Maravi

A hopeless and shameless campaign against Catholics

A hopeless and shameless campaign against Catholics
By Editor
Sun 28 Mar. 2010, 04:00 CAT

RUPIAH Banda and his friends are behind the attacks and the hate campaign against Archbishop Telesphore Mpundu and the Catholic Church.

There’s no way Rupiah and his friends can divorce themselves from this because they themselves have in the past incited this hatred and today they are not saying anything to stop the madness of their agents who are attacking Archbishop Mpundu and the Catholic Church. Why are they silent in the face of this vicious and malicious campaign against Archbishop Mpundu and the Catholic Church? The simple reason is that they support it; it is their campaign.

We don’t understand the reason behind this hatred for Archbishop Mpundu and the Catholic Church. We can understand feelings of hatred which are grounded in ideology, which stem from the frustrations aroused by the failure against the leadership of the Catholic Church and their capacity to hold their ground against all this malice and calumny against the forces of evil that are trying to tarnish and destroy this image. Their frustration and propaganda that knows no bounds explain this hatred.

The Catholic Church has both the right and duty to participate fully in building a just and peaceful society with all the means at its disposal.

But it will be naïve for anyone to expect Rupiah and his friends not to attack the Catholic Church given what they have been doing against the poor of our country. Today the Catholic Church in our country is seen as the most trusted defender of the poor. It is something new among our people that today the poor see in the Catholic Church a source of hope and a support for their noble struggle against poverty, marginalisation and humiliation; the struggle for their own liberation. And the hope that the Catholic Church encourages is neither naïve nor passive. It is rather a summons from the word of God for the great majority of the people, the poor, that they assume their proper responsibility, that they undertake their own conscietisation. And it is support, sometimes critical support, for their just causes and demands. The hope that they preach to the poor is intended to give them back their dignity, to encourage them to take charge of their own future. In a word, the Catholic Church has not only turned toward the poor, it has made of the poor the special beneficiaries of its mission because “God takes on their defence and loves them”.

The Catholic Church has not only incarnated itself in the world of the poor, giving them hope: it has also firmly committed itself to their defence. The majority of the poor in our country are oppressed and repressed daily by economic and political structures. The terrible words spoken by the prophets of Israel continue to be verified among us. Among us there are those who sell others for money, who sell a poor person for a pair of sandals; those who, in their mansions, pile up violence and plunder; those who crash the poor; those who make the kingdom of violence come closer as they lie upon their beds of ivory; those who join house to house, and field to field, until they occupy the whole land, and are the only ones there.

Amos and Isaiah are not just voices from distant centuries; their writings are not merely texts that are reverently read in the liturgy. They are every day realities. Day by day, we live out the cruelty and ferocity they excoriate.

In this situation of conflict and antagonism, in which just a few persons control economic and political power, the Catholic Church has placed itself at the side of the poor and has undertaken their defence. The Catholic Church cannot do otherwise, for it remembers that Jesus had pity on the multitude. But by defending the poor, it has entered into serious conflict with the powerful who control the politics and wealth of our country.

This defence of the poor in a world deep in conflict has occasioned something new in the recent history of the Catholic Church: persecution. There have been threats, arrests, humiliation of many priests. It is, then, an indisputable fact that the leadership of the Catholic Church is being persecuted in this country. Not any and every priest has been persecuted, not any and every institution of the Catholic Church has been attacked. That part of the Catholic Church has been attacked and persecuted that put itself on the side of the people and went to the people’s defence.

Here again we find the same key to understanding the persecution of the Catholic Church in this country: the poor. Once again it is the poor who bring us to understand what has really happened or what is really happening. That is why the Catholic Church has understood the persecution from the perspective of the poor. Persecution has been occasioned by the defence of the poor. It amounts to nothing other than the Catholic Church’s taking upon itself the load of the poor.

Real persecution has been directed against the poor, the body of Christ in history today. They, like Jesus, are the persecuted servant of God. They are the ones who make up in their own bodies that which is lacking in the passion of Christ. And for that reason when the Catholic Church has organised and united itself around the hopes and the anxieties of the poor, it has incurred the same fate as that of Jesus and of the poor: persecution.

The political dimension of the faith is nothing other than the Catholic Church’s response to the demands made upon it by the de facto socio-political world in which it exists. What they have re-discovered is that this demand is a fundamental one for the faith, and that the Catholic Church cannot ignore it.

That is not to say that the Church should regard itself as a political institution entering into competition with other political institutions, or that it has its own political processes. Nor, much less, is it to say that the Catholic Church seeks political leadership. We are talking of something more profound, something more in keeping with the gospel. We are talking about an authentic option for the poor, of becoming incarnate in their world, of proclaiming the good news to them, of giving them hope, of encouraging them to engage in a liberating praxis, of defending their cause and of sharing their fate.

The Catholic Church’s option for the poor explains the political dimension of the faith in its fundamentals and in its basic outline. And because the Catholic Church has opted for the truly poor, not for the fictitiously poor, because it has opted for those who really are oppressed and repressed, the Catholic Church lives in apolitical world, and it fulfils itself as church also through politics. It cannot be otherwise if the Catholic Church, like Jesus, is to turn itself toward the poor.

The course taken by the Vatican Ambassador to Zambia, Archbishop Nicola Girasoli and the entire leadership of the Catholic Church in Zambia is clearly issued from their faith conviction. The transcendence of the Gospel has guided them in their judgment and in their action. They have judged the social and political situation in our country from the standpoint of the faith. But it is also true, to look at it in another way, that the faith itself has been deepened, that hidden riches of the gospel have been opened, precisely by taking up this stance toward socio-political reality such as it is.

In the first place, they have a better knowledge of what sin is. They know that offending God is death for humans. They know that such a sin really is mortal.

Not only in the sense of the interior death of the person who commits the sin, but also because of the real, objective death the sin produces. Let us remind ourselves of a fundamental datum of the Christian faith: sin killed the Son of God, and sin is what goes on killing the children of God.

We see that basic truth of the Christian faith is the daily situation in our country. It is impossible to offend God without offending one’s brother or sister. The worst offence against God, the worst form of secularism is to turn children of God, temples of the Holy Spirit, the body of Christ in history, into victims of oppression and injustice, into slaves to economic greed, into fodder for political repression. The worst of these forms of secularism is the denial of grace by the objectivisation of this world as an operative presence of the powers of evil, the visible presence of the denial of God.

It is not a matter of sheer routine that we insist once again on the existence in our country of structures of sin. They are sin because they produce the fruits of sin: the deaths of Zambians – the swift deaths brought by oppression or the long drawn out, but no less real, death from structural oppression. That is why they have denounced what in our country has become the idolatry of wealth. No matter how tragic it may appear, the Catholic Church through its entrance into the real socio-political world has learned how to organise, and how to deepen its understanding of, the essence of, sin. The fundamental essence of sin, in our world, is revealed in the death of Zambians.

In the second place they now have a better understanding of what the incarnation means, what it means to say that Jesus really took the human flesh and made himself one with his brothers and sisters in suffering, in tears and laments, in surrender. We are not speaking of a universal incarnation. This is impossible. We are speaking of an incarnation that is preferential and partial:
incarnation in the world of the poor. From that perspective, the Catholic Church will become a church for everybody. It will offer a service to the powerful, too, through the apostolate conversion – but not the other way around, as has often been the case in the past.

In the third place, incarnation in the socio-political world is the locus for deepening faith in the world and in Christ. They believe in Jesus who came to bring the fullness of life and they believe in the living God who gives life in the men and women and wants them truly to live. These radical truths of the faith become really true and truly radical when the church enters into the life and death of these people. Then there is put before the faith of the church, as it is put before the faith of every individual, the most fundamental choice: to be in favour of life or to be in favour of death. We see, with great clarity, that here neutrality is impossible. Either we save the lives of Zambians or we are accomplices to their death. And here, what is most fundamental about the faith is given expression in history: either we believe in a God of life or we serve the idols of death.

When the church inserts itself in the socio-political world, it does so in order to work with it so that from such cooperation life may be given to the poor. In doing so, therefore, it is not distancing itself from its mission, nor is it doing something of secondary importance or something incidental to its missions. It giving testimony to its faith in God; it is being the instrument of the Spirit, the Lord and the giver of life.

This is what Rupiah and his friends need to understand in their attacks and attempts to try and character-assassinate and humiliate Archbishop Mpundu and the Catholic Church. They cannot deny their complicity in all that is happening on this score. They have given those who are attacking Archbishop Mpundu and the Catholic Church unlimited space in the state media they control and direct.

Nobody gets such coverage unless their blessing is given. But this is cheap politics which only goes to show their baseness.

This is a true reflection of the calibre of Rupiah’s leadership. But all this will backfire because it is not Archbishop Mpundu and the Catholic Church that are getting discredited, it is Rupiah and his league whose low calibre and lack of leadership is being exposed. It is actually revealing their desperation.

They are running around in all directions like rats caught in the light. This is not the way to govern a country. This is a recipe for disaster.

Labels: CADRES, CATHOLIC CHURCH, RED CARD CAMPAIGN, TELESPHORE MPUNDU

posted by MrK @ 4:17 PM