Lent 2013: reflection and impending change – CIDSE

    Lent 2013: reflection and impending change

    This year’s Lenten campaigns of CIDSE member organisations start amidst impending change in the Church.

    During Lent, the six weeks leading up to Easter Sunday, a period of observance and reflection for many Christian denominations, CIDSE member organisations seek to inform and challenge the general public through development education programmes, raising funds for their activities. This year, several Lenten campaigns focus on the underlying causes of hunger, such as the lack of access to land and markets, as well as inequality between men and women.

    We invite you to follow and support the activities of our 17 members in Europe and North America.

    We hope that Lent will also be a period of reflection for world leaders, that they may put in place the policies needed for peace and prosperity for all human beings. That they may right the wrongs of our global economic and financial system which affect the lives of the world’s most vulnerable people.  

    Lent starts in a moment of imminent change in the Church, as His Holines Pope Benedict XVI announced on Monday that he will resign at the end of the month.

    Chris Bain, President of CIDSE and Director of CAFOD, commented as follows:”It is a mark of the man that Pope Benedict’s first encyclical was about love: the love that demands we serve the poorest people on earth because they are all our neighbour and they are made in God’s image; the love that demands that the charitable works of the Church – its service to others – go hand in hand with its mission to preach and proclaim the gospel.”

    “Like many, I had previously seen Cardinal Ratzinger as the Vatican’s Enforcer, but with those words on the centrality of love, I saw him as a Pope for our times: a teacher and a man of deep compassion. Far from watering down the Church’s thirst for justice for the world’s poor, he helped to show that all our work for justice and fairness is rooted in a profound love that is given freely and unconditionally; a love that demands justice.”

    In his encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Love in Truth), Pope Benedict addressed the injustices of our economic system, saying for example that “hunger is not so much dependent on lack of material things, as on shortage of social resources the most important of which are institutional.”

    Pope Benedict closely followed the efforts for global justice of Catholic development actors like the lay-led CIDSE network. Recently he set out his views on the role of Catholic charities in the motu proprio “Intima Ecclesiae natura”.

    During an audience of Catholic development actors – including CIDSE – with the Holy Father earlier this year, he stressed the strong connection between faith and charity, which is also at the heart of his Lenten message. “The Christian life consists in continuously scaling the mountain to meet God and then coming back down, bearing the love and strength drawn from him, so as to serve our brothers and sisters with God’s own love,” he wrote.

    We will keep Pope Benedict in our prayers, as well as the pope-elect, who we hope will embody the love and the sense of justice of a Church which continues to be crucial to fight against what the Holy Father called “the reckless capitalism with its worship of profit that results in crisis, inequality and poverty” and to be a force for good across the world supporting those most in need.

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