Hunger and insecurity, a scandal against our Creator: Card. Turkson

June 26, 2012: “The hunger and insecurity in the world is a scandal, an offence against our generous Creator and his poor sons and daughters”, said Cardinal Peter Turkson, President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. He was speaking at the IV World Congress on Rural Life, in Rome on Monday. ‘We must do more to meet the challenges posed by the modern world’, he added.

Cardinal Turkson began his intervention with a look at his own country of Ghana, where gold-mining has failed to improve the condition of most of the population. In spite of its mining wealth, Ghana remains largely underdeveloped, with about 80% of its 24 million people living on less than US$2 a day. “My story about Ghana is, sadly, representative of many rural communities in our world not only wounded by sin but also being rapidly transformed by the ambiguous process of globalization.”
Cardinal Turkson said that the Church must respond to the problems facing rural life: “No matter how complex such problems are, the Gospel requires the Church’s creative, collaborative, and determined response”, he added.

Citing the social teaching of Pope Benedict XVI, especially in Caritas in veritate, the Cardinal said that it is a starting point for the Church’s response to those problems. In that Encyclical, the Holy Father reminds us that “Integral human development is primarily a vocation, and therefore it involves a free assumption of responsibility in solidarity on the part of everyone.” “On the one hand, those in rural life make a vital contribution to the integral human development of all humankind; at the same time, those in rural life want opportunities to develop integrally themselves, their families and their communities. Only if we have both, are we fulfilling God's design for his sons and daughters. And only if we take an integrated view of the challenges and marshal our expertise and good intentions in an integrated manner, can we hope for improvement in the most needed areas without deterioration in others”, Cardinal Turkson pointed out.

Looking back at the historical development of International Catholic Rural Association (ICRA), the Cardinal said: we gather in Rome fifty years after the First International Meeting of Catholics in Rural Life held in September 1962; fifty years after Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Mater et Magistra, one-quarter of which was devoted to land tenure and agriculture. Fifty years ago, oriented by Vatican II, the Church looked ahead, towards our present day.
From 1962 to today, Mater et Magistra has provided fundamental guidance for ICRA. During these same first fifty years, Catholic Social Teaching has deepened and developed remarkably, culminating for us in Caritas in veritate of 2009.

The IV World Congress on Rural Life may help us faithfully to discover our vocation, freely to take up our responsibilities, and joyfully to strengthen our solidarity on the long way ahead, Cardinal Turkson concluded.