"BLAZING A TRAIL TO FOLLOW…"
Commitment of the Claretian Family
History:
In 1979 the Justice and Peace Committee was established within the Prefecture of Apostolate headed by Fr. Román Angel Moreno. The committee was made up of four people, one of whom was Fr. James Maloney, who produced several issues of a bulletin and organized 4 colloquia, in Oak Park, Illinois (1980), Medellín (1981), Alcalá de Guadaira (1982) and Rome (1983). During the next General Government, before the resignation of Fr. Maloney, the Committee was joined with that of Churches in Formation, chaired by Frs. Tobón and Ángel Calvo, who developed a questionnaire and continued the process. Later, Fr. Richard Todd continued working in the same way, highlighted by a trip in support of JPIC to Estelí, Guatemala. During the Government 1991, the Prefect of Apostolate –Fr. J. Abella- took charge. He succeeded in having each Organism take responsibility for promoting JPIC and sent out another questionnaire to which he received 11 responses from which he made a summary of the state of the matter. The present General Government, following the orientations of the General Chapter, reorganized the Committee, proposing through it to, "sensitize the Congregation to the urgency of incorporating all aspects of justice, peace and the safeguarding of creation into our apostolic action. To make the service of the Secretariat for Justice and Peace more effective in all Organisms and promote active participation of Claretians in favor of justice, peace and ecology" (Action Plan of the General Government 1997-2003, p.30). To achieve this, a full-time person was named chair, beginning in May 1999.
SERVICES OFFERED:
On 12 March 2000, the General Secretariat for JPIC began a bi-weekly bilingual news service on the Internaet. It presents a summary of documents that are sent to the secretariat—denunciations, campaigns and news items that usually do not appear in commercial publications. The subscriber can request complete texts of items of interest. It has almost 200 subscribers. It is now included on this page under the heading LATEST NEWS.
Monthly bulletin published in Spanish, English and Italian. It is sent as a supplement to NUNC.
From the workshop in Bilbao (3 to 13 December 1999) a Manual for Animation in the area of JPIC was developed, available in Spanish and English. In addition, the Secretariat is available to do presentations in Organisms that request them to arouse interest in the area.
The Secretariat for JPIC has issued various documents on world situations, especially conflicts: