On February 24, 1964, civil rights workers planned to picket the large annual Knights of Columbus Dinner in Chicago because no Negroes were members. Picketing was called off when it was learned that Sargent Shriver was coming to urge the inclusion of Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and other colored Americans in the K. of C.
You of the knights of Columbus have tremendous potential for good in Chicago, but not only in Chicago. The big news these days is Cuba, Castro, Communism in Latin America.What are the Knights of Columbus doing about Latin Americans? About the one-third of all the Catholics in the world who live there?
What language did Christopher Columbus speak? Spanish- the language of most South Americans and of millions of Americans on United States soil.
What are the Knights of Columbus doing to communicate with the Spanish-speaking people in Chicago? How many Puerto Rican, Spanish-speaking Americans are in this audience tonight? How many are members of the Knights of Columbus? What about the Latin Americans who are full-blooded Indians? Guatemala, for example, is populated by people 80 percent of whom are full-blooded Indians. Would they meet any North American Indians in the Knights of Columbus?
And what about the millions of Catholic Negroes in Latin America? Journalists and politicians swarm and hover over Cuba, vying with one another for credit or charging one another with blame. But what are we doing about Brazil, one hundred times bigger and more important than Cuba? Are we helping Brazil? Would a Brazilian Catholic Negro be welcome here tonight? And what about a Negro American from Chicago?
The greatest burden carried by both Eisenhower and Kennedy in their dealings with Latin Americans is our failure as North Americans to respect the Spanish culture, the Indian heritage, the multiracial background of most Latin peoples. These peoples, frankly, honestly, but politely, don’t believe we want them as friends and equals. In their eyes, North Americans, even their co-religionists, show very few signs of treating South Americans, American Indians, or Negroes as equals.
It is in this kind of psychological and spiritual atmosphere that Communism grows and spreads like cancer. Are we actually nurturing Communism in Latin America by our actions and attitudes in North America?
These are hard questions, perhaps impolite, rude questions tonight. But these are the questions I have to answer all over South and Central America, all over Africa, all over Asia.
So far I have always answered that we North Americans do believe in the equality of all men; we do believe that “all men are created equal"; we do believe, and are willing to practice. the principles of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution.
In Indonesia Foreign Minister Subandrio said to me, “Do the people of the United States, do the Peace Corps Volunteers. really believe in the equality of all peoples? Are you sincerely ready to respect diverse, different races of men, different cultures, different languages, different methods of organizing society?” I said yes.
To be sure, these men and others like them all over Latin America, and Africa, and Asia, want our help financially. They want, and desperately need, dollars and factories and power plants. But they can take our money and hate us-hate our culture, hate our superior attitude, hate our hypocrisy, hate our power. And they will hate us if, by our actions at home and abroad, we convince them that we do not respect them as racial equals, cultural equals, political equals, as human beings fully equal to us.
In Latin America the Communist propaganda machine tells the world every day that we are not what we say we are. They point to racial segregation. They point to the huge American industrial companies in Latin America and claim we are only interested in making money out of Venezuelan oil, or Chilean copper, or Bolivian tin. They point to our military campaignsagainst Mexico, against Nicaragua, against Panama, against Haiti, against Puerto Rico. This is the food on which Castro feeds.
Let us remember that this current struggle may well be solved without armed conflict or exchange or nuclear blows. Khrushchev is committed to this very proposition. He believes the Soviet Union can win without a shooting war. Never forget that Cuba became a Communist state without the help of a single Russian or Chinese soldier.
Time has now run out. We no longer can enjoy the luxury of debate on what happened in China or Cuba. We must act, as a nation and as individuals, to guarantee that the future will not be a repetition of the past.
Catholics have been asked to join the Papal Volunteers for service especially in Latin America. Protestants are being encouraged by their various denominations to go abroad as lay missionaries. Businessmen are being asked by the federal government to invest more of their capital in private enterprise in Latin America. And Peace Corps Volunteers are at work in eighteen countries south of the border. But these are only a part of the effort we must make. We must now uncover in this country and in Latin America the vitality, energy, and strength necessary to shape this hemisphere’s destiny.
Scarcely a month before Castro imposed a dictatorship on the Cuban people, Pope John told the National Catholic Congress in Cuba: “The face of the earth could change if true charity reigned: the charity of the Christian who shares the sorrow, the suffering of the unfortunate, who seeks their happiness, their salvation, as well as his own. The charity of the Christian, convinced that what he owns has a social function, and that to use what is superfluous to his need in favor of one who does not have the necessities, is not an optional generosity, but a duty.”
I have seen the Maryknoll priests from Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago working with the Indians high in the mountains of the Andes. I have seen them organizing credit unions and savings and loan associations in the slums of Santiago, Arequipa, and Lima. The Franciscans are there, the Sisters of Mercy from Chicago are there, and the Sacret Heart nuns, too. But the magnitude of the challenge far surpasses the size of their response, or ours.
Almost 200 million people live to the south of us. The population is expanding faster than in any other region in the world. The average income of these people is one-ninth that of a citizen of the United States. But statistics are cold. They cannot describe the daily fight for life, the endless struggles to break those ancient bonds of hunger, disease, ignorance, and poverty.
Fifteen months ago I visited a slum outside of Lima, Peru, called “The Mountain.” More than twenty thousand people lived on this mountain. ‘When I got there, I found out that The Mountain was a mountain of garbage. Yet the people living there were not corrupt or depraved. The men were not loafers, or the women sluts. By and large they were decent, respectable people feverishly seeking work, willing to do anything to improve their lot.
Outside of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Caracas. Venezuela, I have stood in the slums on the mountainsides at night and looked down upon sights as fabulous as anything in the Arabian Nights-glamorous neon signs, four-lane highways, soaring skyscrapers, beautiful homes, cabarets, fine restaurants. But where I stood, in the slums, lived three-fourths of all the people, and three-fourths of all the people had neither electricity, nor clean water, nor sewers, nor telephones, nor schools, nor hospitals, nor food, nor hope for the future. After one such evening I said to myself, “If I were a Communist agitator and could not start a revolution in one of those slums in eight months, I’d quit my job.”
The big electric signs at night, the tall skyscrapers, the fancy automobiles, all have English words written on them: Firestone, Sears Roebuck, Esso, Frigidaire, Coca-Cola. The signs of wealth are always in English, while the signs of poverty are written in Spanish or Portuguese.
It’s so easy to explain that contrast in terms of exploitation by the Gringos from the North. It’s so easy when those Gringos isolate themselves. It’s so easy when thousands of those Gringos profited financially for years, and still can’t speak the local language, or eat the local food. It’s so easy when Radio Havana nightly explains the difference between the “haves” and the “have-nots” in the gross simplicities but forceful sentences of Marxism and Communism.
Today a pitifully small band of priests and Catholic organizations are struggling against these elements, struggling to bring about a better life for the people. But let’s face the facts. The Church has not always been on the side of the people. Far too often it has been identified with the status quo, the rich and the powerful, and those who opposed social reforms and political democracy.
The situation is changing, but is the change coming too late? In every country of Latin America there are Catholic priests and laymen fighting lonely battles to educate the ignorant, feed the hungry, and house the poor. They are in the forefront of the struggle. But these are not just Catholics; they are free men helping other men to gain freedom-freedom from human tyranny as well as freedom from poverty, disease, and illiteracy. One proof is the overwhelmingly hospitable welcome they have accorded to the Peace Corps Volunteers-Protestant, Jew, agnostic, atheist, as well as Catholic-who have come to Latin America.
In Chile, in Peru, and in Honduras, priests have frequently provided lodgings and food until the Peace Corps Volunteers could get a place to live. And in one place, a Jewish Peace Corps Volunteer has refused to move from the home of the priest where he had been living from the beginning, because, as he said, everyone in the village had begun to call him “Padre” and he is getting a 25 percent discount at all the stores.
But to assist in this struggle you don’t have to serve in the Peace Corps. We, the citizens of the richest nation in the history of the world, are all responsible -- directly and personally responsible -- for helping the millions in Latin America.
This is not a responsibility which can be left in the hands of the government while we pursue our daily lives and comforts. It is not a responsibility which can be avoided by criticizing foreign aid or applauding the Peace Corps.
Rather as individuals and organizations, we must personally give of our own resources and, what is even more difficult, of our own time. Therefore, I propose that every diocesan chapter of the Knights of Columbus adopt a diocese in Latin America, that you make the work of that diocese an object of your own personal concern and charity. In this way you can give material assistance to the efforts of individual priests and laymen. You can provide Latin Americans an opportunity for education. either in their own country or here in the United States. Your experience and knowledge can be of direct help to those in your adopted diocese who are trying to organize a union, start a business, or launch an agricultural cooperative.
You and your children will thus have an opportunity to broaden your horizons through learning, in a direct and intimate way, of the problems and life of people in other lands. For we have much to learn in the way of the mind and spirit from our brothers in Latin America who have kept alive their deep beliefs despite an adversity which is almost beyond our capacity to imagine. Thus this effort, by bringing us closer to other men, will bring us closer to God.
