by Leela Ramdeen, Chair, CCSJ and Director, CREDI
Today would have been my mother’s birthday. She would have been 84 years old. She passed away in 1995 and each year we mark her birthday in a special way.
Recently, someone sent me a YouTube link with a clip taken from an interview with my father last year when we celebrated our 50th Anniversary of Independence. The clip is entitled: Love and Independence. He says that when the Union Jack was taken down and he saw the red, white, and black T&T flag being hoisted, he felt the same way he did when he first spoke to my mother. His heart, he said, was pounding so hard he thought he would die.
Mothers and fathers matter and the challenge for us in society is to create conditions that will allow their love for each other and for any children of their union to flourish. I take this opportunity to extend my condolences to dear Rhonda Maingot and Rose Jackman, founders of Living Water Community, both of whom lost their mothers recently. May they rest in peace.
Love is the answer to many of our current problems. It is one of the pillars of peace listed by Blessed John XXIII in his encyclical, Pacem in Terris, Peace on Earth. On Thursday the Church marked the 50th Anniversary of this important encyclical, which was released on April 11, 1963 – written during the height of the Cold War and a few months after the Cuban Missile crisis.
In Pacem in Terris Blessed John XXIII said that there were four essential conditions for peace: truth, justice, love and freedom. In his Message for World Day of Peace in January 2002, Blessed John Paul II added another “pillar”: “forgiveness”. He said: “My reasoned conviction, confirmed in turn by biblical revelation, is that the shattered order cannot be fully restored except by a response that combines justice with forgiveness. The pillars of true peace are justice and that form of love which is forgiveness.”
Pacem in Terris was unique in that for the first time, a papal encyclical was addressed to all people “of good will”. I urge you to read it. CCSJ hopes to organise a seminar to share with the faithful the wisdom contained in this encyclical. Blessed John XXIII reminds us in it that God implanted a moral order in our hearts and that peace on earth can only be established if the right order of relationships exists between individuals, between and within nations and among all peoples.
But these relationships must acknowledge “one fundamental principle: that each individual man/woman is truly a person” whose nature is “endowed with intelligence and free will. As such he/she has rights and duties, which together flow as a direct consequence from his/her nature. These rights and duties are universal and inviolable, and therefore altogether inalienable…every fundamental human right draws its indestructible moral force from the natural law, which in granting it imposes a corresponding obligation…
“Human society can be neither well-ordered nor prosperous without the presence of those who, invested with legal authority, preserve its institutions and do all that is necessary to sponsor actively the interests of all its members. And they derive their authority from God, for, as St Paul teaches, ‘there is no power but from God’.”
It is important for those with “legitimate authority” to remember this and that the reason they exist is to build “the common good” which can be “guaranteed when personal rights and duties are maintained.”
While outlining the essentials of “the common good” he reminds us that “considerations of justice and equity can at times demand that those in power pay more attention to the weaker members of society, since these are at a disadvantage when it comes to defending their own rights and asserting their legitimate interests.” This is in keeping with the plea of Pope Francis 1 that we focus on becoming a poor Church for the poor and vulnerable.
Blessed John XXIII stated that: “Relations between States must …be regulated by justice. This necessitates both the recognition of their mutual rights, and, at the same time, the fulfilment of their respective duties.” Relationships between nations “must be harmonised in truth, in justice, in a working solidarity, in liberty”.
He addresses the issue of the production and stockpiling of arms and calls for a cessation of the arms race: “true and solid peace of nations consists not in equality of arms but in mutual trust alone”. He invites every individual to work for peace, for “there can be no peace between people unless there is peace within each one of them.”
