Called to PARADISE II

In my previous post, I defined the accronym PARADISE and the aim of this program. I would like to elaborate further the reason why there is a need for PARADISE to be understood and to move on a faster pace towards its fulfillment.

Michael Miller posted at T & R group at yahoo: "Fortunately in the last decade, a significant movement within the faith community (referring to the American Catholics) has been mobilized around the call to care for God's creation. We will need to learn to plead for creation. So far we and everybody else seems to be just preaching." I agree with him that many of these calls for the protection of God's creation are mere lip service or media mileage. We have not truly addressed what he called as " sinful structures" that "cause great harm to people."

I can personally attest how the poor are victimized and many are disenfranchised by the moneyed and the powerful while pushing their selfish way to grab more treasures out of the natural resources that God has provided supposedly for the victmized residents. The sadder part of the story is the involvement of the community leaders in devastating creation; they who are supposed to protect the interests of their contituents.

Just few months back, I trekked the rugged roads towards our local mountains that contain our mineral deposits. There, I witnessed how poor people worked rain or shine, day and night, in order to collect mineral rocks with the hope of receiving decent payment for their job if these minerals will be sold to the foreign investors.

Two years had past after the mining operation was started in our place. Hundreds of poor people had come and now are gone from that mining fields. None of them can say, thank God for giving us these minerals. Most of them, if not all, were underpaid or never been paid for the hard work they did. The operators had never successfully traded their product because of political interventions, without mentioning the national law that favors the oligarchs to have control over the national wealth.

More than the devastation caused by mining is the desperation that the poor are experiencing from the system there is in our country with regards to the use of our natural resources. Most of them who started to be an employee of mining firms ended up in joining illegal logging operations or in other criminalities. Morality is very low in the mining field because materialism has been the main motive for work.

There is therefore a need to address these realities the soonest possible time or else it will have a tremendous destructive domino effect to the soceity at large.