JS423 assingment 1: Lecture 2 & 3

Robin Martine Eve-Macleod
Grad dip ed

Lecture 2

Sign’s of the Times:

Vatican II

Vatican II, convened by Pope John XXIII in 1962 (course reader: “An Evolving Social Message” Chap 2, p.9) was a huge step by church leaders worldwide to make the Church relevant to modern, post war society. Gutierrez was at Vatican II and was a founding father of the new ideals laid down. His motivation was in the extreme poverty and dehumanisation experienced by the majority of people, that he found on his return to Peru in the late 1940’s. They had no voice, while Christianity and the Church offered no critical edge on their entrenched suffering.

The council agreed that theology, and therefore the Church, needs to be contextualised, connected to and relevant to the concerns of modern life, not just expounded from tradition or as a means of justifying iniquity and inequality. Paul VI envisaged this as a “process …[of] three separate moments:

1 Evaluation and analysis of their contemporary situation.
2 Prayer, discernment, and reflection, brining the light of the Gospel and the teachings of the Church to bear on the situation.
3 Pastoral action which fights injustices, thus labouring to make the “reign” of God a reality.”(course reader: ”An Evolving Social Message” Chap 2, p.11)

These moments allow theology to respond to questions that life throws up by engaging in discourse between God and society. To do this effectively it is essential to engage in dialogues with the social sciences; Political science, economics, anthropology and sociology. This allows the Church to have different ideals in different situations, for instance; liberation theology in Asia, where so many religions co-exist, is essentially different from that of Peru, where Christianity predominates.

Lecture 3

What are the signs of the times?

Growing inequity; widespread poverty; encultured violence; mass displacement; intolerance; fear; despair; personal, political and global neglect.


80% of the world’s wealth and resources are owned by 20% of the world’s population.
The ‘poor’ countries are primarily those colonised during the imperialist expansion of the technologically advanced (ships, navigation, guns) counties of Europe and later America, from 1600-1945, and this created the North/South divide between wealthy, independent, imperial nations, and poor, colonised, exploited ones. Poverty is not an accident but a social and economic construct by Imperialist nations for the exploitation of subject peoples: To offer charity is to deny the injustice of the construct, rather than accepting responsibility and redressing the iniquity.

While 80% of the world’s population live in extreme hardship, the wealthy 20% are also exhibiting signs of terrible distress: “A cruel and endemic economic injustice, a soul-killing materialism, a life-destroying drug traffic, a persistent and pervasive racism, a massive breakdown of family life and structure, and an almost total collapse of moral values have all combined to create a climate of violence throughout this [any] country and a coldness of heart on our streets that make even veteran urban activists shiver.”(Wallis p.4). In Paulo Friere’s “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” – he says that the act of oppression causes a loss of humanity in the oppressor. And it is the none white members of the affluent societies who are suffering most: “The white racism that survived integration by selectively assimilating some blacks while inflicting upon poor black communities the worst conditions since slavery…” (Wallis p.8).

When the developmental status of a country is measured in economic terms people are seen as ‘tax payers’ and ‘consumers’ – no longer citizens or communities: “…the grindstone of our economy effectively leaves politics and political participation to the elites” (Wallis p.11), the effect of this is that politics works only for elitist, multinational, global corporations, and pays no head to the people it is supposed to govern and support, using ‘spin doctoring’ media to gain sway, rather than genuine political debate. And this consumerist society is not sustainable. The wealthy counties are stripping the world bare and creating ecological debt that our children will have to pay. As countries like India and China increase their prosperity, and thus, their ecological footprint, the rate of global destruction will increase exponentially. Global disaster is looming.

Reference:
Wallis, J. “Signs of a Crisis” The Soul of Politics: A practical and Prophetic Vision for Change, Harper Collins, 1994.