Gary Haugen reports a failure of compassion. While he specifically addresses the developing world, I wonder if there isn’t a lesson for us regarding what is happening in Baltimore, New York City and Ferguson?
Today in the developing world according to Gary Haugen, we have more people in slavery than in any other time in history and that most violence against women never gets reported let alone remedied. He relates these two facts not to poverty, but to the lack of justice for the poor. He credits compassion for the great strides made in addressing poverty, but through his encounters with Venus and Griselda learns the real causes of poverty that we have yet to address.
He doesn’t leave us hopeless, but gives us two actions that we can undertake today to stop these injustices
Number one: We have to start making stopping violence indispensable to the fight against poverty. In fact, any conversation about global poverty that doesn’t include the problem of violence must be deemed not serious.
And secondly, we have to begin to seriously invest resources and share expertise to support the developing world as they fashion new, public systems of justice, not private security, that give everybody a chance to be safe.
This kind of reminds me of Pope Paul VI (1897 – 1963) If You Want Peace, Work for Justice.
We are a community of laymen and laywomen who, with vowed Passionists, seek to share in the charism of St. Paul of the Cross through prayer, ongoing spiritual formation, and proclamation of the message of Christ Crucified.
