Our Urban Mission

INTRODUCTION

“The Church’s ministry to urban residents, especially the underserved and underrepresented of the suburbs, cannot be purely spiritual, ignoring their concrete needs.”

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Sometime next year, the world will cross an invisible but momentous milestone: the point when more than half of the people on planet Earth – around 3.2 billion human beings – will live in cities, says the Worldwatch Institute in its State of the World 2007 Report. And the rural exodus will likely continue in the succeeding years. By 2015, according to demographers’ projections, there will be 59 cities with populations between 1 million and 5 million in Africa, 65 such cities in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 253 in Asia. As early as 2030, four out of five of the world’s urban residents will be in, what we now call, the “developing” world.

Such unprecedented wave of migration toward urban centers is due to a combined impact of population growth, lack of development in the countryside, insecurity and war and the city’s glamour appeal. In Africa and Asia, the great majority of this migration end in unplanned and underserved settlements, commonly known as slums, the places of the world’s most abject and disgraceful poverty and the breeding grounds for alienation, religious extremism, and other sources of local and global insecurity.

Over one quarter of urban residents in the developing world – more than half a billion people – lack clean water and sanitation, and 1.6 million die each year as a result. The slums’ residents – living along the railway and the automobile-choked highways, not far from the gleaming office buildings and luxurious condominiums – often lack education and health care and suffer from pollution-related sickness and violence. This brings Christopher Flavin, Worldwatch Institute President, to affirm that “our ability to meet the needs of the urban poor is one of the greatest humanitarian challenges of this century.”

The growing dominance of cities is one of the most dramatic changes we have experienced for which we are poorly equipped. More than at any time in history, the future of humanity, our economy, and the planet that supports us will be determined in the world’s cities. The State has to do more to address the problems of the new urban residents. The policymakers have to understand that the battles against our greatest global problems, from unemployment and HIV infections to water shortages, terrorism, and climate change, will be largely won – or lost – in the world’s cities.

The Church itself has to show its social solicitude and work for social justice – helping in meeting the basic needs of slum dwellers, soothing their social strains, destroying the sinful structures which oppress them, and advocating in their favor, since this is not a marginal and dispensable part of its mission. Already in 1971, the Synod of Bishops asserted that “action on behalf of justice and the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel.”

The Church’s ministry to urban residents, especially the underserved and underrepresented of the suburbs, cannot be purely spiritual, ignoring their concrete needs. Our pastoral care, in a quagmire of misery, cannot be just a call to personal salvation, but aim at changing the wrong and unjust structures and laws that impoverish, enslave and punish the poor. The poor would not be rescued from their despair just by charity and the crumbles from the government’s table, but mainly by justice. Charity tends to perpetuate inequality and injustice because it does not give the poor what belongs to them by right. The Church has to be on their side, even if it implies confronting the powerful and the status quo keepers.

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