Charismatics, my brothers!
You who love to pray and love to listen to the Lord, stay awake and alert, as he so clearly stresses, we should in the Gospel,
– so that you may never use prayer as a pretext for neglecting social and apostolic action;
– so that you may not criticize those who, without forgetting eternity, remind us that eternity begins here and now and are endeavoring to build up a more just and human world, the kingdom on earth;
– so that you will refuse to classify Christians simplistically, according to the labels « horizontalist” or ” verticalist » which people try to attach to them;
– so that you do not allow your Christian brothers to be persecuted and treated as subversive and Communists merely because they are uniting not in order to trample on the rights of others, but to prevent others from trampling on their own rights.
And more positively:
– Strive to understand and help those around you to understand, in these times of generalized violence, that the most glaring violence of all is, in fact, the « institutionalized » destitution which prevails throughout the Third World.
– Strive to discover and to help others to discover the black areas of destitution right in the middle of the affluent countries.
– Strive to understand and help others to understand that the only effective way of avoiding armed violence is to encourage and practice active, courageous non-violence and to exert liberating moral pressure.
– Help to denounce and combat – always peacefully but courageously – the arms race, and particularly the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
– Help to denounce the idolatry of national security, which some governments present as the supreme value, superseding all other values; no genuine democracy can coexist with this idolatry which holds that the end justifies such means, as kidnapping, torture and assassinations.
– Do everything you can encourage, personally and actively, the studies and researches which are giving the world a clear view of the unjust structures about which it knows so little; do this in the knowledge that, without this clear vision, the liberating moral pressures will remain superficial and ineffective.
– Draw your strength from the Renewal in the Spirit, so that you may help the Church increasingly to overcome its triumphalist temptations, and to be unsparing in its efforts to become a living presence of Christ at the service of men and of God’s glory.
– Help those Christians whose conflicting tendencies have become polarized to understand that prayer and Christian commitment are intimately united, that a horizontal arm does not of itself form a cross, but that both arms extended together from the cross of Christ, embracing both God and mankind in his love!
Bishop Helder Câmara
