FRANCAISComité catholique contre la faim et pour le développement - History
1961-1969
-June 1961, France: the Catholic Committee against Hunger (CCF), which takes its present name in February 1966, is launched after Pope John XXIII and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) called for action against famine in 1960. Presided by Jacques Ménager, bishop of Meaux, then archbishop of Reims, the CCF is first influenced by the ideas of Louis-Joseph Lebret, a former navy officer and a Dominican father who inspired the encyclical Populorum Progresio at the Vatican II synod. The Committee brings together several associations at present the Catholic Action for Children (ACE), the Women’s General Catholic Action (ACGF), the Catholic Action of Independent Circles (ACI), the Catholic Action of Members of the Christian Education (ACMEC), the Workers’ Catholic Action (ACO), Christians of the Rural World (CMR), the Blind’s Crusade, the Education teams, the French Guides (GdF), the Christian Student Youth (JEC), the Independent Christian Youth (JIC), the Women Independent Christian Youth (JICF), the Marian Youth (JM), the Workers’ Christian/Feminine Youth (JOC/JOCF), the French Student Catholic Mission (MECF), the Sea Mission, the Christian Movement of Pensioners (MCR), the Movement of Christian Executives and Leaders (MCC), the Eucharistic Youth Movement, the Nest Movement, the Rural Movement of Young Christians (MRJC), the Pontifical Missionary Works (OPM), Pax Christi, the French Scouts (SdF), the National Secretariat of Public Education Chaplains (SNAEP), the General Secretariat of Catholic Education (SGEC), the Society of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, the National Union of Centres of Studies and Social Actions (UNCEAS), Living the Gospel Together Today (VEA).
-From 1962, Ivory Coast: the INADES (African Institute for Social and Economic Development) is funded by Jesuits in Abidjan and soon to be backed by the CCFD. Before extending in Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Chad and Togo, it starts in Ivory Coast with literacy campaigns, correspondence courses, and the translation in local languages of agricultural textbooks. Yet the Institute, which takes the name of INADES-Formation, considers that education is not enough to defend peasants rights. It wants to organise people so that they can have a say regarding the prices of their products on the market. This position is clearly political. With financial resources that reach € 3,8 and 3,6 million in 2001 and 2002, the INADES-Formation will for instance watch the management of the Doba oilfield in Chad and participate to a new Land Act with a peasants trade union, Imbaraga, in Rwanda in 2002.
-From 1963, Burkina Faso: still close to traditional missionaries, the CCF supports a catechists’ centre for agricultural training. With time, the Committee will becomes more independent from missionary networks in Africa and extends its operations to other continents by hiring directors for Latin America in 1970 and Asia in 1973. The CCFD will also try to share its funds equally among the three poorest continents on the planet.
-From 1965, France: the CCFD launches a magazine, Faim et développement (“Hunger and Development”), then a monthly newsletter, CCFD Info, not to mention its backing to Jesuit reviews close to the theology of liberation in Latin America with Christus in Mexico, Encuentro in Peru and Mensaje in Chile.
-From 1967, Vietnam: while the American Army fights with Saigon against the communist regime in Hanoi, the CCFD works both in the north and in the south. In 1968 along with CIMADE, the LDH, the French communist party, the CGT (General Confederation of Workers) and the MRAP (Movement Against Racism and for Friendship amongst Peoples), it takes part in chartering a ship bound for the north. Some will say that this ship brought technical help to the communist fighters in the south. The CCFD assists political prisoners in the south, but not in the north where Christians are kept in jail. After the Viet-Minh victory in 1975, the Committee finances railway equipment, including wagons likely to carry Hanoi’s military troops who go and invade Cambodia in 1979. In Saigon, the CCFD works closely with Quynh Hoa, a former minister for health of the provisional revolutionary government.
-1968, France: Philippe Farine becomes the first non-religious president of the CCFD for nine years. In his retrospective for the fifteenth anniversary of the CCFD, Bernard Holzer calls this period a “long walk”, referring to the Maoist revolution. A journalist, Philippe Farine is in 1945 the youngest deputy in the Constituent Assembly, as a member of the MRP (Republican People’s Movement). He joins the Socialist Party in 1974, where he works on a comity for immigrants and in the CERES (Centre of Studies, Research and Socialist Education) whilst considering the CCFD as a sort of catalyser of political, trade unionist and cultural commitments. Such was his description during a meeting at UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) in Paris in 1977. Under his presidency, the CCFD becomes a pressure group; it calls to question society and starts showing political positions publicly despite reluctance from the Secours catholique, the Society Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, the ACI and the JIC in June 1968. For the historian François Mabille, “the struggle against communism” had been “a hidden agenda of the catholic involvement in development”. The Church had lost the working class in the 19th century and did not want to lose the third world in the 20th. François Mabille’s study stops in 1969 and so doesn’t show how, in the course of the following decade, the CCFD uses class struggle to seduce the poor. The Committee, according to its own rhetoric, wants to free all developing countries “from all coercive structure and all alienations”.
