This year marks the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking Medellin document, one of the most important exhortations calling the church to live in solidarity with the marginalized and vulnerable. In that work, promulgated immediately after the Second Vatican Council, the Latin American bishops helped the entire People of God better realize that the envoys of the Good News are called to dwell in the slums with the excluded, not merely to hear their pacing footfalls echo around the emptying Baroque museums of a storied past.
To commemorate this remarkable ecclesial, socio-political, and moral contribution, my friend and colleague Miguel Diaz, retired U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See and current John Courtney Murray Chair in Public Service at Loyola, invited me to a recent event titled “The Legacy of Medellin: Option for the Poor and Human Rights in Latin America.” Joining Miguel were Carmen Lomellin, retired U.S. Ambassador to the Organization of American States, and Wally Brewster, retired U.S. Ambassador to the Dominican Republic. Excepting Miguel, the speakers were by their own admission more experts in international affairs than the theological currents of mid-twentieth century Latinx Catholicism, a history Diaz knows extraordinarily well from his own Cuban roots and scholarly study. Yet, the other ambassadors’ fluency in the ongoing affronts to human dignity unfolding in the Latin American and Caribbean contexts provided a nuanced matrix to re-examine the central tenets of Catholic social thought in our own day.
Hearing their direct experiences with the most impoverished men, women and children in our hemisphere could not but encourage one to reflect on where the Medellin bishops’ and Christ’s own call to care for the widow, the orphan, the alien, and the forgotten have fallen on deaf ears in this country and many others.
One important stone in a staggering intellectual bridge spanning from Brazil to Colombia to Mexico to the Dominican Republic and now in some ways to the universal church via Argentina, the CELAM document crafted in Medellin continues to interrogate the current state of affairs where human beings are viewed merely through lenses of production and consumption, and thus in too many instances are agonizingly misconstrued as sub-human, parasitical or disposable. As with most realities in contemporary life, from climate change to economic degradation to government corruption to clerical rigorism, the poor bear the brunt of the violent systems that dehumanize and silence the greater part of human beings on this planet, what some accurately call “the majority world”.
Medellin is a clarion counter-witness to this divisive brutality and apathetic elitism, which the church cannot react to as if the social ills of our days are realities which Christians had no complicity in molding. As Pope Francis has emphasized, not one of us can say: “this is not my affair, this does not concern me.”
All three ambassadors recognized that the situations facing us both domestically and internationally are exceedingly complex, and that simple solutions or platitudes will not suffice in effecting real change to those that need it, whether in Latin America, rural Appalachia, or downtown Chicago or Camden. Yet, the call to root service, public policy and advocacy in the ineradicable dignity of every human being can never be rationalized away for some imaginary and ethereal “ultimate” good. Neither the Catholic tradition nor the principles of a free and democratic society where justice is supposedly blind allow us to sacrifice the ineffaceable sanctity of the human person on the idolatrous altars of self-satisfaction or aloof security for “me and mine alone.” Medellin and those who have put it into practice — whether in the church or the political realm, explicitly or implicitly — demand that we who have eyes, see, and ears, hear.
Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.
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