About 400 people came to hear Detroit area Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbleton last night at Aquinas College speak on the topic of "Systemic Poverty in an Age of Consumerism.” For more than an hour, Gumbleton spoke about the need for individuals to look at their own wealth in relation to the poverty in our own communities and around the global. He cited Pope John Paul II and Mother Theresa as examples of individual responses to poverty, but in both cases did not address how either of them lived out a life devoted to “sharing and simplicity.”
Half way through the talk Gumbleton began to address what he called “structural injustice” and “structural sin,” meaning the economic policies that create poverty in the world. He began by reading the famous words of former United States Director of the Policy Planning Staff for the Secretary of State and Under Secretary of State George Kennan, who writing in 1948, clarified that the US government’s foreign policy has nothing to do with human rights or democracy:
We should dispense with the aspiration to “be liked” or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and—for the Far East—unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization.
Rather, Gumbletown described how Kennan argued that the United States' foreign policy functioned to perpetuate the disproportionate use of the world’s resources by a small percentage of the population.
Gumbleton then addressed other examples such as the Apartheid system in South Africa, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). In regards to CAFTA he cited the Guatemalan Bishop Ramazzini who spoke before the US Congress pleading that they not pass such a trade agreement at is would have grave effects on the people of Central America. In fact, the US and Central American Bishops issued a joint statement about CAFTA that never really saw the light of day in the US media.
Gumbleton also addressed the issue of wages in the US and a recent campaign in Florida to increase the minimum wage there last year that was successful, but didn’t mention there was a current campaign to do the same in Michigan. Gumbleton concluded his remarks by sharing a story of a Salvadoran community that had developed an economic co-op model during the civil war years and that many of its members were harassed and beaten by the Salvadoran military as suspected supporters of the armed revolutionary movement, the FMLN. Gumbleton asked one woman who had been beated and threatened with death why she stayed, and she said “because this is my community and we need to change it.” Gumbleton said that we can do no less that this, especially since the risk to those in attendance to make those changes would not like be as great as in most parts of the world.
