Participate In Social Healing, Bishops-Ulama Conference Urged

DAVAO CITY, Philippines (Mindanao Examiner / Apr. 24, 2008) - The Bishops-Ulama Conference (BUC) urged educators and religious leaders to actively participate in social healing as an indispensable component of the process of peace in the Philippines, particularly in Mindanao.

“What is imperative and of prime important now is the need for social healing among those involved in the conflict, those who have survived and the victims including women and children,” Davao Archbishop Fernando Capalla, BUC co-convener, said in a circular issued to the Kusog Mindanao Roundtable Conference held in Davao City.

Archbishop Capalla stated that the healing process must begin with the re-education of the minds and hearts and attitudes of everyone in Mindanao about peace and how to achieve it.

He pointed out that violence, in its many forms and methods, severely inflicted psychological wounds in the spirit of many Mindanaoans who belong to the Christian and Islamic faith.

Archbishop Capalla stressed that through these wide and deep wounds, many individuals and groups speak and write words of anger, hatred, prejudice and act in a more violently way even to the point of killing, thus deepening the wounds and aggravating the situation.

He noted, however, that the past and present government has tried to heal these wounds by means of economic and cultural projects like housing, roads, clinics, hospitals, income generating projects, but wounds are still there.

“We believe that the economic and cultural projects cannot heal the wounds,” he said. “There were some attempts at healing the trauma experienced by Christians and Muslims but I still have to find out the result of the healing attempts in favor of the children and no other projects for adults.”

Archbishop Capalla disclosed that the process in healing of wounds involves three main activities; peace as understood in three different cultures-Greek, Roman and Hebrew, peace as a result of reconciliation of individuals and groups and the actual face-to-face encounter of the victims and the victimizers through a respectful dialogue, sincere repentance and mutual forgiveness.

The BUC reaffirmed the Christian perspective expressed in Gaudium Et Spes that peace or shalom is the result of justice, a restoration of equality in the observance of human rights. (Edgar Sara)