October 25, 2007
“Man has the right to live. He has the right to the means
necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food,
clothing, shelter, medical care, rest and, finally, the necessary
social services.” — Pope John XXIII
These indelible words by the late pontiff served as recurrent
mantra On October 13 on the Queens campus, where about 250
academics, students, policymakers, Church leaders, service
providers and members of non-profit industries convened for a
daylong conference addressing the problems of global poverty and
the need to take action.
The University’s fifth Vincentian Chair of Social Justice
Conference came this year with the theme “Just and Moral Society:
From Ideal to Reality” and featured some of the area’s most notable
experts on poverty. The conference is sponsored every other year by
the St. John’s Vincentian Center
for Church and Society.
According to
Sister Margaret John Kelly, D.C., Ph.D., Executive Director of
the Vincentian Center, the purpose of this year’s conference was to
identify the foundations and criteria that mark a just and moral
society, and to recognize the factors and conditions that inhibit
or advance the development of persons who are poor, vulnerable,
oppressed or marginalized.
The conference also sought to identify the best practices for
government, social services, education and churches to alleviate
poverty, which Sister Kelly called “an affront to human dignity and
an obstruction to justice and peace.”
Just and Moral Society: From Ideal
…
During his keynote address, Rev. John J. Coughlin, O.F.M., J.D.,
J.C.D., a Professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School,
parsed the conference’s sub-theme, “From Ideal to Reality,”
choosing to focus solely on the “ideal.” (The “reality” of poverty
would be addressed later by four featured panelists.)
Relying primarily on secular and philosophical principles,
Father Coughlin presented an argument that a “just and moral
society” cannot exist under impoverished conditions. Emphasizing
practical reason and natural-law theory, Father Coughlin argued
that every human being, existing as unified body and soul, has
ontological dignity and thus has a right to basic, common human
goods like food, shelter, health care and friendship.
Only later in his address did Father Coughlin broach subjects
like theology (“grace builds on nature”), morality (“rich nations
have an obligation to poor nations”), and legality (“as the civil
rights movement showed us, law can assist the transformation of
societal structures to respect the dignity of each and every human
person”).
… To Reality
Following Father Coughlin’s address, a panel of four distinguished
experts took to the podium, and with that, the tenor of the
conference transitioned from the “ideal” of Father Coughlin’s
Aristotelian utopia to the “reality” of the present-day world. And
the reality did not look pretty.
“One percent of the world owns fifty percent of its wealth, and
the bottom fifty percent of the world owns one percent of its
wealth,” was the frank assessment given by Oscar de Rojas, Director
of the United Nations Office
of Financing for Development, the first of the panelists to
address the crowd. “We have a long way to go for a truly just and
moral society.”
As a U.N. representative, Rojas has an insider’s view of the
bureaucracy that he claims hamstrings the fight against global
poverty. “Whenever you introduce the word ‘justice’ in a U.N.
document, you immediately run into opposition,” he revealed the
audience.
Veronica M. White, J.D., Executive Director of the New York
City Center for Economic Opportunity, later took the podium
and, taking a local perspective, offered her own sobering
assessment of poverty. Speaking as a representative of Mayor
Michael R. Bloomberg, who is widely respected for taking hard
stances against poverty, White nevertheless unveiled some troubling
statistics describing many of New York City’s residents, including
180,000 zero- to five-year-olds, more than 200,000 16- to
24-year-olds, and 300,000 workers currently living in poverty
White’s talk soon took a more hopeful turn, however, when she
explained that the above demographic groups have been singled out
by the Bloomberg administration as “target populations” that will
be given considerable attention during the next year by the city
government. White herself was hired last year to direct 35 newly
developed programs designed to lift the burdens of poverty off New
Yorkers among these vulnerable populations.
Sister Ellen P. Finn, O.P., Associate Executive Director of
Catholic Charities for the Diocese of Brooklyn, also serves as
one of New York City’s powerhouse anti-poverty advocates.
Addressing the crowd, Sister Finn outlined her goal to see U.S.
poverty cut in half by 2020. As the director of the recent Catholic
Charities campaign known as “Poverty
in America: A Threat to the Common Good” (PDF), Sister
Finn has taken dramatic steps to spur public policymakers to
legislate anti-poverty bills.
While at the podium, Sister Finn mused that the atmosphere in
Bent Hall that day was not unlike the day Jesus wandered into a
local synagogue — “a place of education,” she noted — and,
according to the Gospel of Luke, addressed the crowd, proclaiming:
“The Lord has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim
liberty to the captives and to the blind new sight, to set the
downtrodden free.” Before Jesus left the synagogue, added Sister
Finn, continuing the analogy, “He said, ‘Today in your hearing,
this passage is being fulfilled.’ ”
Sister Finn concluded her address by saying: “We all are called
to be a prophetic voice. God is sending us to bring the good news
to the poor. If not us, who?”
Margaret Hanson, the fourth member of the panel, spoke on behalf of
Ladies of Charity U.S.A. (http://www.famvin.org/LCUSA/),
a group originally founded by St. Vincent de Paul to respond to the
needs of the poor in 17th century France. She emphasized global
tolerance, positing that modern culture’s “lack of openness” toward
others “inhibits just structures.”
Hanson is the former president of Ladies of Charity U.S.A. and
currently serves as the organization’s representative to the
executive board of the AIC/International
Association of Charities.
The poverty conference panel was moderated by Michael
Simons, J.D., Professor of Law at St. John’s.
“A Culture of Awareness Is a Culture of
Peace”
After lunch, the conference participants broke into workshop
sessions, organized and moderated by a score of academic experts
and social-justice advocates, including several St. John’s faculty
members. The workshops addressed a variety of practices to combat
poverty, focusing on various human rights, such as right to health
care, education, employment and sustainable development.
The conference climaxed later in the afternoon with a lecture by
Sudanese refugee and former slave
Simon Aban Deng and concluded with a Mass.
Several of the day’s events were sponsored by organizations
committed to the needs of the poor, including the Talbot Hospice Foundation,
the Metanexus
Institute and the Daughters of
Charity.
During conference breaks, many of the attendees seemed
emotional. “Nobody really talks about poverty — it’s something
that’s always brushed under the rug,” said Kelvin Ojo, a
21-year-old communications major from Far Rockaway, NY. “But there
are a lot of smart people out there discussing this issue, and by
putting on events like these, we have the opportunity to bring
poverty to the grand stage and do something to fix it.”
Robert McCreanor, an attorney, works for the Catholic Migration
Office within the Diocese of Brooklyn. Speaking about Father
Coughlin’s keynote address on natural law, McCreanor, who works on
housing issues that face immigrant communities, said, “It’s
important to contemplate the theoretical issues before you move to
action. A conference like this helpful because it gives
practitioners of social-justice issues a chance to reflect on the
philosophical foundations of poverty elimination.”
“A culture of awareness is a culture of peace,” added
Annalisa Saccá, Ph.D., Professor of Italian and a Vincentian
Research Fellow. “We have to share this information with
everyone. We have to spread awareness.”