Confusing Sponsorships

In common language we use expressions that have affective connotations related to our vision of the world, even if we don’t carry out religious practices. During centuries, in the West as still today in the East, religion and culture could not be separated although it’s legitimate to distinguish each one of them. Religion gave culture its ultimate sense while culture lent religion its language. Every language is culturally conditioned and every culture is informed by an ultimate vision of reality.

People no longer know what they’re saying when the use words such as “sponsor” and they reduce them to the commitment of paying a specific monetary quantity with beneficial ends. Not in a few occasions, this gesture alleviates the tension produced by the news of natural catastrophes, war and hunger victims, sanitary and educational insufficiencies that are perfectly controllable, according to the briefs of the most solvent international agencies such as UNPD, UNESCO, WHO, UNICEF and FAO. It seems to be easier to get rid of a quantity of money than questioning the causes of those injustices, of those development models or those sociopolitical systems that produce innocent victims, oppressed people, exploited regions so that no more than a fifth of humanity maintains an economic growth they confuse with their well-being. The forget that universal solidarity is an ethical imperative that surpasses any religions phenomenon emerged at the time and as a product of a reality that is not liked or of the sublimation of fears of the unknown that later become in believed myths.

The powers of the sovereign State and the institutions succeeded the power of religions. Now it is the large economic and financial groups that dictate their politics to States and, in a collateral way, to the civil society organizations that, with the best will, can serve as a wall against inhuman development programs.

Since three decades ago, we assist to the proliferation of humanitarian associations that promote social justice beyond frontiers and beyond those pressure groups that today decide the States’ policies.

Along with this hope-giving social reaction there are confessional, political and interest groups that take advantage of feelings through the “sponsorships” of children playing with the religious subconscious to obtain funds of questionable administration. They can cause a lot of damage because hope is not of the future events but of invisible things and nobody has the right to hide the interests of soulless people who confuse value with price and development with uncontrolled economic growth underneath noble feelings.

José Carlos Gª Fajardo
Translated by Carlos Miguélez

This article was published in the Center of Collaborations for Solidarity (CCS) on 10/05/2004