Cry of the Earth - Cry of the Poor (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781537276762)

In order to become a priest and missionary I spent eight years in the seminary, two of these in Rome. After leaving the seminary at the end of 1968, I taught philosophy, did volunteer work for CUSO, and left for Chile in 1973 in order to pursue my studies on developing country issues. The experience of the coup d'État of September 11, 1973 that ousted Salvador Allende plunged me into a profound, life-altering crisis. I discovered that the United States, a country whose presidents constantly repeat that their nation is the best in the world-God bless America-readily uses economic sabotage, propaganda, assassination and torture to defend its interests. I discovered that the Canadian Ambassador, Andrew Ross, while openly welcoming the military takeover, was accepting only a dozen of the thousands of Chileans who, desperately trying to escape imprisonment, torture and possibly death, were knocking on his door. I discovered that the Catholic Church, which I had always identified with a universal love that prioritized the marginalized, was clearly siding in Chile with the military by accepting, a mere one week after the coup d'état, to pray with the military junta in a ceremony that was being broadcast throughout the country thanks to the only television station to have survived the coup, Channel 13 of the Catholic University of Chile! After returning to Montreal in the summer of 1974, I published "Chili: le coup divin," a scathing criticism of the complicity of the Chilean Catholic Church in the military coup and participated in a very intense speaking tour. Convinced that one must first understand the world in order to change it, I then pursued my study of developing country issues, focusing on that area which I felt I knew less about: economics. As I had a growing family and needed to earn a living, I accepted, before writing my master's thesis, a job teaching economics at the college level, a career that I ended up pursuing until my retirement. Not surprisingly, how and what I taught in economics was deeply affected by my experience in Chile. Students, I felt, must experience reality in order to understand it. To this end, I created, with colleagues at Dawson College, the North South Studies profile that included a one-month field trip to Nicaragua. Founded in 1993, this profile still exists and, after my retirement in 2011, I am still collaborating with it on a volunteer basis by managing small development projects in Nicaragua.