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Fr. Jack’s President’s Award Acceptance Speech  

The following speech was given by Fr. Jack Davis upon acceptance of the President’s Award, also known as the “Touchstone” award, bestowed by the National Federation of Priests’ Councils.

I proudly accept this Touchstone Award on behalf of all those priests, religious, and lay people who have left their countries to serve in another culture, often at great sacrifice. I also accept it on behalf of the priests of the Society of St. James the Apostle who share my ministry in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru and I also accept it in the name of my family and friends who have supported me with prayer and sacrifice during these 24 years in Peru, especially from parishes in North Dakota, Minnesota, Florida and Virginia.

In the early 1970's, I attended the National Federation of Priests' Councils conventions in Denver, San Francisco, and Detroit, as President of the Fargo Association of Priests and as a delegate. In Denver, the theme was Peace and Justice. I remember Archbishop Patrick Flores giving us a talk in which he used the words "Sí, se puede." (“Yes, it is possible.”) At the time I did not speak Spanish, but the impact of the challenge presented at the convention has continued until this day. These words have become part of my pastoral vocabulary.

In 1971, I visited Jim Jefferies, a Fargo priest and member of the Missionary Society of St. James, who was working in Chimbote Peru, an industrial city on the desert coast recently devastated by an earthquake. What I saw reawakened the missionary desire that had stopped several years before. The Society, founded forty years ago by Cardinal Cushing, brought diocesan priests to serve in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.

Twenty-five years ago, I received permission from Bishop Driscoll of Fargo to join the St. James Society. After language school in Lima, I was assigned to Peru and was given five options as to where I was to begin my missionary service. I chose Chimbote. I had visited areas of poverty in Africa, Eastern Europe and South America, so I was not expecting to have difficulty adjusting to a culture of poverty. However, I soon discovered that it was one thing to visit an area of poverty and quite another to be faced with its horrible reality day after day after day. I went into culture shock and I didn't know it was happening. Much of what I had been taught in the seminary and what l had experienced for five years in a comfortable middle class parish in Fargo was called into question. Even basic aspects of my Catholic North American faith were severely tested by the popular religious beliefs of the people that I sent to serve. My first year was difficult to say the least. My attitudes of North American superiority were questioned and challenged by what I was facing every day.

Thanks to my pastor, Joe McCarthy, I was introduced to the theology of liberation and the writings of Padre Gustavo Gutiérrez, a priest of the Diocese of Lima, Peru. This theological interpretation began to profoundly change the way I saw and reacted to the situation of poverty.

I was not aware of how much my attitudes had changed until one night in July of 1980 at a wake service of a 12 year-old boy, Victor, who had died of tuberculosis. A newly ordained Fargo priest was visiting me at the time. In the crowded shack surrounding his casket, were his parents, brothers and sisters, family and friends. I preached that it was not God's will that Victor had died. As soon as we left the home, the priest jumped all over me. "Jack Davis, how could you be so cruel to say to that poor family that it was not God's will that their son died?" I responded that it was not God's will and that I was not about to lie to them to make them feel better. Victor died of tuberculosis, a curable disease in 1980.

Although Victor's father worked hard, six and seven days a week, and his mother spent long hours washing other people's clothes, their combined wages were not enough to get them out of poverty. Neither was this enough to allow for a decent living for them and their six children. Victor died because he was not eating properly and had no resistance to the tuberculosis. When Victor got sick there was not money for medicine or good food to allow him to recover his health. That was NOT God's will.

Therefore, Victor's parents, his family and friends and his priest were obligated to do all that we could to change the unjust social system that made it possible for so many, like Victor, to be afflicted with TB, condemned to live in inhuman conditions while others enjoyed excessive wealth. My five years in Chimbote had changed me forever. I was challenged in ways that I had never imagined and was not prepared for.

It was clear that I needed to join with like-minded people in their struggle to change our society and its rules. To develop a new vision of the church where the fundamental option for the poor was not just words from a bishop's meeting but was, in fact, an essential issue for a pastoral orientation. God does not want people to live in poverty. Poverty is a cardinal sin—both personal and collective sin. Poverty is the result of injustice: unjust laws and economic rules that favor the rich, developed, industrial nations of the North at the expense of the poor nations of the South.

But we can change that. "Sí, se puede."

The gospel imperative to announce the good news that Jesus came to give life and to give it abundantly demands that injustice be denounced with vigor. You simply cannot practice charity without justice. The Christian has no choice. It's not an either/or but a both/and response. Thus, the mission of the priest and every Christian is to both , preach and practice charity and,, at the same time, be the prophetic voice of the voiceless—to denounce the injustices that keep them poor and deny them their rightful share of God's creation. Jesus came to bring life and to bring it in abundance, not for a small minority but for all women and men.

Although I only once had the opportunity to work alongside of Mother Teresa when she came to El Hogar de la Paz, a home for abandoned women and children in Chimbote, I was very impressed with her genuine love of the poor. I cherish the hand written note I received from her for my support of her sisters.

However, I also wish that she and her sisters would have felt compelled to demand that the owners of the nearby fish factories raise the height of their smoke stacks to remove the thick smoke that is so damaging to the health of these fragile women and children, causing them respiratory illnesses.

The growing poverty in Chimbote and other parts of Peru in the early 1980's made it necessary for parishes, in collaboration with Caritas (Catholic Charities), to establish hundreds of soup kitchens. We saw this as an opportunity to empower the poor. Maria, a thirty-eight year-old mother of five, typical of the many uneducated women of Chimbote, had been confined to a role of subservience and silence in the home. With only a third grade education, Maria was elected president of one of our parish soup kitchens. As she grew in this new role, her increased self-esteem not only enabled her to lead a soup kitchen serving her community, but also empowered her and others to denounce injustice and insist that their rights be respected.

The women spoke against corruption in parent-teacher organizations and demanded that the authorities provide them such basic services as garbage collection, electricity, water and sewer. This new sense of self worth empowered them to courageously lead protests against crime and the sale of drugs in the neighborhood. They demanded we put an end to violence against women and challenged the powerful institutions that control so much of their society.

Other significant pastoral achievements in the past 25 years have been the development of basic Christian communities in many parts of Latin America and catequesis familiar , a two-year first Eucharist program designed to involve parents in the religious education of their children. The raising of the level of consciousness and Christian commitment in many cases is astounding. On the one hand there is social development and change, and on the other there is the enormous financial burden of servicing the interest on foreign debt in the poorest countries.

This must be done at the expense of programs for health, education and development, and as a result, developing countries remain unable to meet basic human needs and the gap between rich and poor countries continues to grow.

Pope John Paul II continues to make a dramatic call for the forgiveness of the debt of the poorest nations of the world. In June, million of petitions will be handed to the leaders of the world's eight richest nations at their meeting in Cologne, Germany. I urge you to support this effort in your own parishes.

By choosing to give me this award, you have obviously wished to honor the North American missionaries, who have served, suffered and witnessed to the gospel of Jesus Christ. So in their names I proudly accept the 1999 President's Award and I wish to dedicate it to Father Roy Bourgouis, Maryknoll missionary and to Padre Gustavo Gutiérrez, diocesan priest, pastor and theologian.

I would like to close with the words of Archbishop Patrick Flores: “Si, se puede!”