Those of us alive at the time were too young to understand. The middle of the last century witnessed major historical developments in the world and in the Church. With the wisdom of retrospection, we now better appreciate their significance.
The first half of that period was marked with unrest of epochal implications: two global conflicts, the holocaust, the surge of totalitarianism, economic reversals, regional wars, and the threat of nuclear annihilation posed by the globe’s two superpowers. The ‘welfare gap’ between what became known as the developed and ‘third world’ countries was widening. Hope was in short supply. Darwinism, Nietzscheanism, and Freudianism were ascendent, and their adherents intentionally or otherwise fomented insecurity, nihilism and even despair.
Two Providential events occurred at midcentury. One was the momentous convocation by St. Pope John XXIII in the early 1960s of the Second Vatican Council. Its last and longest conciliar document – The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (usually referred to by its incipit: Gaudium et Spes or Joys and Hopes) – is the Council’s magnus opus explicitly addressing the Church’s responsibility to the larger world. Her focus could no longer be exclusively on the faithful but on the welfare of all people. One excerpt captures the new spirit: “The ferment of the Gospel has aroused and continues to arouse in the hearts of men an unquenchable thirst for human dignity” (GS 26).
The second was the organization in 1951 of Caritas Internationalis which, in a way presaged Vatican II. Historically, as it developed in separate countries over the previous decades, the Caritas movement had been inspired by Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum which became the foundational text of Catholic social teaching. Thirteen national Caritas movements were the original members of Caritas Internationalis. Except for the United States they were all European. Now seventy years later there are one hundred and sixty-two national organizations operating in over two hundred countries and territories. According to its website, the mission of Caritas Internationalis is “to serve the poor and to promote charity and justice throughout the world”. Headquartered in the Vatican, the organization concentrates on humanitarian needs in two ways, emergency relief and integral development. The first encompasses natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, fires, famime, droughts, etc, and the effects of man-made disasters such as the mobilization of refugees, human trafficking, etc. The second addresses education, health and reconciliation. As for recent years, readers may remember Caritas’ work with Ebola in West Africa, the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, the Rwandan genocide, the droughts and wars in Sudan and Darfur, and most recently in Ukraine and Lebanon.
The National Catholic Community Foundation and its donors are privileged to participate in the mission of Caritas Internationalis. We are proud that the fund created with us in 2015 has enabled hundreds of individual donors throughout the United States to support Caritas Internationalis’ mission in numerous countries around the world with distributions of several million dollars.
The sense of solidarity manifested in the commitment our donors to the various charities they support, including Carias Internationalis, confirms our contention that something happened when we were too young to realize. Now, looking back over the past seven decades we begin to see how over that time the despair of foment has become the promise of ferment. The Kingdom advances with joys and hopes.
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