Theme: Life and Dignity of the Human Person

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Theme Life and Dignity of the Human Person
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Life and Dignity of the Human Person

• The Catholic Church proclaims that human life is
  sacred and that the dignity of the human person
  is the foundation of a moral vision for society.
• This belief is the foundation of all the
  principles of our social teaching. In our
  society, human life is under direct attack from
  abortion and euthanasia.
• The value of human life is being threatened by
  cloning, embryonic stem cell research, and the
  use of the death penalty. Catholic teaching also
  calls on us to work to avoid war.
• Nations must protect the right to life by finding
  increasingly effective ways to prevent conflicts
  and resolve them by peaceful means.
• We believe that every person is precious, that
  people are more important than things, and that
  the measure of every institution is whether it
  threatens or enhances the life and dignity of the
  human person.

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Take out a piece of paper

• Stay completely silent throughout the entire
  activity.
• Write down as many positive/good qualities about
  each person presented.
• Completely describe what you see.

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Use your imaginations to name a positive or good
characteristic about each person.
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What does this lesson present?
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We need to See and Respond

• D Dignity...of the Human Person
• C Callto family, community, participate
• R Rights and responsibilities
• O Option for the poor/vulnerable
• W WorkDignity and Rights of Workers
• S Solidarity being one family (love)
• C Care for Gods Creation

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Building the Foundation CST
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Foundation

• The foundation of the house is our fundamental
  belief in the dignity of the human person. This
  is so important that we need to dwell on it. It's
  not just an idea that emerged in the 19th or 20th
  century. We can trace it all the way back to the
  Book of Genesis. We are made in the image and
  likeness of God. Vatican II said that the role of
  the Church in the modem world is to be the sign
  and safeguard of the dignity of the human person.
  So this is the cornerstone-the reason why we have
  a social teaching. Everything flows from this.

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Walls

• Now I have a friend who has a priceless
  collection of Sports memorabilia. You can't just
  put these objects in a closet. He had a custom
  cabinet designed to hold and display them. Then
  he had the house alarmed as a protection. The
  point is, when you have something precious, you
  have to design structures to protect it. The
  walls and roof of our house are human rights,
  which protect human dignity. Human rights are
  civil and political as well as economic, social,
  and cultural. They spell out what we're entitled
  to just by being human. In many countries, the
  Church is the lone voice speaking out for human
  rights. We do so because they affect human
  dignity.

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Family Room

• In the family room of our house we are reminded
  that we are called to community and to active
  participation in society. We are not isolated
  individuals but we are linked to others in our
  family, workplace, neighborhood, and community.
  This is how we work out our salvation, not alone,
  but with and through others. We are not observers
  on the sidelines we contribute to society
  according to our talents.

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Dining Room

• In society, we come in contact with the poor and
  recognize that we are called to have a preference
  for them. So, in our dining room, there are
  places reserved for the poor. They have a
  standing invitation to be there, together with
  us. Because they are voiceless and powerless, we
  are ready to stand up for them, to have a special
  love for them. Again, this is not something new.
  The prophets in the Old Testament told us that
  how we treat those on the margins--the widows,
  the orphans, and the aliens could judge the
  quality of our faith. Without concern for them,
  our faith is shallow, hollow.

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The Office

• There are rooms in our house where different
  forms of work go on. There's the kitchen where
  meals are prepared, the study where tax returns
  are worked on, the internet where the teens have
  learned to surf, etc. Our social teaching tells
  us that those workers have a dignity and certain
  rights precisely as workers, that work has a
  dignity. This teaching came as a response to the
  industrial revolution in the late 19th century
  when workers were exploited, mistreated, and
  discounted. The Church was there to say clearly
  that workers have the right to organize, the
  right to collective bargaining, the right to a
  just wage, and the right to a safe work
  environment.

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Bedroom

• But our house is not a self-contained universe
  it has windows on the world. We are called to be
  in solidarity with the rest of the world. Pope
  John Paul II describes solidarity as a "firm and
  persevering determination to commit oneself to
  the common good that is to say the good of all
  and of each individual because we are all really
  responsible for all." Now that statement could
  overwhelm us--being told that we are responsible
  for all, but it's understood that we can only do
  what one human being can do. The important thing
  is the orientation, the attitude, and the lens
  through which we look at the rest of the world.
  We can't pull down the shades of our windows on
  the world because, in fact, the whole world is
  our home.  

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Outside Landscape

• Finally, the lawn in front of the house reminds
  us of our duty to care for God's creation. This
  goes far beyond recycling, but it can begin
  there. We have over-consumed and damaged much of
  our environment. We need to repair and care for
  the earth as stewards of creation.

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Life and Dignity of the Human Person

• Respect for all life
• All stages of life
• Primacy of humanity

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Current issues

• Abortion
• Euthanasia
• Capital Punishment
• War

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2 Call to Family and Community

• Fulfillment in families and communities
• Government rightly ordered when the family is
  safe guarded
• Community open to all
• Everyone has an obligation to contribute to the
  good of the community as a whole.

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2 Issues

• Breakdown of the family
• Isolation of the elderly
• Policies or social trends that deemphasize the
  focus on the family as the essential unit
• Lack of open avenues for participation in
  political life

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3 Rights and Responsibilities

• Human dignity achieved only if certain rights are
  available.
• Right to life, food, clothing, shelter, health
  care, and education.
• Rights require duty to self, others, and society.
  

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3 Issues

• Rights for all?
• Health care
• Education
• Food, Shelter, Clothing
• Employment

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4 Option for the Poor and Vulnerable

• Basic test of any society how do we treat the
  poor among us?
• In serving the poor we see our dependence on God
  mirrored in the poors dependence on others. The
  Church says this is one of the four avenues we
  use to know God.
• Special attention because we are called to love
  others as we love ourselves.

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4 Issues

• Understanding poverty
• Not because people are poor and lazy
• Understanding generational poverty
• Understanding poverty at a global level

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5 Dignity of Work and Rights of Workers

• Just living wage.
• Rights to certain benefits and humane working
  conditions.
• Private property and economic initiative.
• No right to accumulate mass amounts of wealth
  while others go without.

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5 Issues

• Working conditions for all?
• Just and living wages?
• Economy to serve people.

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6 Solidarity

• Global solidarity.
• Our humanity unites us together in a common bond.
• Need for unity of all peoples.
• Fair Trade.

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6 issues

• Fair Trade
• Corporate rights over those of people
• Globalization and the race to the bottom
• Rights of immigrants and migrants
• Racism
• Fear
• War
• Bobby Kennedys Speech Mindless Menace of
  Violence

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7 Care for Gods Creation

• Stewards of the Earth
• Care for sustainability
• Appropriate view of our responsibility to those
  who come after us.

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7 Issues

• Environment
• Pollution
• Consumption
• Need to sustain other avenues of energy
  consumption

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New Evangelization

• Attractiveness of activism
• Energy of youth channeled through proper
  understanding leads to a relevant moment of the
  Gospel being preached.
• Avoids danger of dualism.
• Risk - can seem overly political.

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What can we do?

• Personally
• Family
• Community of Friends
• Parish
• Diocese
• Church

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Future of Social Justice

• Address the morality of globalization
• Power of the Corporation
• Role of Government
• New Technologies
• Fair and Free Trade
• By end of the year Pope Benedict to promulgate
  new encyclical on the 40th anniversary of
  Popularum Progressio -- topics globalization.

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Test Your Social Justice IQ

• 1. Which is the most socially just a Chiquita, a
  Dole or a Del Monte banana?

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• Sometimes a banana is just a banana, but
  sometimes it's a symbol of the downside of
  globalization. A growing proportion of bananas
  are produced by workers who lack health care or
  wages high enough to feed their families, and who
  are exposed to pesticides, says Stephen Coates,
  executive director of the US/Labor Education in
  the Americas Project (www.usleap.org).In June,
  Chiquita, the largest producer of bananas in the
  world, signed a contract with its unions to
  respect workers' rights. "Neither Dole nor Del
  Monte has discussed these issues with Colsiba,"
  the Latin American Coordinating Committee of
  Banana Workers' Unions, says Coates. The contract
  was the result of a two-year campaign and was a
  "very significant breakthrough," he
  adds.According to "Bananas An American
  History" by Virginia Scott Jenkins (Smithsonian
  Institution Press, 2000), we eat 75 bananas per
  person each year, more than any other fruit. The
  major U.S. banana-importing companies were among
  the first multinational corporations.

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Test Your Social Justice IQ

• A "slave-free" label has been proposed in
  Congress for which of the following?
• The Big Mac
• Chocolate
• Cotton

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• A two-month investigation by Knight Ridder
  reporters earlier this year found children as
  young as 11, sold or tricked into slavery,
  laboring on cocoa farms in Africa's Ivory Coast,
  which supplies 43 percent of the world's cocoa.
  The beans harvested by youngsters are made into
  chocolate products that appear in groceries
  everywhere."The big chocolate companies --
  Archer Daniels Midland, MM Mars, Hershey, Nestle
  -- all use cocoa from the Ivory Coast," says
  Debora James, fair-trade director for the human
  rights group Global Exchange.The United
  Nation's International Labor Organization in June
  reported that tens of thousands of children are
  being exploited. In August, the U.S. State
  Department said there are as many as 15,000 child
  slaves in Ivory Coast.A documentary, in part
  financed by HBO and based on "Disposable People,"
  a book by Kevin Bales (University of California
  Press, 2000) was shown in the United States, but
  the part about child slavery on cocoa farms in
  West Africa was cut out, says James.According
  to Bales' book, the new slavery is linked to
  several factors an enormous population explosion
  over the past three decades poor farmers
  dispossessed by economic globalization and
  modernized agriculture, and corruption and
  violence associated with rapid economic changes
  in developing countries.

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Test Your Social Justice IQ

• What is the "race to the bottom?"
• A new Olympic swimming event.
• A new reality-based TV show about competitive
  socially incorrect behavior.
• The tendency of corporations to seek out the
  countries with the cheapest labor and fewest
  safety and environmental regulations to produce
  their products.

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• In "The Race to the Bottom Why a Worldwide
  Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade are
  Sinking American Living Standards" (Westview
  Press, 2000), Alan Tonelson explains how
  countries with the weakest workplace safety laws,
  the lowest taxes, and the toughest unionization
  laws win investment from American and European
  countries. Tonelson, an economist active in
  national trade politics, argues that this "race
  to the bottom" lowers American living standards
  and causes even bigger problems for the world
  economy.

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Test Your Social Justice IQ

• When Harvard students staged a sit-in at the
  university president's office early in 2001, they
  were protesting
• The university's endowment fund's investments in
  stocks and bonds towards the school.
• The university's janitor wages.
• The firing of a professor who took students on a
  field trip to a crack house.

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• In 1998, Cambridge City Council instituted a
  living wage ordinance for all city employees.
  Harvard University, the largest employer in
  Cambridge, continued to pay 1,000 custodial and
  dining-hall workers as low as 6.50 per hour
  without benefits.After an unsuccessful two-year
  campaign to convince the university to pay its
  workers a living wage, 30 students in the
  school's Progressive Student Labor Movement moved
  into the president's office building in protest.
  One month later, the university agreed to raise
  the pay of the workers to 10.25 per hour.The
  concept behind the living wage is that people who
  work in a community should be paid enough for
  them to live there decently. According to the
  Living Wage Resource Center (www.livingwagecampaig
  n.org), many campaigns have defined it as
  equivalent to the poverty line for a family of
  four (currently 8.20). Standards vary by region,
  but they are all considerably higher than the
  federal minimum wage, which puts a parent with
  one child below the federal poverty line.

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Test Your Social Justice IQ

• What's a fair price for a pound of coffee?
• 6.95
• 3.45
• 1.26

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• A fair price for coffee isn't what you pay in the
  grocery store, it's what the coffee farmer is
  paid. Available in Europe for more than a decade
  and recently in the United States, "fair-trade"
  coffee has been purchased directly from coffee
  farmers for 1.26 per pound, instead of less than
  50 cents.According to Transfair USA
  (www.transfairusa.org), an agency that certifies
  fair-trade practices, coffee is the second
  largest trade commodity in the world, next to
  oil. An estimated 80 percent of Americans drink
  coffee.Ten years ago, the world coffee economy
  was worth 30 billion, of which producers
  received 12 billion. Today, it is worth 50
  billion, with producers receiving just 8
  billion, according to the Fair Trade Coffee
  Campaign of Global Exchange.Last year,
  Starbucks became the first U.S. company to agree
  to a "code of conduct," promising it would tell
  its suppliers that in order to sell to Starbucks,
  they must pay workers a decent wage and respect
  their rights. Many gourmet coffee companies now
  offer fair-trade products, too, says Deborah
  James, fair trade director for Global Exchange,
  including the Bucks County Coffee Co. in
  Langhorne (800-523-6163). More are listed on the
  Global Exchange Web site (www.globalexchange.org).
  
• Fair-trade coffee is more "bird-friendly," too.
  According to Transfair, fair trade-certified
  coffee is more likely to be grown on small,
  family farms under trees that provide habitat for
  songbirds. These farmers also tend to avoid
  pesticides.

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Test Your Social Justice IQ

• Agree or disagree?
• Congress should make it easier for corporations
  to relocate to areas where the average wage is
  less than 4 per day.
• Governments should be required to pay damages if
  environmental laws cut into a corporation's
  potential profit.
• Governments should be forced to end public
  subsidies for public education and health care
  because they unfairly compete with for-profit
  schools and hospitals.

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• Too late The North American Free Trade Agreement
  already allows the first two conditions. "They
  allow corporations to do end runs around labor
  and environmental laws that we have in this
  country," says Mike Prokosch, global economy
  coordinator for United for a Fair Economy
  (www.ufenet.org), a grassroots campaign that
  concentrates on public education about the
  economy.As for the third condition, it also
  will become a reality if NAFTA becomes the Free
  Trade Area of the Americas by expanding to all of
  the other 31 countries in the Western Hemisphere
  (excluding Cuba, of course).From a social
  justice position, trade agreements like these
  start the "race to the bottom," which makes
  working people compete against working people to
  see who is going to work for the least money,
  says Prokosch. "The global economy isn't making
  countries richer, because they are giving up
  taxes for the new plants, they are letting
  corporations pollute, and all they are getting is
  low wages."

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Test Your Social Justice IQ

• Which of the following labels can you buy to
  avoid clothing made in a sweatshop?
• Gap
• Banana Republic
• Abercrombie Fitch.

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• Trick question. All of the above have been
  challenged for controversial production
  practices. "Unless it has a union label, you are
  hard-pressed to find a piece of clothing that is
  not made under horrible conditions," says Joan
  Axthelm of the U.S. Labor Education in the
  Americas Project (www.usleap.org). The Department
  of Labor recently said that half of all clothing
  made in the United States is made under sweatshop
  conditions, she adds.The apparel, textile and
  footwear industries employ the largest work force
  of any manufacturing industry in the world, with
  more than 29 million people in more than 150
  countries. Many of these garment workers get less
  than 1 an hour, and work 12 or more hours per
  day, according to the Union of Needletrades,
  Industrial and Textile Employees
  (www.uniteunion.org).

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Test Your Social Justice IQ

• What did The New York Times call "the biggest
  surge in campus activism in nearly two
  decades?"
• The student anti-sweatshop movement.
• Campus-based groups lobbying for an Equal Rights
  Amendment.
• An electronic forum that promotes freedom of
  speech on the Internet.

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• Students on more than 200 campuses in the United
  States and Canada are asking "Was our college
  sweatshirt made in a sweatshop?" They have staged
  sweatshop fashion shows, sweat-ins, knit-ins and
  other creative protests to demand that their
  schools take responsibility for the conditions
  under which their licensed apparel is made.The
  Web site of the Worker Rights Consortium, the
  sweatshop watchdog group, has a database that
  tells students where their college clothes come
  from (www.workersrights.org).

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• On October 5, 2007 Notre Dame- Cathedral Latin
  High School proudly wore NDCL Day T-Shirts made
  from Fair Trade.
• We are the first High School in the United States
  to invest the time towards making a change.
• What are you willing to change?