c. 1999 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops ended their annual four-day fall meeting Thursday (Nov. 18) calling on people of faith to become involved in ending poverty and hunger and rejecting the”me-first”politics pervasive in contemporary culture and society.”Charity’s minimal demand is justice,”said Bishop Joseph Sullivan, auxiliary bishop of Brooklyn, N.Y., who chaired a committee that drafted the call,”In All Things Charity: A Pastoral Challenge for the New Millennium.””The gospel … urges us to be persons for others, deeply committed to the well-being of all members of the human family,”the bishops said in the pastoral message.

It said the barriers preventing billions of women, men and children from sharing the Earth’s bounty will be lifted only when believers put their faith into action.

It asked Catholics especially to deepen their commitment to serve their neighbors by signing and promoting the Jubilee Pledge for Charity, Justice and Peace, a program of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops _ the new name the National Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted in a restructuring of the conference and its social action arm, the U.S. Catholic Conference.

The bishops also called on Catholics to learn about the church’s social teachings.”Our social tradition remains unknown to many parishioners, and parish social ministry remains the task for too few,”the documents says.

The statement calling on Catholics to a deeper commitment to ending poverty in the next millennium was one of several actions taken by the bishops to set a context for the American church in the coming years.

Most controversial of those actions was the bishops’ approval of a set of norms tightening local bishops’ control over Catholic colleges and universities in an effort to ensure the Catholic identity of the church’s institutions of higher learning.

The norms must now go to the Vatican for approval. A previous version was rejected by the Vatican because it did not give bishops more control, especially in approving the theologians who teach at Catholic colleges. Even if the Vatican approves this set of rules, however, it is expected to be several years before they are specifically implemented.”It is disappointing that the bishops did not respond to the appeal of theologians for further dialogue with them prior to the vote on the document,”said Margaret Farley, president of the Catholic Theological Society of America in a statement Thursday.”Many theologians hoped that discussions on a scale comparable to the discussion between the bishops and Catholic college and university presidents could resolve the difficulties the document contained,”she said.

Bishop Joseph Fiorenza of Houston-Galveston, president of the bishops conference, told a news conference at the end of the bishops meeting that dialogue would be continued and that a committee or committees, including both bishops and Catholic educators, would develop a process for implementing and making more specific the new rules if they are approved by the Vatican.

While the education issue dominated the meeting, the bishops also took action on a number of other areas.

For example, the bishops approved spending $100,000 to implement on the parish and diocesan level their statement,”Faithful Citizenship,”which aims at increasing Catholic participation in the political process.

The bishops will mail”Faithful Citizenship”kits to some 20,000 parishes encouraging nonpartisan programs of voter registration, education and involvement along with a set of election”do’s and don’ts”for parishes.”Faithful Citizenship,”released by the bishops’ administrative board in September, outlines a set of 10 questions with which citizens can gauge candidates’ positions on issues ranging from abortion and capital punishment to the challenges of poverty, health care and America’s role in the world.

Also, for the first time, the full body of some 270 bishops called for an end to the economic embargo of Iraq and Fiorenza said he expected the bishops to continue to call for an end to the economic isolation of Cuba as well as Iraq.

The bishops, citing what they called”an unprecedented situation”in the United States _ one in eight Americans is at least 65 years old _ also issued a statement affirming older people and pointing to the resources the elderly bring to society.”Growing numbers of healthy, active older persons are challenging our stereotypes of later life,”said Bishop Joseph Delaney of Fort Worth, Texas.”We urge society and the church to utilize the talents and experience of older people, and we urge older persons to enrich their own lives by serving others.” The new statement coincides with the observance of 1999 as the United Nations International Year of Older Persons.

CS END ANDERSON