December 2001 Call to Action News

From the Global South, women's voices cry out for justice

While the nation was preoccupied with the new war against global terrorism, feminist liberation theologians from Asia, Africa and Latin America reminded CTA audiences of broader injustices faced every day by the poor in the Global South, especially women.

Elsa Tamez of Costa Rica put it bluntly: "We believe that terrorism is a product of the effects of globalization of the free market." To work for real peace means "to struggle not only against some crazy suicidal terrorist but against globalization." She said the various types of liberation theology in the developing world are converging, because "women, indigenous and blacks are all part of those excluded from the neoliberal market system."

Franciscan Sr. Nasimiyu Wasike of Kenya was the only member of the international liberation theology panel to make it to Philadelphia three days after 9/11. But she held forth alone for 90 minutes on a wide range of problems facing the Kenyan people: the raging epidemic of HIV/AIDS, the tensions among 42 ethnic groups and 46 political parties, and the blatant sex trade of African girls in Europe.

As former superior of her religious order, Wasike also confronted the silence of the Catholic Church on the sexual abuse of nuns by priests. She spoke out against it before it became widely known. She was ignored. The priests were "returned for study," and the nuns typically were sent away. But she kept her sisters, supported them, and helped place for adoption the babies that were born. "All of this is being denied by the bishops," she said. Her sisters did not re-elect her superior because they feared retaliation by the bishops. But she continues to speak out. She helped form the Institute of African Women in Religion and Culture, and is active with the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians.

From the Philippines, Teresita Amalia Rosana reminded CTA that most Third World countries were colonies of northern hemisphere nations, and are still treated as neo-colonies. To this day the Philippines, seized by the U.S. from Spain in 1898, remain an economic and military colony of the U.S. Her people will not rest until U.S. military bases - Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Base - are gone.

Benedictine Sr. Mary John Mananzan, a founder of the CTA affiliate in the Philippines, spoke of the dramatic upsurge in populist politics in which women are increasingly active. The most dramatic recent victory was the impeachment of a president for corruption and the election of a woman president. She said that after centuries of patriarchal Church control, Filipina Catholic women are developing a new spirituality that is positive, self-affirming and mutually empowering. "Our faith today is a feast more than a fast," she said. "We try to combine passion with compassion."