by Leela Ramdeen, Chair, CCSJ and Director, CREDI
Christ is risen! Alleluia! A very happy and joyous Easter to everyone. God of justice and mercy gave us the gift of His Son who died and rose again so that we may live: “Because I live, you live also (John 14:19).” We live, yes, but what are we doing with our lives?
Easter is a time of new beginnings. Let us commit to open our hearts and minds to clean up our ‘act’ – at all levels of society – so that the Lord of life will lead us to heal wounds in our land. God knows that we need healing – including me.
In his encyclical “God is Love” (Deus Caritas Est), Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI proclaimed that the Church “cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice”. There are many injustices that beset us and we Catholics must address these.
One such injustice relates to the unfortunate statements that were recently made in Parliament under the protection of Parliamentary Privilege. The freedom of members to speak in Parliament should be used to advance our democracy – not to defame others.
How can anyone support certain statements made in Parliament by Tobago East MP Vernella Alleyne-Toppin? They were unacceptable on so many levels; they will not help us to build a culture of life, of love, of decency, of harmony.
CCSJ makes a special plea to all political parties to conduct themselves in a manner that will help us to lift our people and our nation to a higher, more noble place (Martin Luther King Jr). Proverbs 29:18 tells us: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
God has blessed us in T&T with enough people of vision to turn things around. In fact, we all have a duty to build God’s Kingdom here on earth. We can only do this if we start looking through the right lens. Too many of us are looking through a lens that distorts our vision.
Easter is a time when we thank God for his grace in loving us so much that He sent LOVE to save us. We are so ‘own way’, we need to be saved from ourselves! This Easter Sunday, let us pray for our politicians, our people and ourselves.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales has released a letter ahead of the May 7 general election in the UK. There is much in the letter on which we in T&T should reflect. While encouraging Catholics to participate in the upcoming elections, the letter asks them to think about what kind of society they are striving to create together, at home and abroad. The letter is built on five themes: the dignity of the person, religious freedom, crisis of trust in society, creativity in enterprise, and solidarity with the wider world.
(See: http://rcdow.org.uk/att/files/general%20election%20leaflet.pdf).
It states: “As Catholics, we are called to work for a world shaped by the Gospel of Jesus Christ…Our relationship with God leads to the desire to build a world in which respect, dignity, equality, justice, and peace are our primary concerns… In the light of the Gospel we can be messengers of hope as we challenge the political candidates about the policies they wish to implement and the reasons why…
“Politics is a vital and necessary vocation. It carries important responsibilities not only for policy decisions but also for shaping the hopes and aspirations of people. Political leaders can choose to appeal to our sense of hope or of fear, to our desires to care for others or for ourselves, and to our sense of solidarity or to our selfishness. We expect politicians to be committed to the common good. We also each have a responsibility to be involved in the democratic process. It is important that we vote.”
An election process that is free from violence does not only refer to physical violence but, as Professor Isaac Olawale Albert says, also to psychological and structural violence. He reminds us that “Despite wide variation in the procedures and institutional arrangements of democratic systems, all share certain norms for reconciling competing values and interests by nonviolent means…Democracy is feasible only so long as politicians and citizens implicitly agree on the delineation of these boundaries and constrain their actions accordingly.”
Let us all constrain our actions so that the peace and love of the living God will prevail in our hearts and in our land.
