Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

d) The Duty of Love
Love obligates the individual to contribute to development aid to the best of his or her abilities
and in his or her own way. From a theological point of view, there is not only a solidarity
of mankind in sin, on which theologians say profound things in the doctrine of original sin,
but also a solidarity of mankind in love, which has received only little interpretation thus far.
The more mankind in the industrial age becomes a unity, the more people of foreign races and
civilizations are also our neighbors, and the more Christian love must grow beyond family,
relatives, neighborhood, village, and nation and bend down to the need which people in other
parts of the earth are suffering.
2. Forms of Development Aid
The chain of misery can be broken only if the following measures are carried out in worldwide
assistance:
a) Cooperation of all Nations
- An increase of agriculturally arable acreage. Experts think that the amount of acreage on
earth that is utilizable as farmland could be doubled.
- The improvement of farming methods through mechanization, irrigation, plant protection,
control of epidemics, fertilization, and the like.
- A change of ‘refined eating habits’ in favor of the hungry. In industrial states, 300 to 400
million tons of grain are consumed as cattle fodder in meat production each year. Are fattened
calves and pigs more important than human beings?
- A considerable expansion of development aid, even if it entails heavy sacrifices. The sentence,
„Every man is neighbor to himself,“ will have disastrous consequences for the future
fate of mankind.
- A decrease of defense expenditures. In the year l973, 207 billion US dollars were spent on
defense throughout the world. By the year l979 , defense expenditures had far more than doubled
to 5l8 billion US dollars, and, in l98l, 650 billion US dollars were spent on defense
worldwide according to the figures of the International Institute for Research into Peace
(SIPRI) in Stockholm. Tensions in the world are increasing and spurring on the arms race.
Record increases are therefore to be reckoned with in this realm of expenditures for l983.
- The contribution to development aid by rich oil-producing countries, among which sums in
the billions have accumulated.
The difficulties that hamper the realization of this program are great: high prices for agricultural
machines and fertilizers on the world market, capital shortages, increases in the price of
crude oil, and too little development aid - it does not even amount to one per cent of the gross
national product of the wealthy states.
b) Rejection of Neocolonialism
With great earnestness, the encyclical Mater et Magistra warns against every kind of neocolonialism
which abuses development aid for the purpose of interfering in the political conditions
of the developing countries with „ the thought of domination.“ Such a procedure „would in
fact be introducing a new form of colonialism - cleverly disguised, no doubt, but actually reflecting
that older, outdated type from which many nations have recently emerged.“ Technical
and financial aid must be granted unselfishly and „for the purpose of helping the less developed
nations to achieve their own economic and social growth.“ Only in this way can there be
success in „the formation of a world community, in which each individual nation, conscious
of its rights and duties, can work on terms of equality with the rest for the attainment of universal
prosperity“ (nn. 172-174).
Economic development aid should not begin with the establishment of prestigious large-scale
enterprises, but commence by fostering labor-intensive measures in the infrastructural realm :
the building of roads, bridges, railways, aqueducts, and so on. At the same time, numerous
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