4. Minorities as Source of Transformation of the dominant System
This historical account based on the three-period stages of Catholic Social Teaching demonstrates a developing approach of the Church to minorities, from one that is insensitive and even destructive during the Pre-Leonine period, through one that takes the minorities as equally sharing common dignity and human rights during the Leonine period, and one that eventually becomes respectful and protective of the unique condition and minority rights of IPs during the Johannine or post-modern milieu. Appropriating Enrique Dussel’s liberative analectics, we can discern that Catholic Social Teaching can move beyond simply recognizing and respecting minority groups in their unique form of life and cultural identity. We can say that the minorities and their critical perspectives and voices can be sources of transformation of the dominant systems in both the Church and society.
Following Emmanuel Levinas’ solid critique of the totalizing philosophical tradition of the West that culminates in Heidegger, Dussel claims that Heidegger’s existential-ontological ethics tends to affirm the givenness of being, and therefore lacks “a critical method which might allow one to go beyond those assumptions and from the fundamental horizon of being.”[17] Dussel speaks of Heidegger’s ontological ethics as flawed for being a ‘totalizing totalization of totality’. Dussel’s appropriation of Levinasian metaphysics of alterity, which speaks of ethics—the call by the other to responsibility and obligation—as the first philosophy, puts into question the metaphysical presuppositions and assumptions of a given system or tradition of rationality. Exposing the irrationality of the egologism and Euro-US-centrism through his transmodern discourse in his architectonics of liberation ethics, Dussel claims that the reality of the poor, the marginalized and the excluded exposes to the system its own inadequacy and limitations, falsifying its claim to truth, justice, and love, among others.[18]
[17] Enrique Dussel, Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana II: Éticidad y moralidad (Buenos Aires: Siglo Vientiuno Argentina Editores, 1973) 190.
[18] Enrique Dussel, Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y de la exclusión (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 1998).
Catholic Social Teaching, even as it has become a source of defense of minorities against totalizing ideologies, may have to recognize and affirm that minorities could really be important channels that could put into question, not only the dominant systems that become oppressive, but even some of the Church’s limited perspectives. Excluded minorities can be manifestations of the kairotic in-breaking of the Reign of God that calls present dominant systems of thought, beliefs, values and practices to transformation.
5. Conclusion
In a postmodern yet globalizing world, we recognize and celebrate the unique form of life, cultural traditions, and particular identity of those who are minorities as constitutive of their rights. Against totalizing ideologies, which find expression in unscrupulous economic pursuit, especially the extractive industries that push further to the margins the minorities and indigenous communities, Catholic Social Teaching has gradually taken a clearer and more committed stance in defense of the minorities. Yet, just as the Church warns minorities against ideologically totalizing themselves, as in fundamentalist, radical and even violently militant strands, it should likewise be sensitive to the in-breaking of the Reign of God that brings about transformations through the mediation of the epistemically privileged but excluded minorities.
Author
Rolando A. Tuazon is member of the Congregation of the Mission, Philippine Province. He has been involved in the ministry of seminary formation for many years. He presently holds the post of Rector and pastor of Santuario de San Vicente de Paul, while teaching Moral Theology courses at St. Vincent School of Theology and other schools of theology. He finished his licentiate and doctorate in theology at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.