SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic – The IV Meeting of Synodal Cooperation for Latin America and the Caribbean, which brings together in Santo Domingo the main aid agencies and leaders of the Latin American Church to redefine assistance strategies in the region, is an opportunity to see reality and make a prophetic discernment in the face of the region's challenges. During the inaugural panel on the situation of the Church, Cardinal Michael Czerny, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Service of Integral Human Development, challenged participants to transcend bureaucratic management to embrace a "universality in communion" that responds to the real pains of people.

The return to reality: overcoming the culture of appearances

For Cardinal Czerny, the starting point of any international aid must be an honest exercise in analyzing the situation. According to the cardinal, the greatest danger for cooperation organizations is the risk of being carried away by a superficial perception of reality, living in what he called "appearances."

We are increasingly immersed in an electronic world, a world of images and I am a little afraid that we are living in what Plato called appearances, that is, without hitting rock bottom and without specifying where things are going and where our efforts are going.

The prefect of the Dicastery recalled his Jesuit missionary experience and the method of conjunctural analysis that, at the time, they developed at the Jesuit Center for Faith and Social Justice, in Toronto, with an exercise called Naming the Moment.

The analysis of the situation, as Czerny pointed out, is not an academic exercise, but a spiritual necessity to capture the signs of the times, seeking safer paths in service to the poor and the church. The exercise is an opportunity not to offer solutions for problems that no longer exist or that are not the priority of those who suffer the most, said Czerny, urging agencies to keep lists of challenges "open and dynamic." Cardinal.

Confronting development work in the face of multiple problems

In an exercise of profound institutional honesty, Cardinal Michael Czerny urged Church agencies and bodies to resist the temptation to declare "fashionable priorities" that close their eyes to reality. The Prefect defended the need to maintain an "open catalog" of problems to be surprised by the challenges that people really face in their daily lives, after making a list of several topics and adding at the end the category that he considers the most important: “etcetera, etcetera, etcetera”, in a very close and informal tone, awakening laughter from the participants.

"We must resist the temptation to declare two or three issues as totally priorities and encourage ourselves to perceive the challenges that our people really face. In Rome we make an effort not to convince others of what issues they should face, but to allow ourselves to be open to the surprise of problems that are not on our lists, but are vital for people," the cardinal explained.

In this framework, Czerny made a self-criticism after almost 50 years of work in the field of development, pointing out two phenomena that, in his opinion, were allowed to grow until they became almost unmanageable because attention was not paid to them when they had addressable proportions. The first of them is drug trafficking, which he described as a power of devastating dimensions.

"Today drug trafficking has an incalculable force and impact on the lives of many people. I wonder: What were we thinking 20 or 30 years ago? Why don't we take it seriously? The force of organized crime today is of almost indescribable, immeasurable power, and it has an impact horrible in the communities. Perhaps it was not on our list of issues and now it seems almost impossible to fight against it,” he lamented.

With this call, Czerny invited the participants of the meeting to a prophetic vigilance that does not ignore the structural problems while they can still be transformed.

Universality in the face of globalization

The Cardinal rejected the term “global” when applied to the Church, which he considers “intolerable,” arguing that globalization tends to standardize and exclude. On the contrary, he defended, it is manifested according to a different principle, "since the church subsists in each particular church and precisely thus makes visible a form of unity that is not realized against the multiple, but within it."

This is not a uniformity imposed from above, but rather recognizing the richness of local differences, without dissolving the concrete faces that the Church takes shape in history, Czerny reflected.

The universal does not coincide with what flattens differences, but with what guards them and orders them towards a deeper communion, showing that the highest unity is not what standardizes, but what makes reciprocal belonging possible without loss of identity.

Czerny's intervention concluded with a call to cooperation agencies to assume themselves as allies of long-term processes, inspired by the social teaching of Popes Francis and Leo

By reaffirming that integral human development is only possible when the protagonism is returned to the people, his message set the course of the meeting: a cooperation that is not afraid to touch the wounds of a continent that cries out for justice.