A boy carries a wooden timber destined for a mine tunnel in Pamintaran, a remote gold mining community near Maragusan on the Philippines’ southern island of Mindanao, in this June 6, 2012, file photo. Child labor exploitation is rooted in poverty, scandalous inequality and lack of opportunities that protect human dignity, Pope Francis wrote in a message to a global conference on the fight against child labor May 17, 2022. (CNS photo/Paul Jeffrey)
OFFICE FOR SOCIAL MINISTRY
“Something that any father and mother would want for their children is a desire for what should be within everyone’s reach, namely land, housing and work.” (Pope Francis, 2014 World Meeting of Popular Movements)
Around the world at the local, national and global levels, people are struggling for land, housing and work. Nutritious food, affordable housing and dignified labor are what everyone should be able to attain. Pope Francis has constantly consistently spoken out about these basic human rights grounded in Catholic social teaching.
“Tierra, techo y trabajo” (land, lodging and labor) are three words invoked by our Holy Father as every year he addresses the World Meeting of Popular Movements, an annual international gathering of community-based organizations working for justice in their societies. The three T’s — or three L’s — represent the pope’s shorthand for social and economic rights.
The right to “tierra” refers to land needed for sustainable food and development for all peoples. “Techo,” loosely translated as lodging is meant to be broadly interpreted as not just decent shelter for all, but clean water, adequate sanitation and health care. “Trabajo” represents a right to engage in work that provides not only a just wage but meaning and financial security to workers and their families.
Pope Francis points to papal Catholic social teachings that speak about the basis of these rights: “The basic principle behind the three T’s is the universal destination of goods” that comes from Leo XIII and develops over the years, and in “Laborem Exercens,” where St. John Paul II considers that concept as the first principle of the whole ethical and social order.
The three T’s or L’s also appear in Pope Francis’s encyclical “Fratelli Tutti,” where he speaks out against “the structural causes of poverty and inequality; of the lack of work, land and housing; and of the denial of social and labor rights.” Our Holy Father urges solidarity as a force to confront “the destructive effects of the empire of money: forced dislocation, painful emigration, human trafficking, drugs, war, violence and all those realities that many of you suffer and that we are all called upon to transform.”
He underscores solidarity not only as a moral virtue but also a “social principle that seeks to confront unjust systems with the aim of building a culture of solidarity that expresses a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good.”
In particular, Pope Francis thanks all who “have felt the pain of others as your own. You know how to show the face of true humanity, the humanity that is not built by turning your back on the suffering of those around you, but in the patient, committed and often even sorrowful recognition that the other person is my brother or sister and that his or her joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties are also mine. To ignore those who have fallen is to ignore our own humanity that cries out in every brother and sister of ours.”
The pope believes the world can be seen more clearly from the peripheries. “We must listen to people on the peripheries, open the doors to them and allow them to participate. The suffering of the world is better understood alongside those who suffer. When people have suffered injustice, inequality, abuse of power, deprivations in their own flesh they understand much better what others are experiencing and are able to help them realistically to open up paths of hope.”
Here in Hawaii, we are blessed to have saints Damien de Veuster and Marianne Cope, as well as Joseph Dutton who serve as inspiring models witnessing to Jesus as they accompanied the most vulnerable in Kalaupapa. They ministered tirelessly to sustain with dignity the land, lodging and labor for their brothers and sisters with Hansen’s disease.
This year the diocese continues their legacy by establishing a fund to support the needs of the remaining Kalaupapa resident patients. Also parishioners throughout the diocese are collaborating in social ministry with faith-based organizations such as Family Promise, Habitat for Humanity, St. Francis Healthcare, Catholic Charities Hawaii, and HOPE Services Hawaii, working with the vulnerable to sustain land, lodging and labor for all as one ohana, sharing the earth as our common home.
For more information on how to follow in the footsteps of St. Damien, St. Marianne and Joseph Dutton, please visit the Office for Social Ministry website: officeforsocialministry.org. And now during these difficult times here in Hawaii and around the world, let all recall the encouraging words of Pope Francis to popular movements everywhere, “Sisters and brothers, let us dream together, because it was precisely the dreams of freedom and equality, of justice and dignity, the dreams of fraternity, that improved the world … when we look through these dreams we will find God’s own dream for all of us, who are His own sons and daughters.”
Mahalo,
Your friends at the Office for Social Ministry
