PART 4 – Conclusion – An experience of social/social justice ministry in Mexico
By Fr Curtis Gaston Poyer
Former Director for Social/Social Justice Ministry in the Diocese of Tampico, Mexico, 2004–2023
Catholic social/social justice ministry or action flows mainly and directly from Catholic Social Teaching (CST), a set of universal principles and at times practical guidelines, which themselves originate and are developed from Scripture and Tradition.
CST is found in the documents of Vatican II, in papal social encyclicals and apostolic exhortations, in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, in the publications of the Synods of Bishops and in those of national and regional Conferences of Bishops, for example, in the publications of the Antilles Episcopal Conference (AEC) and the Latin American Conference of Bishops (CELAM or Conferencia del Episcopado Latinoamericano, in Spanish).
Also, CST/Doctrine and guidelines for social/social justice ministry can be found in publications from different Vatican Congregations or Dicasteries and/or Pontifical Councils.
In 2004, together with a few interested colleagues, I started the Diocese of Tampico’s Institute for CST and Centre for Social Research.
We offered to lay pastoral agents interested in social/social justice ministries a wide range of courses in biblical, theological, and pastoral studies using the hermeneutics of social/sociological, ideological, and rhetorical criticisms of the Bible, theological writings, official Church teachings, and other documents.
These hermeneutical tools were and have been useful in helping us to identify the power relations and struggles, specific concerns, and systems of beliefs in the texts and their related contexts. Such identification then helped us to identify where our pastoral priorities ought to be or to confirm the paths that we were already taking.
Informing our pastoral studies were, have been and are, selected documents from CST, from the broad range of sources outlined above, and the growing number of excellent publications on social ministry as an integrated a wide range of specific ministries or pastoral actions and literature and multimedia expositions on specific areas of social ministry.
Caring for migrants and victims of human trafficking
From 2005 to 2007, all the dioceses of Latin America and the Caribbean were invited to participate in the preparations for the fifth Latin American Conference of Bishops, called CELAM V. It was due to be held in Aparecida, Brazil, in 2007.
In the Diocese of Tampico, we received a similar questionnaire to that which was sent around to the other dioceses. One section asked us to identify and describe specific social problems and pastoral priorities and approaches.
Our social/social justice ministry team, in collaboration with other dioceses, described some of the results of our own social research and our multifaceted and at the same time organic approach to pastoral social.
We sent our answers to the Mexican Episcopal Conference. To our great surprise, the Aparecida Final Document has an entire section on social ministry, very close to what we had proposed: bishops’ conferences and local churches have the mission of promoting renewed efforts to strengthen a structured, organic, and comprehensive social ministry with which both direct aid and development efforts becomes present in the new realities of exclusion and marginalisation in which the more vulnerable groups live, where life is most in jeopardy.
At the centre of this action is each person, who is welcomed and served with Christian warmth. Globalisation is causing the emergence of new faces of the poor in our peoples.
With special attention and in continuity with our previous general conferences, we focus our attention on the faces of the new excluded: migrants, victims of violence, displaced people and refugees, victims of human trafficking and kidnappings, the disappeared, people sick with HIV and endemic diseases, drug addicts, adults, boys and girls who are victims of prostitution, pornography and violence or of child labour, abused women, victims of exclusion and trafficking for sexual exploitation, differently-abled people, large groups of unemployed men and women, those excluded by technological illiteracy, street people in large cities, the indigenous and Afro-Americans, landless peasants and miners.
Through its social ministry, the Church should welcome and journey with these excluded people in the appropriate environments. (APARECIDA, # 401-402, emphasis, mine).
As a result of this, we proposed to our diocese and, through the Mexican Episcopal Conference’s national department for Pastoral Social (which I call here social/social justice ministry) to other dioceses the following: each parish should set up an EPPSO (Equipo Parroquial para la Pastoral Social), meaning, a parish social/social justice ministry, which would include those areas relevant to the social reality of the parish.
The parish social/social justice ministry team should, parallel to its own actions, receive formal training/formation in the different areas of pastoral social, as needed, at an institute for CST and centre for social research.
Each diocese should have at least one major centre for Social/Social Justice Ministry with representation from movements, societies, centres for development, and religious orders that already have charitable, human development, and social justice actions as part of their mission.
As I now look back, I can now recommend the same steps for the Archdiocese of Port of Spain, and other dioceses in the Caribbean.
