Feature Article, 12 April 2008
Window on the world
Patrick Nicholson
Pope Benedict's visit to New York is expected to highlight the Vatican's
commitment to the UN. But what of the hundreds of Catholic NGOs based in New York
which lobby on issues such as education, justice and poverty? Are they a
Catholic bloc or myriad voices for the voiceless?
On a visit to the United Nations headquarters in New York in 2006, Archbishop
John Baptist Odama, of Gulu in Uganda, poignantly addressed members of the
Security Council, telling them: "I come here to bring the cry of the children,
the cry of their mothers, and the cry of their families to the ears of the
people who matter."
Uganda was then in the twentieth year of a long, brutal and largely
unreported civil war. Its worst feature was the abduction of 20,000 children by the
rebels to be used as forced labourers, sex slaves and soldiers. The archbishop
was asking for outside help to end the conflict and he got it. With increased
support from the international community, a peace process was launched.
Caritas Internationalis, the umbrella organisation for 162 national Catholic
relief and development charities, had helped to arrange the archbishop's trip
to the United Nations. It is one example of a wide variety of work carried out
by Catholic organisations there.
"Every day we work in a relentless crisis of challenging opportunities and
urgent competing priorities," says Joe Donnelly, head of the Caritas delegation
at the UN in New York, as he shuttles between meetings on Iraq, Colombia and
the Millennium Development Goals.
His office looks across to the UN, with its landmark Secretariat tower and
domed General Assembly building. It is here that the Security Council and
General Assembly meet to address urgent crises of peace, human security and
development affecting the lives of millions of people around the world.
"The General Assembly and the Security Council don't have any windows," Mr
Donnelly points out, "so we provide them with a window on the world. We're a
grass-roots global organisation and so can give the diplomats and UN staff a
sense of the reality on the ground. We act as a bridge between governance and
policy to members of our network in local communities everywhere."
Amid the jargon and the bureaucracy, reportedly not as bad in the wake of
reforms launched by the current Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, deals are struck
and international law is shaped. Hoping to affect the outcome of these
negotiations are various advocacy groups, from industry lobbyists to non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) campaigning on anything from the arms trade to the
economic crisis in Zimbabwe.
Hundreds of Catholic organisations, lay and Religious, from all over the
world are accredited to the United Nations systems in New York, Geneva, Paris,
Vienna and Nairobi. Some, like the Catholic Association for Peace, were actively
engaged with other Christian groups in San Francisco when the UN Charter was
drafted in 1945.
"Catholic organisations are very vibrant at the moment," says Sr Dorothy
Farley, a Dominican who has headed the International Catholic Organisation
Information Centre for the past 13 years.
Her office provides Catholic agencies at the UN with accreditation details,
advises them about whom to talk to on what issues, and sets up briefings with
national Catholic staff and experts on health, education, environment, de
velopment and poverty matters, often in dialogue with diplomats and UN executives.
During her time at the centre she has seen its members double to 42. "There is
great variety," she says. "There are Franciscans, the Catholic Medical Mission
Board, the Society of Vincent de Paul, the International Federation of
Catholic Universities. The list goes on."
NGOs are accredited to the department of public information or to the
Economic and Social Council, or to both. "Catholic NGOs at the UN have been active
advocates on the alleviation of poverty, access to primary education,
empowerment of women and climate change," says Isolda Oca, information officer at the
Department of Public Information. "They are effective. They come to conferences,
briefings, workshops, and high-level meetings at the General Assembly."
Though NGOs are not allowed to address the General Assembly, those with
accreditation to the Economic and Social Council and consultative status, like
Caritas, can be called upon to speak as experts.
Sr Eileen Gannon represents the Dominican Leadership Conference at the UN.
She says her job is to bring the voice, experience and concerns of the Dominican
family to this global forum on issues around the Millennium Development
Goals, the UN's anti-poverty targets.
"Justice, poverty, fair trade and sustainability are global issues," she
says. "They are local issues as well, and our work at the UN complements the good
work done by our sisters and brothers where they live. Global policies are
lived locally and we make the connection."
The nuts and bolts of being a representative mean submitting briefings to UN
committees, attending NGO working groups, meeting General Assembly and
Security Council members and, most significantly, giving them off-the-record
briefings. Achieving change can at times seem a slow, laborious process, but this has
borne fruit in the past. Caritas representatives at Special Sessions on HIV
and Aids at the UN General Assembly have helped to lobby governments to increase
funding and commit to providing universal access to prevention, treatment and
care. Their words have been incorporated in final declarations.
The key to success is not being part of a Catholic ghetto, but working in
partnership with other colleagues across the NGO spectrum. Catholic NGOs stress
that they are not part of a bloc, but are there to represent the issues that
are vital to their organisations on the ground. However, they do bring an
important moral dimension to their work.
In an interview with The Tablet, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, Permanent
Observer of the Holy See to the UN, told me that the Catholic NGOs' relationship
with the Holy See is not merely functional: "Rather, they tend to incarnate
different charisms and calls within the Church. In this sense, their mutual
relation is based more on the sense of the ecclesial communion than on
functionality."
He added that a healthy challenge to Catholic agencies comes from within. "If
they want to be effective, they have to team together, to show cohesion or,
rather, communion and unity on the background of their legitimate pluralism.
Because this is our strength: our word is effective only if we are united," he
said.
At the end of November, Pope Benedict XVI addressed a Vatican meeting with 85
Catholic international NGOs and expressed support for their work as well as
for the importance of the UN system, though he did warn against "moral
relativism".
"A growing tendency within the international organisations is to dislike and
discard in principle all semblance of a religious connotation," said
Archbishop Migliore on the challenges faced by Catholic NGOs at the UN. "The
intolerance does not reside only in certain fundamentalist religious people, but also in
those who - not being believers - do not permit society to be a believer."
Governments and international institutions have in the past not recognised
the vital role that faith-based organisations have to play in delivering
humanitarian assistance and promoting human development, says Caritas. For instance,
in many African countries the Catholic Church is the primary, if not the sole,
healthcare and education provider. International donors have not taken
advantage of this valuable resource as a way to deliver aid, with only a fraction of
funding going though faith-based organisations.
"We advocate first and foremost not on the basis of our beliefs," says Dr
Ezio Castelli of the Association of Volunteers in International Service USA
(AVSI-USA), a development agency with a basis in Catholic social teaching. "We are
not advocating for a space to build a 'Catholic' school or hospital, but for
governments to recognise the common good of these institutions."
The UN is beginning to see the potential of faith-based organisations,
especially their role in organising advocacy initiatives internationally, nationally
and locally. UN staff regard campaigns such as the Jubilee Debt Campaign or
Make Poverty History, with their backbone of faith-based organisations, as
setting the standard as they try to deliver on their own Millennium Development
Goals. They also look for expertise on programming from faith-based groups.
Pope Benedict's visit to the UN in New York to address the General Assembly
will bring into focus many of these issues. Catholic NGOs are hoping for
different things from the Pope: to support their issues around poverty and
development, to maintain the Vatican's commitment to the UN system as he has done in
the past and, in the words of Dr Castelli, "To be reminded what a Christian is
and means."
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