Archbishop Timothy Dolan, freshly returned from participating in the funeral Mass of Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, spoke with reporters about his two-day visit to the country. As chairman of Catholic Relief Services' Board of directors, Archbishop Dolan was representing the American bishops at the request of the Church in Haiti.
Archbishop Dolan first took time to express his admiration for the Catholic workers present in the country. Far from being solely outside specialists and missionaries, “the good chunk of those over 300 Catholic relief workers are not Americans but Haitians, because that’s part of the genius of Catholic relief services, that we tap into the industry, strength, competence, the generosity of the local people,” he said. Many of these workers have lost their own homes and possession.
The Catholic Church in Haiti was dealt a severe blow, with not only Miot of Port-au-Prince perishing, but many priests and seminarians, according to the Catholic News Service. Archbishop Jose H. Gomez of San Antonio, head of the USCCB Subcommittee on the Church in Latin America, detailed some of the tragic setbacks for the Church, including the destruction of major cathedrals in Port-au-Prince and Jacmel. Five other churches and two major seminaries were destroyed, as well as convents and some Catholic schools.
As for his own assessment of the situation on the ground for the Haitian people, Archbishop Dolan said he had experienced “profoundly, the sorrow, the darkness, tragedy, and death of Good Friday, and, the beginnings of the light, the radiance, the hope of Easter Sunday. My experience has been a bit of both.”
Archbishop Dolan also described praying over the collapsed wreckage of a neonatal unit with grieving mothers.
As for signs of hope, the archbishop said he was touched by the great generosity of the American people, as well as the American military personnel. He noted in particular “the professionalism and downright tenderness of the American troops” distributing goods and protecting refugees. The New York Times has some excellent video of the Navy hospital ship the U.S.N.S. Comfort and its efforts to provide emergency medical help to Haitians, despite diplomatic hurdles with the Haitian government.
Slowly, Haiti is rising again. Banks have reopened. The larger supermarkets have begun to sell food again, and even cell phones stores are back in business as people try to reconnect with one another. Nails, generators, flashlights, (and of course alcohol) are in high demand as the country continues to rebuild, in many cases, from the ground up.
Archbishop Dolan pleaded for all Americans to remain generous and focused on the people of Haiti as the story will eventually fade from the limelight.
So what will happen going forward, when the cameras leave, when the front pages return to health care coverage or the next big story, and the Anderson Coopers of the media have no more children to carry heroically through the streets?
Catholic Relief Services, as it has been doing since the 1950s when no one was looking, will continue its work in the largely Catholic country.
Obviously, an international effort will coalesce to resuscitate Haiti, and this has already been a source of controversy.
A donor conference occurred Monday in Montreal, with representatives from the EU and the U.S., including Secretary of State Clinton and 14 donor nations. An initial proposal set out a 10-year, $3 billion rebuilding plan. Many world leaders, Secretary Clinton included, urged caution, especially in light of what many viewed as the wasted efforts at foreign aid into Haiti in the past, a country which remains one of the poorest in the world. A formal needs-assessment will be commenced in the coming weeks by members of the World Bank, U.N., and Inter-American development bank, which will help shape the international response.
One can only hope that the assessment will be more nuanced than simply pinpointing the right dollar amount, but will instead focus on rebuilding the institutions of the society that will foster economic independence and prosperity, as well as government accountability.
For some, the history of foreign aid has been fraught with misplaced incentives and corruption. Bret Stephens of the Wall St. Journal discusses some of the factors behind the complicated calculus of foreign aid in a piece on January 19th. He notes that:
For actual Haitians, however, just about every conceivable aid scheme beyond immediate humanitarian relief will lead to more poverty, more corruption and less institutional capacity. It will benefit the well-connected at the expense of the truly needy, divert resources from where they are needed most, and crowd out local enterprise. And it will foster the very culture of dependence the country so desperately needs to break.
Debates over the shape of foreign aid however, can afford to wait. As Fr. Robert Sirico noted in a piece for the National Review, concerns over foreign aid are a bit premature with condition on the ground as they are, but at some point that serious debate over exactly what foreign aid is doing needs to occur:
We are a very long way from that, and this catastrophe has set Haiti back even further. However, this is an opportunity to build a society that is prosperous, industrious, virtuous, and free. The unromantic truth is that charity does not really ameliorate poverty. Rather, it provides a necessary and temporary fix for an unusual problem. What Haiti needs are the institutions that provide protection and cushioning in cases of emergency. Most of all, it needs to develop economically.
Right now, what is needed is emergency relief and prayer. As Haitian Bishop Pierre-Andre Dumas said this week in an article from Zenit:
At the moment it's all about the emergency, but one day the questions will be about reconstruction. That doesn't mean rebuilding things as they were before; instead we have a chance to build a better Haiti in which people are at the heart of everything.
Paul Ciarcia
Photos Courtesy Catholic News Service
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