Monsignor Miguel Cabrejos Vidarte, President of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM), sent a letter yesterday, November 11, 2019, to the “Pilgrimaging Church in Chile” and also to other peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, in face of the “social explosion” the region is experiencing.
For the President of the Latin American Episcopate, “the Church journeying in Latin America and the Caribbean is a body. When part of that body suffers, the whole Church suffers with it, shares its pain but also its hope.”
Peace through Dialogue”
Therefore, he explains, “there must be insistence on the need to seek Peace through Dialogue, with the participation of all the actors and institutions to seek real solutions geared to the Common Good.”
Therefore, Monsignor Cabrejos expresses in the first place his solidarity and closeness with the Church and the Chilean people suffering aggression and violence, and he refers to the words of the Permanent Council of the Episcopal Conference of Chile, “the people are not only tired of the injustice, but also of the violence.”
His message also refers to the other people in the Latin American and Caribbean region that are also suffering violence, especially in Bolivia, Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Chile, and Peru.
“Social Explosion” in the Region
According to the Prelate, the causes of these events are found “in corruption, in imperfect democracies and in the situations of poverty, inequality, unemployment, and under-employment, low quality and coverage of the health services, education, and transport, which have been accumulating great discontent.”
He also remarks: “in the whole of our region a sort of ‘social explosion’ is going on without precedents.
Rejection of Violence
The Prelate expresses his “firm rejection of violence, wherever it comes from,” and he exhorts the Governments and Authorities of the region “to implement concrete and real policies that guarantee the promotion of the human person and the common good, based on the fundamental rights of freedom, respect, equity, justice and the care of our common home, so that our people can really have an integral human development.”
Finally, Monsignor Cabrejos stresses that politics “is, first of all, a service” and must not be the “slave of individual ambitions, or of the arrogance of factions because the immunity that many politicians enjoy can never become impunity,” he concludes.
