Peace & Justice

In Caritas in Veritate, Benedict honors Paul VI's Populorum Progressio as the "Rerum Novarum of the present age" and takes up his own responsibility to bring Catholic social thought to bear in a much changed economic and political landscape.

The title expresses Benedict's distinctive concerns. He proposes caritas as a virtue with the moral, intellectual, and political force desperately needed in our globalizing world. Caritas -- grounded in God's Trinitarian life -- impels us to seek the good of the other. Just as God refuses to leave humanity suffering in its sinful state, so charity prevents us from accepting the myriad ways that our economies dehumanize and despoil. Just as God saves humankind within history, so charity impels us to realize the positive potential of economic life for human communion and mutual flourishing.

The sugar industry: Film Review

Vanity Fair’s February 2001 article by Marie Brenner, “In the Kingdom of Big Sugar,” was an exposé on the business and labor practices of the Fanjul Family’s Florida sugar industries (that includes Domino Sugar). Brenner’s article generated several documentaries revealing the disturbing hidden reality of human rights violations that include trafficking in persons, the slave trade, child labor, deprivation of citizenship and other illegal work practices. The sugar triangle, where these practices continue with little reform since slavery was introduced to the Americas, includes Florida, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic. Two documentaries in particular, “The Sugar Babies” and “The Price of Sugar,” both released in 2007, make it clear that it is the blood, sweat and tears of cane workers that put the sugar on our tables, and into almost every processed food product in the United States.

As the bishop-union-health care task force discussed ways to do a better job of dealing with union-organizing drives and representation elections in Catholic hospitals, one of the things the group studied was a recent experiment in an Ohio Catholic hospital.

In December 2007 Community Health Partners Regional Medical Center in Lorain, Ohio, which is part of the Cincinnati-based Catholic Healthcare Partners system, held union representation elections under an employer-union agreement that followed many of the principles and mechanisms now recommended in the task force’s final statement.