A personal reflection by Marian Pallister on Fr Donal Dorr’s visit to Scotland to deliver a keynote speech at the Conference ‘Is This Progress? The Challenge of Populorum Progressio 50 years on’.
The Just Faith pilot project that’s been working its way through the dioceses of Argyll & the Isles, Dunkeld and Paisley since 2014 comes to a close this month. The main intention of the project, a joint affair bringing together Justice and Peace Scotland, Missio Scotland and SCIAF, has been to encourage Catholics to put their faith into action.
The conference that Just Faith planned as this phase of the project comes to a close aimed to look to the future. We felt the best way to do that was to look again at one of the most relevant Papal documents from the past. This is the 50th anniversary of Populorum Progressio and Just Faith decided to ask what progress has been made in that half century and to explore the challenge Populorum Progressio poses for us now in a world that seems even more troubled and complex than when Pope Paul VI released the document.
To have more than 70 people from all over Scotland attend the conference was encouraging, but then, we had invited an inspirational speaker whose expertise in the field of integral human development is summarised in a new edition of his book Option for the Poor and for the Earth: Catholic Social Teaching.
Fr Donal Dorr is a hero for many of us. Missionary, theologian, he’s a man who has spent four decades empowering grassroots activists working for justice and caring for the environment. And he agreed to travel from Dublin to be the keynote speaker at our event.
I had the opportunity ahead of the conference to ask Fr Donal a few questions for the Justice and Peace Scotland website. You can hear the outcome in our podcast.
Fr Donal’s book is called Option for the Poor and for the Earth. Like Pope Francis, Fr Donal places the emphasis on our stewardship of the planet. Pope Francis’s document Laudato Si, according to Fr Donal, moves the world on from Populorum Progressio. This clearly was the challenge our event was hoping to articulate and formulate into something of value for the future.
As we would hear at the conference itself, when food and water – the essentials of life – are at a premium, that’s when society begins to break down. Failed crops mean higher prices across a country. The economy begins to totter, people become angry, and confrontation is inevitable.
The three organisations that formed Just Faith are going to be subsumed into the new dicastery for integral human development, and Pope Francis has put special emphasis on that dicastery caring particularly for refugees and migrants. Those migrants and refugees are the people fleeing from hunger and from the conflicts that hunger ignites.
The new dicastery will have its work cut out, as was clear from Fr Donal’s contribution to the conference, and that of Duncan MacLaren (former head of Caritas Internationalis and a former director of SCIAF). As Fr Donal told me the night before, we have to get our act together as Christians. Of course we need inspirational leadership like that of Pope Francis - but we also need to act as individuals.
That could be as simple as joining a campaigning website. Fr Donal believes in the power of the on-line petition, Facebook and Twitter. Social media has brought us into the present. He is not an optimist, but hopes that in another 50 years time by putting our faith into action we will have survived today’s ‘shocking realities’.
Justice and Peace Scotland is on both Twitter and Facebook. We’d like you to spread the word by ‘liking’ and particularly by ‘sharing’ our posts on getting something done about those ‘shocking realities’. Small actions can have big results. Please spread the word.