or theological ground in their final message, which called on followers to reach out to Catholics who have abandoned the church and to other people “still searching for God.”

They offered little to those erstwhile Catholics, especially in North America, who have been alienated by the pope’s refusal to ease the Vatican prohibition on artificial birth control, divorce and the ordination of women or married priests. Those issues were not on the Vatican-controlled agenda, and few bothered to bring them up in debate.

Instead, the bishops’ message stressed the need to master the mass media and compete more effectively with evangelical Protestant groups that are gaining ground in the hemisphere, particularly in Latin America. “We must learn to preach in the new language to which so many have become accustomed,” it said.

The synod, which drew 233 bishops and 58 other participants, was the first to include church leaders from throughout the hemisphere. It was confrontational at times, with members sometimes deploring each other’s cultural stereotypes. But participants said it ended in a better understanding of common problems facing the church in North and South America.

Latin American bishops dropped their derogatory references to evangelical rivals, which they often refer to as “sects,” after the North Americans insisted on a more tolerant, ecumenical attitude.

*

At the urging of Latin American colleagues, bishops in the north agreed on the need to reach out more quickly to Spanish-speaking immigrants leaving a culture shaped by Catholicism, before they are drawn into the more secular lifestyle of the United States.

Cardinal Adam Maida, archbishop of Detroit, said North American Catholics could learn from Catholics in Latin America.

“We in the North are constantly seduced by the false voice of freedom that calls for individual choice, even to the point of a so-called right to die,” he told the synod. “Because family relationships are a high value in your [Latin American] culture, individuals rarely die alone or unwanted.”

John Paul sounded pleased with the synod, saying its objective had been to “knock down the walls of separation between man and man, nation and nation.” To underscore the point, he read parts of Friday’s homily in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French--the languages of the nations represented--as well as in Italian.