19 May 2005

YOUNG AND OLD, LAY AND ORDAINED, UNITE WITH GLOBAL MESSAGE: MAKE POVERTY HISTORY


From a Jesuit Mission in Zimbabwe to a primary school in Clitheroe, Lancs., and from a college campus in San Francisco to a church in Trinidad and Tobago, tens of thousands of men, women and children united this week with one message for world leaders: Make Poverty History. They assembled in their thousands and in twos and three, in 14 countries and four continents, and all as part of the Jesuit Day of Prayer and Action, initiated by the British Jesuits.


The largest gathering was at Musami, 75kms from Harare, where 2,500 people, from school children to the elderly, gathered in the church and in classrooms to recite the specially-composed prayer and listen to talks about the importance of self reliance for the destruction of poverty. In Harare itself, at St George's College, the prayer was said in all classes at 1pm - the end of school, as well as at the Monday Assembly, and even in the middle of a sports practice!

At least 100 people in Thailand and Japan Jesuits and their co-workers paused to reflect on the injustice of the current rules for trade, the unfair and unpayable debt burden on the South, and the poverty of millions of people across the globe, and to pray that action would be taken to improve their conditions substantially. At the University of San Francisco (founded by the Jesuits in 1855), more than 300 members of the African Alliance donned white bands, recited the prayer for the Day of Prayer and Action, and explored the causes of global poverty and ways of eliminating it.

The white bands symbols of the MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY campaign had been sent by Jesuit Missions in the UK to workers around the world. Parishioners at St Theresa's Church in Port of Spain in the West Indies wore theirs enthusiastically, as did the Jesuit community at Merrivale in Natal, South Africa. At all these locations, they prayed, they explored ways in which poverty could be alleviated, and they added their names to petitions and letters to the leaders of the G8 the world's richest and most influential nations who will be meeting in Scotland in July.

In Britain, schoolchildren and teachers, chaplains and parishioners formed human white bands or draped their buildings with banners to highlight the injustices and to call for change. Thousands of letters were written to the President of the EU Commission, José Manuel Barroso, urging him to use his influence at the G8 Summit and in the EU itself. Primary school children for instance at St Michael and St John's School, Clitheroe went white and observed a minutes silence during which they thought of the 20 children who would have died needlessly through hunger in those 60 seconds.

Over a dozen Jesuits joined over 1,000 other members of religious orders on Wednesday (18 May) as they marched to the Houses of Parliament in Westminster and lobbied their MPs to support the objectives of MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY.

 

Pupils of St Ignatius College, Enfield, form human white bands in the playground on World Debt Day.		Parishioners of St Michael and St John's parish in Clitheroe, Lancs., collect signatures after Sunday mass in support of MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY.
Parishioners of St Theresa's Church, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, brandish their white bands as a sign of solidarity with the Jesuit Day of Action and Prayer and MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY.		Jesuit priests and scholastics join the hundreds of religious men     and woman to lobby MPs at Westminster (left to right: Peter Scally, Michael Smith, Raymond Perrier, Dave Stewart, Patrick Purnell and Tom McGuinness).

               
For more information, contact Ged Clapson (Communications Officer, British Jesuits) on 020 7499 0285 or 07778 218671.