(ART is taken in part from
In the Footsteps of Jesus, Resource Manual on Catholic Social Teaching, [United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops] 71).
ART is an acronym that stands for Act, Reflect, and
Transform. The process of ART moves
people of faith from concern for charity to action for justice. Let’s use ART to look at a familiar allegory.
Suppose you live in a small village next to a river. This river provides water for drinking, daily
cooking, washing clothes and bathing.
One morning you’re down at the river filling a bucket of water and you
notice what looks like a woman floating face-down in the water. You wade out and grab the edge of her skirt
and pull her towards the shore. You roll
her over and attempt to resuscitate her but realize that she is already dead. With
the help of other villagers you give her a decent burial and shocked and saddened,
you figure she just drowned accidentally.
That evening, while you and some neighbors are at the river to draw
water for cooking, you notice two more bodies floating in the river. Everyone gets excited and rushes out into the
river to snag the bodies and drag them back to shore. One man is already dead but the other has a faint
heartbeat. You begin artificial
respiration and the man coughs up water and begins breathing. He then opens his
eyes but cannot seem to speak. A
neighbor puts him in his wagon and takes him back to the village to care for
him and many of the women volunteer to bring the man daily meals and gather
clothing donations. The remaining
neighbors, shocked and saddened, prepare the dead man for a decent burial.
The next morning, you and a group of women are down at the
river washing clothes when five bodies come floating down the river. Like you all did the previous day, you wade
out and grab them as fast as you can and pull them to shore. Two women are alive, the other three are
dead. Some of the village men come down
to prepare the bodies for burial and the two women who are barely alive are
taken to the village to be fed and clothed.
This pattern repeats for the next week and each day there are more and
more bodies floating down the river until the whole village is occupied with
caring for the injured and burying the dead.
The initial response of most people to issues of human
concern is to act to meet the immediate need as the villagers are doing in our
story by pulling people from the river.
Through this action we come in contact with the issue. The issue takes on a face; it becomes more
real to us. But this type of action alone also frustrates us. It does address the pain of people but it
does little to address its causes. People continue to come to us hungry,
homeless, in flight from war and oppression and in the case of our story, dead
and dying. This is the “A” in ART,
Action. It’s generally the first step in
addressing an issue.
After the first day of pulling bodies from the river, the
villagers are starting to wonder how long they can keep up the daily pace of
rescuing victims and burying the dead. The sight of so much tragedy is heartbreaking
and they shudder to think what the families of these people are going through. Eventually, a little boy asks, “Why are there
so many bodies coming down the river?”
Nobody had even thought to wonder why the bodies were in the river. The villagers talked among themselves wondering
if there was something wicked or cursed in the water that was killing
people. Some were afraid to even touch
the water anymore. Many felt they might
become infected if they touched the bodies and wondered if it would be better
to just let them float by. They started
boiling the water before using it thinking it was harmful. Some of the elder women in the village didn’t
believe the water was bad. After all,
they had been using it when the first few bodies showed up and nobody has died
or even gotten sick! The elder women
suspected something else might be going on that resulted in people floating
down the river.
The next step in ART is Reflect, to ask “Why?” “Why are people hungry, homeless, uprooted,
battered, or discriminated against?” “Why
is the environment damaged?” “Why are
there wars?” “Why are these issues concerns of faith?” “What does scripture
have to say about these social issues and their causes?” Going deeper, we can ask “What factors
contribute to this problem?” “Who might be gaining from this situation?” “Who
has the power?” “Who is losing?” “What beliefs and values support the status quo?” “What does
Catholic Social Teaching have to say?”
The Reflect phase of the ART process enables us to explore the
underlying causes of poverty, violence, homelessness, racism, war, ecological
devastation and other issues. It also
gives us the opportunity to reflect on the rich tradition of episcopal and
scriptural teaching.
After the first week of caring for the sick and burying the
many dead, the elder women remark that their time and talents might be put to
better use by trying to stop whatever it is that is putting these poor people
in the river. “There must be an
explanation for this. We cannot just let
an apparent slaughter of human beings continue…we owe it to our brothers and
sisters of this land.” So they decide they are going to travel up the river to
try and find out what is going on. They
bring some of the village men and a wagon of provisions for the journey. After two days journey, the women and men
come upon a decimated and burned out farm. Dead chickens lay on nearly every
inch of ground. When they ask some of
the remaining inhabitants what happened, they are told that a large group of marauders
stumbled upon their land and announced that they needed it for farming
potatoes. “We told them that our
ancestors had been on this land for many generations and that we will be here
for generations to come.” The invaders
started slaughtering us one by one, then two by two, until after a week,
hundreds of my friends and family had been slaughtered and thrown into the
river.“
The elder women and men of the village ask to speak with
these potato farmers and plead the case for the chicken farmers to leave them and
their land in peace. The potato farmers
threaten to kill them too, “Get off this land before we slaughter you too and
throw all of you into the river!” The
elder women of the village decide to meet with the women of the chicken farmers
and the potato farmers and see if they can work out a deal. The potato farmers realize that they would
like to have eggs and the chicken farmers admit that some potatoes would be
nice so they decide to share the land and trade with one another. Every morning they enjoyed a great feast of
scrambled eggs and fried potatoes and they all lived happily ever after.
The final step in the Art of Catholic Social Teaching is to “Transform”
the social structures that contribute to suffering and injustice. Social transformation is a different kind of
action. Transformation gets at root
causes; it does not stop at alleviating symptoms. Our story had a “happy ending” because I
wrote it that way but we know that isn't always the case. But we can transform our communities and our
world through changing social values, empowering low-income people, advocating
for just public policies, buying or boycotting goods based on social values,
adopting lifestyle changes, investing in socially responsible corporations, and
so forth. Action on behalf of justice
and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a
constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel, or in other words, of
the Church’s mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation
from every oppressive situation” (in Vatican
Council II: More Post Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery, OP
[Northport, NY: Costello Publishing Company, Inc., 1982], 696). The End.
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