In this Issue:

Convention 2006

Alaska's Bishop Mc Donald, keynotes 2006 Convention

Nominees for Diocesan Offices

Resolution Alert! Due in Diocesan Office by February 3

Other Stories

Ministry of Hospitality: St. Paul's Newport

Listening: King's message spans Americas, Panama's bishop declares

Haitian institute director killed in Port-au-Prince

Trinity Institute explores 'The anatomy of reconciliation' Jan. 30-Feb. 1

Commentaries

From the Bishop: Daddy, Why can't I go to Fun Town?

Reflection: Riding a bumpy camel

X-ercizing: Advent Lessons

Meeting God in Pascagoula, Mississippi

Diocesan Calendar

Past Issues

Listening: King's message spans Americas, Panama's bishop declares

By Pat McCaughan

The struggle for justice and freedom continues to link those deprived of “the opportunity to dream” across the Americas today, Panama’s Bishop Julio Murray told the congregation gathered at L.A.’s Cathedral Center for its annual King Day observance.

The “triple evils of poverty, racism and war,” against which the Rev. Martin Luther King fought, “still plague all of us today,” Murray told the congregation, hosted by Bishop Suffragan Chester Talton.
“My friends, the work is not over,” Murray said. U.S. economic policies continue to exert social, political and economic pressures on Panama and Latin America, “especially the poor and excluded. The rich keep getting richer. In Panama, we don’t talk about the middle class anymore. The poor class lives in poverty and we try to stand in solidarity with them.”

The underclass dreams “of building houses and living in them, in their country. They dream of the opportunity for education for their children, in their country. They dream of the dignity of getting a job and sustaining a family, in their country. They dream of raising their children in a serene life-sustaining environment, in their country,” he said. King’s ethic of love and nonviolence ignited a spark among the poor and excluded which spread across Africa, Asia, Central and South America and the Caribbean in a common struggle for justice and freedom, he said.

“Many of us turned, looked to King. We had no voice, no face of our own. The struggle of the movement in the United States by King gave people out of the U.S. in the Americas the opportunity to reclaim our voice again.

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