Listening to the stories of so many who suffer and whom we try to accompany, we ask ourselves: How long and how far is this going to go, we are almost at midnight, we are almost at the limit of history. We are almost at midnight, we are almost at the limit of history, how much further is it going to go like this, or worse?
We have seen and heard that the pandemic time instead of decreasing, mining extraction has increased, it is advancing. The increase in conflict and deaths, it answers, exactly because we are reaching the limit. The violence and threat is exacerbated because we are contending to reach this limit.
“There is no more time,” the Pope tells us. The bishops of Latin America tell us, in the Pastoral Letter “Custodians of the Common Home” that, extractivism is an unbridled tendency of this economic system to convert the goods of nature into capital. It is another conversion that we need. So far we are with this conversion where any good and gift is commercialized and financialized. We have perceived the alliances between companies and systems and they are imposing a narrative that tells us that it is not so, that we are improving, that we need a little more time.
Let’s be quiet to hear the stifled and threatened cry of Mother Earth, we have to bring it as a subject. At this table, she speaks through the stories of communities and families martyred by mining, which are real.
In the face of this we have to say new words. There is no room for punctual reparations. There is no room for an adjustment, Laudato SI tells us. The Pope is telling us that we have to make a cultural revolution. A profoundly new way of thinking. In this revolution there is an apology, an acknowledgment of guilt, about the forms and practices that continue to take place in the same colonialist model, which we continue to reproduce.
Our Latin American bishops also speak to us of taking the Gospel seriously. And to evangelize implies the responsibility to care for Creation, the capacity to respond to these times with new forms of care, from the paradigm of Integral Ecology.
We are not talking about “an adjustment”, it is a profound change that we need, a voice that places at the center the rights of Mother Earth and the communities that suffer because of extractivism and this devouring system. It is a revolution that rethinks it completely.
It is necessary to be daring, dreamers, but that this then translates into paths. It is necessary to take steps, to live these transitions, with concrete steps to achieve great changes.
And one of these transitions is the RIGHT TO SAY NO. The right of communities to decide about their territories and their lives. Accompanying, defending and respecting the right to SAY NO and, aware that, this may be our last hope
What can the Church do?
We need to have a role in all this. We need to be prophetic. We need to give a word, an action, something that makes sense. And if not, why are we here, if your word has no light, it is cast out, the Gospel tells us. We need to BE a strong word, to have light, to be luminosity. As a network of Churches and Mining we are discovering, as Churches, (not only Catholic) that what sustains the defense of the peoples, their organization, their resistance, their defense: is their spirituality, their mysticism. That is its main root to its memory, to its territory, to its meaning, it is one of the deepest values.
It is the meeting of spiritualities that allow us this resistance. This is one of the answers that we have to give, it is a recovery that we have to make. To renew alliances. The peoples are asking us: do not betray us. They have hope in spite of our contradictions, they have confidence in the capacity we have as Churches to reach several levels, the capillarity.
But we cannot be a neutral alliance, not in the center to maintain the balance. We have to decide and know which side we are on, dialoguing, but knowing where we choose to be. The peoples are asking us for these alliances. The people ask us for an alliance, which, as Jesus Christ and the Gospel say, has to start from the victims.
The Lord’s Prayer says: “Do not fall into temptation. We have millions of experiences of how many temptations the church has suffered because the companies want the churches to be mediators of conflicts. Attention! This is the seduction, this is the vigilance that the church needs to assume. The resistance of the people is our hope, perhaps the only one, the last one.
Let us think and feel with the women at the foot of the cross, standing, with our heads raised, without this resistance there would be no resurrection. The resistance of the people that remains standing is our hope and that is why we have to accompany and be there.
Resistance is re-existence, a new way of existing. To hold on to what is essential, to relearn to live, to exist.
Speech of Fr. Dario Bossi – Comboni Missionary (Lima, Peru abril 2022)
