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Pastoral orientations on internally displaced people

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Introduction

1 At the end of 2018, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), 41.3 million people were internally displaced worldwide,1 the highest number in recorded history. The Church recognizes the definition of internally displaced people (IDPs) provided by the United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (1998): “persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized state border.”2

2 A further root cause of internal displacement should be added.
Governments and private sector actors, including private militias, extremist groups, and multinational companies, are sometimes responsible for planned or arbitrary takeover of certain territories. The purpose is often infrastructure or other building projects, but also mining, intensive agriculture and land grabbing. The takeover may happen without properly consulting and justly compensating the affected communities or providing them with resettlement and rehabilitation, thus creating internal displacement.

3 In recent years, the international community has acknowledged the magnitude of IDP needs and made significant efforts to address them, including the Plan of Action for Advancing Prevention, Protection and Solutions for Internally Displaced People.3 We acknowledge its priorities, particularly its promotion of the participation of IDPs in decisions that affect them, national legislation and policy for the protection of IDPs, collection of data and rigorous analysis on internal displacement, and addressing protracted displacement.

4 The Catholic Church also recognises and appreciates the efforts of the international community to build a legal framework for the protection of IDPs, as well as the engagement of many civil society actors in responding to internal displacement. Nonetheless, they cannot be a substitute for the primary role of national governments and local authorities.

5 The magisterium of the Catholic Church has already considered the plight of IDPs, together with other categories of migrants, and has produced reflections and instructions concerning their pastoral care. The Pastoral Orientations on Internally Displaced People (POIDP) focus exclusively on IDPs, highlighting some new challenges posed by the present global scenario and suggesting adequate pastoral responses. The main purpose of these orientations is to provide a series of key considerations that may be useful to Bishops’ Conferences, local Churches, religious congregations, Catholic organisations, Catholic pastoral agents and all Catholic faithful in pastoral planning and programme development for the effective assistance of IDPs.

6 The POIDP are deeply grounded in the Church’s reflection and teaching and in its longstanding practical experience responding to the needs of IDPs, both past and present. The majority of the magisterial quotes mentioned in this document refer explicitly to IDPs; others originally deal with other categories of migrants, but they can be fairly applied to IDPs. The POIDP draw also from the longstanding practical experience of many Catholic organizations working in the field and from the observations of representatives of Bishops’ Conferences. While approved by the Holy Father, the POIDP do not pretend to exhaust the Church’s teaching on internal displacement.

7 The POIDP consider a series of challenges faced by IDPs today, each followed by a list that calls upon the Catholic Church to take specific actions in response. Challenges and calls for responses have been organised according to Pope Francis’s four verbs for migrants: welcome, protect, promote and integrate. These four verbs have been used as a roadmap in pastoral planning for international migrants and refugees, and, with this document, they extend the Pope’s pastoral concern to IDPs. This document also contains a section dedicated to cooperation and teamwork, which are the foundation of successful projects and are key to effective and efficient service delivery for IDPs.

8 In this document, the expression ‘Catholic Church’ means and includes the official Church leadership, the Bishops and Bishops’ conferences, priests, religious sisters and brothers, officers and heads of organizations and each member of the Catholic Church.

9 The Catholic Church also has a motherly care for all those who have been displaced by the effects of climate change and climate change-related disasters. However this particular situation of vulnerability has not been specifically considered in the present POIDP, because the M&R Section intends to address it in a separate document to be produced in the near future.

10 The POIDP only consider the short-term and long-term responses to challenges posed by internal displacement which has already taken place. They do not consider the actions that the Catholic Church should take to prevent internal displacement from happening altogether. That is, the root causes or drivers of internal displacement are not addressed in these guidelines. Nonetheless, the Church recognises and reiterates the right to life, liberty and security of persons in their country of origin. All people, regardless of their migratory status, should be able to remain in their home in peace and security without the threat of being forcibly displaced.