Following the Haiti earthquake, the pontifical council Cor Unum named Catholic Relief Services of the US as the main aid coordinator. But whether or not it had the authority to do this is a question that goes to the heart of the Church’s work in international aid and development
Following the recent earthquake that laid waste much of Haiti, international aid organisations began to rush personnel and emergency supplies to the devastated capital, Port-au-Prince, and the other affected areas. The results, especially in the days immediately after the quake struck on 12 January, were marked by a distinct lack of coordination.
Attempting to pre-empt the danger of the relief effort descending from the haphazard into the chaotic, the pontifical council Cor Unum on 14 January designated the US-based Catholic Relief Services (CRS) as coordinator of the Catholic Church’s response to the emergency. “The 300-plus on-the-ground personnel, who have long been active in Haiti, and the past experience, expertise and resources of CRS will enable prompt and effective coordination of the Church’s efforts,” the pontifical council said. The announcement, made when so many lives had been lost, and so many were still at risk and capable of being saved, seemed unremarkable in itself. But it has implications that go to the heart of the way Catholic relief and development operates around the world.
CRS is part of Caritas Internationalis (CI), the Church’s multi-billion-pound aid and development operation, which is second only to the International Red Cross in providing relief assistance to people across the globe. A sign of its significance is that its secretary general, Dr Lesley-Anne Knight, was asked to contribute a paper on values, ethics and the economic crisis to a volume distributed to participants at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week.
Along with other members of the vast Caritas confederation, including Caritas Haiti, Caritas Switzerland and Secours Catholique (France), CRS had indeed been in Haiti for years, giving permanent assistance to the Haitian people. But Cor Unum’s “nomination” of CRS raised questions about the relationship between Caritas Internationalis and the Vatican, and perhaps opened up wounds, that have lingered untreated for decades.
Many people involved in the 162-member Caritas confederation wondered why Cor Unum took the action it did when their own umbrella office, Caritas Internationalis, clearly has this mandate in its Vatican-approved statutes. Cor Unum had never intervened like this during other emergencies, such as the Asian tsunami of 2004. People in the Caritas movement seemed surprised, and somewhat irritated, that the pontifical council had appointed a confederation member to coordinate operations in Haiti without even first consulting or informing Caritas Internatio-nalis.
But the irritation was not simply a matter of officials’ noses being put out of joint by the attempted imposition of a chain of command that sidestepped their authority. The move by Cor Unum brought to the fore anxieties about its relationship with the Caritas confederation that have troubled the development arm of the Catholic Church since Cor Unum’s inception in 1971. The main question comes down to this: is it the Vatican, or Caritas Internationalis, that calls the shots for the Caritas confederation?
The Vatican spokesman, Fr Federico Lombardi SJ, told The Tablet this week that Cor Unum had put CRS in charge because “other Catholic humanitarian organisations want to intervene and are not members of Caritas Internationalis”. The reasons, he seemed to be suggesting, were to do only with avoiding confusion in the relief effort.
It is true that, while the Caritas confederation is by far the largest network of Catholic aid and development agencies, it is not the only one. There is also a 16-member development coalition based in Brussels called CIDSE, but it has a somewhat narrower focus on justice and long-term development and actually includes five Caritas agencies. Additionally, there are a number of independent Catholic organisations such as the St Vincent de Paul Society, Aid to the Church in Need, Fidesco (in Africa), Jesuit Refugee Services, Misereor and others. Some of these groups have also tried to play a part in aiding the Haitian people. But with the magnitude of the disaster, the Cor Unum president, German-born Cardinal Paul Cordes, evidently believed it was best that CRS should take charge in order to prevent the Church’s relief efforts getting bogged down. In doing this he clearly thought he had the mandate to make that decision, given that Pope John Paul II in 2004 publicly entrusted Cor Unum with “the task of supervising and guiding the activity of Caritas Internationalis”. The question that was raised in the most pointed way on 14 January, however, is whether supervision and guidance are the same as coordination and delegation of responsibilities.
It may have only been a coincidence, but the CRS chairman of the board, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, was in Rome when Cardinal Cordes made his decision. Interestingly, it was just last November that Archbishop Dolan told his fellow American bishops they should be doing more to promote CRS, certainly before any other foreign aid agency. “There are a lot of excellent charities doing international relief work out there … but there is only one official humanitarian agency of the US Catholic bishops and that’s CRS,” he said. “Our preferred way of working is through the diocese and the local Caritas social action agency designated by the Holy See” (my italics).
Clearly the archbishop’s understanding is that the Vatican, and not CI, calls the shots for the Caritas confederation, and Cardinal Cordes more or less confirmed that when he designated CRS to coordinate the Haiti operations. So what are the origins of this struggle, if such it is, within the global Catholic aid operation? Cor Unum, set up by Pope Paul VI in 1971, is a much younger organisation than the Caritas movement, which began in Germany in the late nineteenth century. The Vatican recognised it as the Church’s official relief agency in 1947 and approved plans for its reorganisation.
By 1951 a central coordinating office was set up in Rome at the encouragement of Archbishop Giovanni Battista Montini (the future Paul VI), who was then the Vatican’s Deputy Secretary of State. The revamped organisation held its first general assembly and began expanding rapidly to other countries. In 1957 it formally changed its name to Caritas Internationalis and after the Second Vatican Council became more involved in the fight against poverty, underdevelopment and injustice.
Today, by statute, CI is “an international confederation of Catholic organisations, mandated by their respective episcopal conferences, to spread solidarity and social justice throughout the world”.
But as CI expanded after the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), some in the Vatican evidently thought it should be more accountable to the Holy See. The tipping point came during the Biafran War (1967-70) when Caritas began airlifting tons of food and medicines to the people of Nigeria’s independence-minded republic.
Archbishop Giovanni Benelli, then deputy Secretary of State, was suspicious of the then-secretary general of CI, Fr Carlo Bayer. The German priest had been at the helm of CI since its formation in 1951 and Archbishop Benelli was evidently concerned over the organisation’s finances and the political repercussion of its actions. Some accounts claim that US President Richard Nixon, who took Nigeria’s side in the Biafran War, complained to the Vatican about Fr Bayer’s efforts. Archbishop Benelli had Fr Bayer named a monsignor and convinced the German bishops’ conference to appoint him to a prestigious position away from Rome.
Whether by coincidence or design, the establishment of Cor Unum in 1971 came around the same time that Archbishop Benelli failed to get his own candidate elected to replace Fr Bayer as CI secretary general. Many people in Caritas at the time tied the two events together and, since then, there has been a less than cosy relationship between them and Cor Unum.
At its 2007 general assembly CI selected Lesley-Anne Knight, formerly of Cafod, as its first woman secretary general. At the papal audience with the assembly’s delegates, there was an embarrassing moment when Vatican officials appeared to be unsure where to seat Ms Knight. It was only after senior clerics in the Caritas delegation intervened that the Vatican organisers eventually allowed her to sit in the front row with the other top officials, most of whom were priests and bishops.
At that same general assembly Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga SDB of Honduras was elected CI president. Many of the delegates were convinced that it would be useful to have this possible future pope as the organisation’s cardinal protector, and it seemed to bode well that he was a fellow Salesian of the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone SDB. But Cardinal Bertone’s office has seemed none too pleased with the arrangement. When Cardinal Rodriguez impressed world leaders with a speech at a special session of the United Nations in September 2008, just five months after Pope Benedict XVI had spoken to the same UN body, Secretariat of State officials were furious that they had not been consulted beforehand.
The tensions, it seems, remain.