News Archives » Resources
Peace & Life Connections: December 2013 December 17th, 2013
Holiday Edition
Quotations of the Season
When, therefore, one wishes “A Happy Christmas” without the meaning behind it, it becomes nothing more than an empty formula. And unless one wishes for peace for all life, one cannot wish for peace for oneself. – Mohandas Gandhi
♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥
“Peace on Earth” Means “No More War”
You cannot seriously call yourself a follower of the nonviolent, peacemaking Jesus, whom we celebrate and honor at Christmas, if you own guns, support our wars, defend our nuclear weapons arsenal, tolerate executions and catastrophic climate change, and participate in violence in any form. Anyone who supports warfare, weapons or killing, even if they be a priest, minister or bishop, goes against the nonviolent Jesus. To be a Christian is to be a practitioner of creative nonviolence. To follow the peacemaking Jesus means becoming a peacemaker. – John Dear
♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥
Therefore, welcoming the child . . . means welcoming the poor and destitute, the stranger and the alienated, the disabled and the unborn. Christmas is universal, and is about the exaltation of the human person. We welcome all he welcomes, and are to make room for all he loves, especially the most unwanted, marginalized, burdensome, or inconvenient. If we welcome the baby Jesus, we welcome every baby and we welcome his teaching that every life is sacred, and we live accordingly. – Fr. Frank Pavone
♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥
Postscript to Christmas Village Voice, January 1, 1958
On Christmas Eve, Dorothy Day returned to the Women’s House of Detention where she had spent almost a month this summer. With her were fellow members of the Catholic Worker Movement, pacifists, individualists — several of whom had also gone to jail for refusing, because of their convictions, to take shelter during an air-raid drill. They had come to Village Square to sing carols to the women inside. They stood in the freezing street opposite the towering building, and sang . . . We sang ourselves to tears to a bunch of tough girls we would never see.
♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥
A Dorothy Day Christmas, December 24, 2012
From reader Sue Hayes: “There’s a story . . . that Dorothy, in her seventies, was arrested after a peace protest and they put her in a holding cell. After a bit, they opened the door and shoved in a young woman who was a prostitute and drunk. She cried and swore and said vile things to Dorothy and then fell on the floor at Dorothy’s feet and threw up all over Dorothy’s feet and legs…without a second’s hesitation, Dorothy sank down on the floor and took the young woman’s head gently into her lap and just held her, as a mother would hold her child. . . . It was LOVE which Dorothy clung to and was not afraid to offer to ANYONE, a love so God-partaking in its authority, so steely determined in delivery that “even the gates of Hell could not prevail against it!”
♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥ ♫ ♥
Past Holiday Editions
In 2010, we showed “It’s a Wonderful Movement” by using the theme of what would happen if the peace movement and the pro-life movement hadn’t arisen. We also had quotes from Scrooge against respect for life and a Martin Luther King Christmas sermon for it.
In 2011, we covered the materialism-reducing “Advent Conspiracy” and offered two pieces of children’s literature: a 1938 anti-war cartoon called “Peace on Earth,” and the anti-war origins of “Horton Hears a Who,” whose tagline – “a person’s a person, no matter how small” – is irresistible to pro-lifers.
In 2012, we had a couple of quotes showing the pro-life aspects of two prominent Christmas tales: A Christmas Carol with Ebenezer Scrooge, and the movie It’s a Wonderful Life. We also quote from John Dear about Jesus as peacemaker (as above) and Rand Paul about the 1914 spontaneous Christmas Truce; he then related it to the culture of life.
issue #190 12.13.13 Consistent Life web page / Join or Donate / Previous Issues / Index
Predatory Hedge Funds and Argentina Face Supreme Court Showdown December 17th, 2013
Majority Debt Holders Seek to End Standoff between Argentina and Holdouts
Argentina is expected to appeal to the US Supreme Court by mid-February in response to a US 2nd Circuit Court ruling ordering the country to pay $1.33 billion to predatory hedge funds. The precedent the case sets will hurt poor countries in financial distress and could allow a small group of hedge funds to target assets that benefit vulnerable populations. At the same time, debt holders who restructured their debt with Argentina have hired lawyers to help negotiate the dispute between holdout hedge funds and Argentina. Nearly 93% of debt holders restructured their debt with Argentina after the 2001 default. The majority of bondholders are concerned that their settlements could be disrupted if hedge funds win the final ruling.
“We agree with the concerns of the restructured bondholders,” said Eric LeCompte, Executive Director of Jubilee USA Network, a faith-based antipoverty organization. “We join the IMF, World Bank and White House in denouncing this extreme hedge fund behavior that takes advantage of the world’s poorest people.”
Click here to read more »
Stop Trafficking! – December Issue December 16th, 2013
Read the latest issue of Stop Trafficking!, the Anti-Human Trafficking Newsletter to promote Awareness, Advocacy and Action. This issue includes the latest report from Polaris Project, information on webcam child sex tourism, serious concerns about the UN report on human trafficking, and raises awareness around boys being trafficked for sexual exploitation.
Older issues and handouts on specific subjects are also available here…
Stop Trafficking! is made possible through the supportive sponsorship of national and international congregations of women religious and their partners.
On human rights day, investors affirm responsibility of business to safeguard human rights in global supply chains December 11th, 2013
Members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility announce a month-long initiative during January, Human Trafficking Awareness month, to counter trafficking and slavery in high-risk sectors.
In commemoration of Human Rights Day 2013, members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, a coalition of faith-based and socially responsible investors of which the Missionary Oblates are active members, announced a month-long campaign in January to urge fifteen companies in the food, agricultural and hospitality sectors to implement policies that will prevent human rights abuses in their global supply chains. The food/ag companies identified in the initiative are ADM, ConAgra, Costco, Darden Restaurants, Kroger, Mondelez Int’l, Target, Walmart. The hospitality companies are Choice, Delta, Hyatt, Starwood, US Airways, Wyndham, and Southwest.
The investors recently published a Statement of Principles and Recommended Practices for Confronting Human Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery which forms the basis of all their dialogues with companies on human rights issues.
Using International Human Rights Day as a platform to highlight potential abuses in global supply chains, the initiative will focus on a subset of companies in the food/ag and hospitality sectors and encourage the implementation of specific human rights policies.
Click here to read more »
Dialogue on Life and Mining from Latin America December 10th, 2013
Religious and Lay representatives from Latin America, “moved by the critical situation of our peoples vis-à-vis the extractive industry”, met in Lima in November 2013. Concerned that mining is a source of “constant and serious conflict” in many countries of Latin and Central American countries, the attendees wanted to develop a vigorous and supportive set of local and international networks to help address the destructive impacts of mining. The Missionary Oblates were represented by Fr. Gilberto Pauwels OMI from Bolivia, and Fr. Seamus Finn OMI from the United States and through their participation in VIVAT, a coalition of religious congregations with ECOSOC status at the United Nations.
There are a number of outcomes from the gathering that included reaching out to a larger number of communities affected by mining, engaging with the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace at the Vatican and convening a broader consultation on the challenges of extractives in the second half of 2014.
Extractives, mining oil and gas exploration, play an important role across the world while also imposing great intrusion and damage in local communities and on the environment where they operate. The search for a way forward that addresses the most serious of those negative impacts has been taken up by a number of different initiatives in the academic, business, stakeholder and shareholder and NGO sectors. Hopefully gatherings like the meeting in Lima can make a constructive contribution to that process.
Read the statement: Dialogue on Life and Mining: Open letter from religious and lay stewards of the goods of creation in Latin America
