The Costa Rican Catholic Church, Social Justice, and the Rights of Workers, 1979-1996

6: CECODERS

CECODERS CECODERS, hand-in-hand with the worker. —Banner carried by CECODERS representatives in Labour Day parade (May 1, 1996) The poor peoples make a dramatic accusation against the rich peoples. —Pope Paul VI, Populorum Progressio (quoted on a poster in the CECODERS office) T he Centro Coordinador de Evangelización y Realidad Social —better known in Costa Rica by its acronym, CECODERS —was created in 1984 by a decree of the Fifth Archdiocesan Synod.1 The centre was part of the archdiocese’s Vicaría de Pastoral Social, itself formed by synodal decree to co-ordinate the efforts of all of the Church’s social pastoral agencies based in the Archdiocese of San José. CECODERS officially began its work in October 1985. From the very start of its existence, Padre Orlando Navarro Rojas has acted as director of the centre and has been instrumental in shaping its mandate to include a number of programs aimed specifically at workers in Costa Rica. In this chapter, I describe CECODERS, its structure, and the wide array of activities that it has organized over the years as part of the Church’s pastoral social. Then, focusing particularly on the centre’s education, training, and accompaniment programming, I examine the complex manner in which CECODERS’ pastoral options are related to the archdiocese’s conservative positions on social justice and workers. The Centre’s Structure and Programming CECODERS, Cáritas, the ESJ23, and Hermandades de Trabajo are the key agencies that have been brought under the co-ordination of the Vicaría de Pastoral Social.2 CECODERS is not only the youngest of these organizations , but, with the exception of the nearly defunct Hermandades de Trabajo , is also the smallest. As of 1996, CECODERS maintained only eight people on its permanent staff, while the ESJ23, the closest counterpart to the centre within the Vicaría, employed more than one hundred. Moreover, and in contrast to the impressive facilities housing the ESJ23 in several loca6 Notes for chapter 6 start on page 220 109 06_sawchuk.qxd 2004/09/16 15:56 PM Page 109 tions throughout the country, CECODERS operates from a cramped complex of offices and meeting rooms on the grounds of the Church of Santa Marta Y Griega in San José. Despite such modest appearances, however, CECODERS is a stable Church organization that has long provided an impressive range of programs and services to its constituents. Part of this is owing to the fact that, while staff size is kept low, members are able to draw on the support of others in the Church and the community at large. Thus, while Padre Navarro is the only member of the clergy formally employed at the centre, he can count on a long-standing network of approximately ten other priests who voluntarily help him with fundraising and organizing activities.3 The core staff (consisting of administrators, a statistician, a theologian, and sociologists, of which Padre Navarro himself is one) frequently collaborate with members of a broader pool of social scientists and journalists. These latter individuals will either donate their services to CECODERS or work for the centre on a contract basis as the need for their expertise arises.4 Taken together, this interdisciplinary network of professionals provides CECODERS with resources and labour power far beyond what the organization ’s low operating budget would suggest. Over the years, the centre’s staff has come to concentrate their energies in three main areas: social scientific research; support for small scale productive projects among disadvantaged sectors of the population; and education, training, and accompaniment programs. Examining each of these areas in turn can reveal the depth and breadth of activities encompassed in the pastoral social of the centre. x Social Scientific Research Even before CECODERS was an official Church entity, Padre Navarro recognized that the first step in effective social pastoral planning must be an accurate understanding of the socio-economic reality experienced by Church members. He believed that providing Church leaders with sociological diagnosticos (diagnoses) of their target populations would be the key to organizing pastoral strategies that truly responded to their needs.5 The delegates to the Archdiocesan Synod agreed that the Church’s social assistance and human promotion programming should be informed by socioreligious research, and they translated this conviction into the mission assigned at the synod to CECODERS.6 With this, CECODERS was on its way to becoming the main social scientific research centre in the Costa Rican Catholic Church. In the beginning, the diagnosticos...