Chile: triumph for religious freedomChile: "It is necessary to promote Christian values in the new Fundamental Charter".In an increasingly secularized world, where the family is under attack and the inherent dignity of the human person is scorned, Community and Justice stands as an effort to defend what is good, true and beautiful, even if no one else does.
Defense of non-negotiable securities
Community and Justice is a Chilean NGO that was born in 2013 to promote and defend the vision of the Social Doctrine of the Church on human rights, with special emphasis on the "non-negotiable values" spoken of by Benedict XVI, which today are under constant attack in the public sphere: life, family and freedom of Catholics and the Church. It is not a study center closed in theory - a very necessary work, but done by others - but an organization for the struggle at the forefront of the political and juridical arena against the dominant ideologies, contrary to faith and human nature. Its members, mostly young lawyers, are professionally dedicated to this cause, mainly through strategic litigation, legislative counseling and interest management in the National Congress.
With nine years of history, thank God we have been able to position ourselves as a serious and professionally rigorous organization willing to be faithful to its principles without fear of "what people will say". The world of human rights is often seen as being captured by ideologies opposed to natural law and Christianity; Community and Justice represents an attempt to defend human rights as an expression of human dignity, from a realistic point of view and in fidelity to the Magisterium of the Church.
Cristóbal Aguilera -who was coordinator of the Legislative Area and is currently a member of the Board of Directors- has said that our aim is "to denounce and confront injustices that today go unnoticed and are even claimed as individual rights. We see it as a way of seconding the words spoken by St. John Paul II -our patron- to the Chilean youth: "Christ is asking us not to remain indifferent to injustice, to commit ourselves responsibly to the construction of a more Christian society, a better society", with the certainty that -despite the challenges of our times- love always wins, even when it seems impossible, as the victory of the crucified Christ seemed impossible.
Trust in Providence
The origins of the corporation, and we try to maintain that spirit, were marked by a blind trust in God's Providence on the part of those who had the opportunity to carry out this project with barely enough means to subsist. This is what the founder, now a member of the Board of Directors, Tomás Henríquez, tells us:
"Once one month's salary had been saved -thanks to the contributions of the directors and our first donor, Professor Mario Correa Bascuñan-, the compromise adopted was that I would accept the task, in exchange for the directors donating from their own pockets the money to cover the following months, if I could not find funds on my own (...). As some know, the directors of Community and Justice have never had to resort to their own funds for the survival of the Corporation since that time. From that day forward, we have never lacked to pay a fair salary to all those who have had the courage and generosity to work here.".
Although throughout our history we have gone through many failures -in human eyes-, such as the approval of abortion on three grounds, Community and Justice has contributed in more than one initiative oriented to the common good. For example, the influence of our Legislative Area was decisive in the rejection of the comprehensive sex education bill -which made mandatory a single model of sex education "secular and non-sexist" from kindergarten level, even against the will of parents-; also key was the joint effort of the legislative and judicial teams to declare the unconstitutionality of some articles of the bill on guarantees for children, which violated the preferential right and duty of parents to educate their children.
With international relevance
We have also participated in several cases of great international relevance, some of them in the Inter-American Human Rights System, as in the case of the Uruguayan Jacqueline Grosso, who was unable to recover the body of her daughter, who died in a non-consensual abortion and was considered biological waste. Recently, we had the opportunity to be the only NGO in the world to participate, as the only one in the world to participate, as amicus curiae of the U.S. Supreme Court, along with 140 leading academics from various countries, in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organizationwhich could reverse the abortion permit that has been in place since the case of Roe v. Wade in 1973.
Perhaps the greatest victory of all - because it defends and promotes the highest good that exists on earth - was a Supreme Court ruling that protects the presential character of the Mass and the sacraments, as part of the worship due to God in the Catholic creed, protected by the freedom of worship. In the context of health restrictions due to the pandemic, the participation of the faithful in the Eucharist had been severely restricted, except for very specific cases, with discriminatory capacity compared to other activities. The sentence affirmed, for the first time in a ruling in the history of Chile, the essential character of presence for Catholic acts of worship, which are a fundamental right that cannot be affected in its essence.
A light of hope
With a constituent process underway, all these rights are in grave danger and the challenges facing this small Corporation are immense, but we have already seen that God is capable of writing law with crooked lines. This future, which does not look very positive, offers a glimpse of hope. In a world that has lost its sense of self and is sailing aimlessly towards anywhere, people - without knowing it - are calling for a horizon of meaning that only Christ can give them. Community and Justice has a much more modest work, but we believe that it is a grain of sand with which we can contribute to the Reign of Christ in the world.
Community and Justice can be found here: Website: www.comunidadyjusticia.cl ; Twitter: @ONG_CyJ ; Instagram: @comunidadyjusticia ; Facebook: Comunidad y Justicia
Community and Justice Researcher
