Cardinal McCarrick says education is necessary for survival of humanity

Photo caption: Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick

By Mary Ann Wyand

“Planting good trees” through education, morally responsible leadership and respect for the environment at home and abroad will make the world a better place now and for future generations, Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, archbishop emeritus of Washington, D.C., told 300 people during a Nov. 21 speech in Indianapolis.

“Just as good trees are important for the land, for food and for the survival of crops, so education is necessary for the survival of the human race,” he said. “Planting a good tree and educating a person have many things in common. They are both essential for the health and welfare of our world.”

Cardinal McCarrick was the keynote speaker for the first Semler Lecture on Leadership at the University Place Conference Center on the IUPUI campus. The program honored St. Pius X parishioner Jerry Semler of Indianapolis for his distinguished educational and leadership contributions to the Church and community for more than four decades.

The retired cardinal, who serves on the board of Catholic Relief Services, recently returned from a fact-finding visit to Lesotho, formerly called Basutoland, an impoverished and mountainous country surrounded by South Africa.

While there, he toured a village where CRS would like to build a dispensary to administer anti-retroviral medicines that combat AIDS in the population.

“The terrible pandemic of AIDS is unfortunately truly rampant in that part of the world,” Cardinal McCarrick said. “… AIDS has cut down, specifically, groups of people in their 20s and 30s, and life expectancy in this area is well below 40 years. The older people not only have to take care of the children, they have to make sure there is enough food to go around for everybody.”

In Lesotho, he said, “the head of a household could well be the oldest surviving child, who at 12 years old becomes the caretaker of his little brothers and sisters because his parents … have been the victims of AIDS. It’s a sad part of the world, but it’s an important part of the world because these are our brothers and sisters.”

The desert region there is unproductive, he said, and the absence of trees is a sign of the poor state of the land.

However, he said, a masterful tree and a master teacher can make a difference in the lives of countless people.

“In the place of good soil, you need a child’s imagination,” Cardinal McCarrick said. “In the place of life-giving water, you need a teacher with patience. In the place of the warmth of the sun, you need a community that really cares.”

Indianapolis is that kind of community, he said, because much has been done with urban Catholic schools to provide quality educational opportunities for children from low-income families.

In recent years, the public school system in the District of Columbia has been struggling, the cardinal said. “In spite of great expenses of federal money, which made the cost per child one of the highest in the nation, the outcomes were completely unsatisfactory.”

Concerned people raised funds for scholarship assistance for students from low-income families, he said, which has enabled parents to choose a public school that is producing good results or transfer their children to a private or parochial school.

“Over the course of three years, this system has produced enormous benefits for the children,” the cardinal said. “Perhaps the most important thing it has done is given a challenge to the public school system, which has reacted very well and where progress is being made, thank God, in just about every part of the city.”

Teachers with the virtue of patience and a community that cares are the key ingredients for helping children learn, he said, and grow up as responsible adults.

“It’s very much the same, I think, with good trees and good people,” Cardinal McCarrick said. “Just as it is important to have good trees, it’s important to have good leaders. … Are we educating people today to take leadership in the future? What kind of leaders are we going to have?”

Trees with strong roots are like courageous leaders,

he said, because they hold things together, give to others, provide protection and stability, take the heat, and spread beauty in the world.

“A good leader provides ... protection with the values and stability that people need so they can live a good and happy life,” the cardinal said. “… A good leader has to be a person of values, … [and] be unafraid to stand for those values and promote them with others. A good leader has to be someone who cares for others. … A good leader holds things together in good times and in bad. A good leader brings to the community beauty and class and dignity and even love.”

Keep planting good trees and bringing forth good

leaders, Cardinal McCarrick urged. “Keep doing what you’re doing here because it seems you’re doing it well.”

Three challenges face the leaders who will arise from this generation, he said. They must promote civility, help the poor throughout the world and pass on a healthy

environment to future generations.

“We are truly living in a world of globalization, and it must be globalization with a conscience,” he said. “As long as 2 billion people in this world must live on less than $2 a day, as long as a little less than 40 million

people in the United States go hungry every day, and as long as terrible diseases and pandemics … kill thousands and thousands of people every 24 hours, we cannot afford to build for ourselves a shelter from the real world

outside. We need to reach out to that real world or we will throw away the chance for lasting peace and stability.”

Leaders must take up the causes of the underdog and fight for the rights of all human beings, he said, wherever they live and whatever their race, culture or language.

“As we talk about globalization and the needs around the world, there is another area that is becoming not just important but critical as we look to the future of our civilization,” he said. “The leaders of today cannot walk away from the environmental problems of our time lest there be no one to solve them until it is too late. … The greatest threat is to our children and our children’s children.”

The growing ecological crisis reveals the urgent need for a new solidarity throughout the world, he said, or the future of the human race will be endangered.

“As is the case in planting good trees, that combination of warmth and soil and water is sometimes hard to come by in every part of the world,” he said. “Thank God it flourishes in abundance here in Indiana. That’s why I’m confident that good trees and great leaders will also abound from this community as they have in the past, as they must in the future, for the welfare of all of us in the years ahead.” †