Peace & Justice

My daughter-in-law practices medicine in Denver. She tells me of an uninsured man with an incarcerated hernia who came to the emergency room in need of immediate surgery. They could not find a surgeon willing to operate on an uninsured patient. The emergency room physicians reduced the hernia -- a temporary fix at best -- and the man went home.

While this man and others struggle to get health care, I stand with my 91-year-old mother struggling to stem the tide of tests, procedures and hospitalizations. If many young people seldom see doctors for even simple preventative treatment, many old people become professional patients whose last years are spent in waiting rooms and labs, in hospital beds and inside MRI tubes.

When Cardinal Francis George of Chicago released a statement Feb. 5 discrediting New Ways Ministry, which describes itself as a “gay-positive ministry” (see story), he was, indeed, standing on a solid foundation of church teaching, even if it contains some of the most noxious sentiments one might imagine using about another human being.

NEW YORK
Franciscan Sr. Kathie Uhler has for months been working on a series of panel presentations to the United Nations that will show the damage exploitative mining has had on the indigenous populations of countries like Peru, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.

As Uhler has learned in her research, inhabitants of an area are often unaware of mining–for gems, coal, or oil–that is taking place a short distance from their homes, perhaps on a mountaintop, until natural resources have already been polluted. In many cases, she said, the governments of countries where this mining occurs have allowed companies to do the work without alerting area residents or giving them a choice in the matter.

"You have a microcosm, in mining, of what's happening to the whole earth," said Uhler, one of about 400 attendees at the Trinity Institute's recent "Building an Ethical Economy" conference, a three-day event inside the vaulted chapel of the Episcopalian Trinity Church here on Wall Street and included remarks from Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury, England, and Kathryn Tanner, theology professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Analysis

The government of Bolivian President Evo Morales Ayma, inaugurated Jan. 21-22 for a second term in office, sets the stage for the latest experiment in the interplay of traditional forces of Latin American Catholicism and recently insurgent indigenous religions and cultures.

It took two days for Morales’ inauguration. The swearing in on Jan. 22 followed a full day of celebrations in the ancient Andean ceremonial ruins of Tiwanaku, about 50 miles outside of La Paz.

Morales was re-elected last December with 64 percent of the vote while gaining a two-thirds majority for his Movement to Socialism Party in the new Congress. Donning ceremonial vestments of the Andean peoples, he made his inauguration the occasion of symbolically stating his party’s principles and his goals. The event underlined the Andean belief that the Pacha Mama, the “Earth Mother” of the native peoples, is the symbol of the union between humankind and nature, joining ecology, ethics and economics.