Peace and DevelopmentBuilding the peace means pursuing development. This means pursuing justice for all peoples and nations. It means recognizing a moral order at work in the human universe, and guiding our choices and actions accordingly. It means that citizens of the most affluent nation in the history of the world must use effectively their most important tool, which is their citizenship. We are to give good direction to our national policy for foreign aid, for overseas development, for world hunger, for the availability and management of loans, for trade and terms of trade.
Development is not just a matter of economic and material goods. It involves the whole person: economics, culture, politics, religion: economic needs, cultural needs, political needs, and religious needs.
There are many things we, you and I, can do to promote peace and development. When financial and material resources are freed up by a reduction of the military budget, as a result of perestroika, how will they be used? For world development? For the world's poor?
Will we provide scholarships to qualified students in developing nations to study in our colleges and universities? Will our college and university graduates delay their personal careers a few years and donate several years to PAVLA and the Peace Corps, or even to our home missions.
Will we as a nation insist upon our national compliance with the United Nations' recommendation that every 1st world nation contribute 1 percent of its GNP for world development purposes? Will we ask our legislators to press for greater reciprocal dependency upon developing nations to supply some of our basic needs, and open our markets to them, e. g., for such things as shoes, clothing, fabrics?
Pope Paul VI teaches in Populorum progressio that "Peace is something that is built up day after day, in the pursuit of an order intended by God, which implies a more perfect form of justice among men" (pp 76).
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