Catholic Commission for Social Justice

columns2018

Moving from retribution to restoration

Post author By Web administrator
Post date June 3, 2018

by Leela Ramdeen, Chair, CCSJ and Director, CREDI

“…the Church proposes a form of justice that is humanising, genuinely reconciliatory, a justice that leads the wrongdoer, through an educative path of encouraged penance, to rehabilitation and total reinsertion in the community.” (Pope Francis)

A Catholic approach to restorative justice “recognizes that the dignity of the human person applies to both victim and offender” (US Bishops). We live in a violent society. Every day the media assail our senses with news of violence/disharmony/disputes. While we thrash around in an effort to find solutions, there are tried and tested solutions staring us in the face.

Tags restorative justice

columns2018

Bloom where you are planted

Post author By Web administrator
Post date May 29, 2018

As we prepare to observe Indian Arrival Day tomorrow (May 30), let us use this opportunity to thank God for the resilience of our forebears. As Desmond Tutu said, “You don’t choose your family, they are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.” Sadly, many of us have failed to document the history of our ancestors.

My maternal grandfather, Robert Henry Fitzgerald Manning, came to Trinidad from Barbados and my maternal grandmother, Enid Nicome, originated from Venezuela. Though we don’t know much about their history before they arrived here, my family has some knowledge of the history of my paternal forebears.

Tags Indian Arrival Day

columns2018

Arrival and cohesion

Post author By Web administrator
Post date May 27, 2018

“The political and social climate that prevails in the world today emphasises difference, disunity, and destruction rather than the qualities of unity and productive and constructive energy that are required to sustain human societies. These negative processes and forces have perpetuated our alienation from the basic material roots of our existence, the natural world of which we are a part”. —Roxande Lalonde (Unity in Diversity: Acceptance and Integration in an Era of Intolerance and Fragmentation, MA Thesis, 1994)

On Wednesday, May 30, the nation will observe the 173^rd anniversary of Indians arriving in T&T. Like Lalonde, I believe that we can have “unity without uniformity and diversity without fragmentation”.

Tags holiday, Indian Arrival Day

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A ministry for migrants & refugees

Post author By Web administrator
Post date May 20, 2018

“Are we open to ‘God’s surprises’? Or are we closed and fearful before the newness of the Holy Spirit? Do we have the courage to strike out along the new paths which God’s newness sets before us, or do we resist, barricaded in transient structures which have lost their capacity for openness to what is new?” (Pope Francis)

This Pentecost, let us embrace the initiative of Archbishop Jason Gordon and members of the Vicars’ Council who agreed at a recent meeting that a Ministry for Migrants and Refugees would be established in each parish and ecclesial community. The archbishop followed up this decision in his May 6 Catholic News column. He has asked that we entrust this ministry to Our Lady of the Wayside.

Tags migrants, refugees

columns2018

See Christ in the face of each mother

Post author By Web administrator
Post date May 13, 2018

Let us remember and reach out to those mothers who are struggling to make ends meet; those mothers whose children have moved away and who hardly visit them or communicate with them; those mothers for whom loneliness is their only companion.

By Leela Ramdeen, Chair, CCSJ & Director, CREDI

“Her children stand up and proclaim her blessed. Her husband, too, sings her praises” Proverbs 31:28

Today is Mother’s Day. Thank God for mothers! Amidst the joy, laughter and love that will be shared today, I want to share an uncomfortable perspective with you to raise awareness of some of the social ills that beset some mothers in our communities/world and which we need to address if we are to build a just society/world.

Tags motherhood, mothers