Justice and Peace in a Renewed Caribbean: Contemporary Catholic Reflections

Abstract

In 1970, Pope Paul VI in Octogesima Adveniens called upon Catholic bishops and theologians to rethink Catholic social teaching from within the context of their particular regions and cultures. Without a doubt, many educated readers are already aware of such efforts from US and Latin American bishops. The merit of this volume edited by Anna Kasafi Perkins, Donald Chambers, and Jacqueline Porter, if nothing else, reveals to a broader audience the lesser-known pastoral letters on justice and peace written by the Caribbean bishops. After an introduction by Perkins, fourteen other contributors review a range of letters written over the past four decades. These chapters divide into three broad categories. One set deals either with the repercussions of colonialism or other types of interdependence: the Black Power movement (chapter 2), integral human development (chapters 3 and 4), evangelization (chapter 6), solidarity (chapter 7), and ecology (chapter 14). A second set deals with specific public or moral policy issues: homosexuality (chapter 5), capital punishment (chapter 8), crime and violence (chapter 11), and HIV-AIDS (chapter 13). A third set deals with faith formation and internal church challenges: catechetical statements (chapter 9), sexual abuse (chapter 10), Eucharistic hospitality (chapter 12), and abortion in relation to conceptualizing life (chapter 15). Had the text, in fact, been organized around these three categories, the reader would have then been able to draw conceptions and themes across the chapters much more easily than the existing order allows.