By Mario Signorino

ABSTRACT: The business and power interests which oppose emergency action to save three million lives have found potent allies in the about face of the Communists and the Third World policy of the Catholics, a mixture of welfarism and generic revolutionism. The Communists now say they are placing all their bets on the reform of the laws and the existing structures, but there is very little reform and a lot of power sharing among the parties in their project. The role of wet blankets is given to the partisans of peace during the Fifties such as Castellina and Anderlini and the Catholic-Communists Masina and Codrignani of the so-called independent left. Anderlini even proposes dividing up the starving: the Sahel to the Catholics, Somalia to the Socialists, Mozambique, Ethiopa and Angola to the PCI [Communists].

(NOTIZIE RADICALI No. 66, March 14, 1984)

We should have been able to guess that the Communists would be the principle enemies of our last-ditch effort on behalf of the starving. We could also have taken for granted that they would be joined by that other potent factor of delay made up by the incapacity and bad will of party men who yet paid lip service to our intentions. But that among the hardest adversaries we would have the executives of the Church's welfare organisations - this no, this we could not have foreseen, and even today it still astonishes us.

Yet it happened, in an incredibly harsh way, and at once. Hardly has the Piccoli-Fortuna-Cicciomessere bill been presented when Mons. Nervo, vice-president of Caritas [a Catholic relief organisation, ed.] opens fire. And he does so in an apriori way, immediately upon his return from a trip to Africa, without even having read the bill. And he keeps coming back to the subject followed by all the rabble of the Catholic and lay voluntary associations, taking every opportunity to turn a debate or a confrontation into a very harsh attack, often at the border line of denigration of the proposal for "Three Million Lives To Save". What astonishes is that among the accusations there is that of "welfarism", considering that Caritas, by its very nature, neither can nor does anything else.

With these attacks Caritas puts itself in the lead of the motley but not very noble front of the workers in the field, the under-development experts, the organisations and institutes that have founded a profession on the world's starving and fill their own budgets with substantial financing for them. And it is this coagulation of interests, with its explicitly converging activities, which has given the breath of life and substance to the Communist opposition to our bill. Against the decree of "Three Million Lives To Save" Caritas has utilised the weapon of "doubts and perplexities" deriving from its long experience in the Third World. Legitimate doubts and perplexities if they are used to adequately increase policies to the size and urgency of the problem. But deleterious if the experience so meritoriously acquired is used to defend the status quo against all attempts at innovation. No one can consider the present aid policies sufficient; no one can imagine that they will only take a little retouching

when it has been shown that they not only do not relieve, but often worsen the condition of absolute poverty, malnutrition and death from starvation in ever-greater areas of the Third World.

The deaths of millions of people is the true result of all the actions and experience operating for decades in the field of aid. None of them can decently be offered as an example. An example of what? Of how the industrialised North continues to kill millions of people while saving its soul with a few "good actions" and big business? Certainly there must be prudence, but above all in evaluating the only new policy proposal that in recent years has managed to put the problem at the centre of political debate, the only proposal that aims at radically changing a tragic and unbearable situation.

And instead, incredibly enough, Caritas supports the policy of small steps and long-term goals and reduces to mere technical terms a great question of what is primarily moral policy. Its positions reveal a fundamental diffidence towards government actions which shows that a certain Catholic culture and historical role in Italian life - from the Risorgimento to Unification to Fascism - are still very much alive even if perhaps in an unconscious way.

Their demand is that state action should be reduced to the level and quality of that of associations, institutions, and private operators. It is an archaic culture which is blind to the present needs of both states and societies, and above all incapable of conceiving of policies (or of "politics" in general?) which are up to the measure of the problems and needs of men.

Acting thus, Caritas is undertaking an operation that has very little charity in it: it is trying to give the action against hunger not the dimensions that the seriousness and urgency of the problem demands, but dimensions corresponding to the capabilities of the voluntary associations and public organisations which have in any case already demonstrated their inadequacy.

It is a typical reflex action of workers in the field and identical with that of the organisations that live on commissions for "aid to the Third World". The problem they ought to be solving takes second place as do those who are dying of starvation. The important thing is to maintain "a correct and tested approach" without risking anything new. Do the years meanwhile pass and the deaths increase? This, it seems, ought not to be the main concern. But what is the adjective "Christian" supposed to mean?