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Ignatian Advocacy
I am invited to offer a draft model for and overview of ‘Ignatian advocacy’: advocacy in an Ignatian spirit, therefore relying on the ‘way of proceeding’ developed by St Ignatius Loyola that should permeate all Jesuit activities and apostolates: in this case, the practice of advocacy.
What is presented here is a ‘model’, a framework for a wide range of possible particular advocacy efforts. As such it is intentionally abstract and simplified, tidy whereas life is not tidy. Models are an aid to reflection, no more: complexities arise as soon as they are applied.
Advocacy is part of a broader process. The work of the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), for example, includes not only advocacy but primarily the accompaniment of people in urgent need. It is the commitment to accompaniment and service that gives JRS’s advocacy its credibility. For my own organisation, the Jesuit European Office (OCIPE), advocacy is one element of a mission that includes a general engagement, in and around the institutions of the European Union, on the relationship between Christian faith and political responsibility. This note, however, focuses specifically on advocacy itself, not on its broader institutional context or its necessary complements.
I shall identify six fundamental elements of Ignatian advocacy.
1. It is a critical and constructive engagement with centres of power.
Content
It is critical: something needs changing, or we would not be taking the trouble to do the work. Advocacy is more than ‘comment’, and it is not an entirely open, exploratory conversation, of theoretical interest only: it is directed towards the achievement of some social change deemed necessary. Further, advocacy aims not only at behavioural change on the part of individuals (e.g. those with decision-making authority) but at a certain transformation, even though always inevitably partial and selective, of political structures. Advocacy is part of a search for justice, usually starting with the struggle against manifest injustice.
It is constructive: we are familiar with protest campaign slogans at public events and demonstrations. Such condemnatory expressions may have a limited value in mobilising a mass movement: but they are not themselves advocacy. The organisations that used the tag ‘Make Poverty History’ were simultaneously in dialogue with governments and with the international financial institutions about how this objective might realistically be achieved.
Process
Advocacy is a form of conversation or dialogue: it seeks to include those people we challenge in the conversation, not to reject them. Sometimes, as for example, sheer tyrants may refuse to negotiate; or the overriding need to defend people under threat must be secret. We may still then need to confront oppressors, and protest might have a worthwhile, long-term effect: but confrontation as such is not advocacy. (Advocacy is not everything!) There seems often to be a rhythm between cooperation and confrontation – always accompanied by clarification. It is important that advocates, ‘never break the bridge’.
It engages with the structures of power and decision, at appropriate, perhaps multiple levels – international, national, local; both political and commercial.
Advocacy promotes the equitable sharing of power. The advocacy dialogue seeks not only to rectify some specific wrong, but to build mutual recognition and respect, and to include those groups (or their representatives) which have suffered from the bad situation but have previously been excluded from negotiations.
Early drafts of this paper proposed a distinction between ‘advocacy’ (the promotion and defence of principles) and ‘lobbying’ ( the application of pressure in order to promote or defend interests). However this advocacy-lobbying distinction cannot bear much weight. The usual French term for ‘advocacy’ is ‘le lobbying’! Even in English, different people simply use the terms in different ways. In the USA, for example, ‘lobbying’ is synonymous with ‘advocacy at the governmental level’. It may be less useful to distinguish advocacy from lobbying than to commend an ‘Ignatian practice’ of both advocacy and lobbying.
Instead a somewhat different distinction may be helpful. Lobbying is the direct processing of addressing parliamentarians, officials, executives, etc. This role will often be limited to a few practitioners, and is rarely possible for those at the grassroots. Advocacy is the whole matrix of activities that enable and support such lobbying, including some of the elements discussed below: research, analysis, media communication. In this paper, therefore, ‘advocacy’ refers to the whole infrastructure of activities that support the direct 'conversation' that engages with decision-makers.
2. Advocacy is done from the perspective of the oppressed and excluded, but in an open spirit
Ignatian Advocacy is grounded in fundamental ethical convictions, as an element of the search for justice. These convictions may apply at two levels; foundational moral principles (solidarity, economic and social justice) and juridical principles (national laws, international norms and standards).
It includes an ecclesial perspective – the ‘option for the poor’. When we represent those who have little public voice, we need clarity about the positions of those for whom we advocate, as well as about our own convictions (and we must especially be clear where these two perspectives differ). Therefore we need to stay in touch with value-based local leadership, to ensure that our analysis fully takes account of theirs. The further aim is to enable communities most affected to make their own case. For the principal good being sought is not the reversal of some particular pattern of dominance, but the establishment of a more equitable set of relationships, in which appropriate decisions are made through fairer, more participative process.
Nevertheless, as argued above, advocacy promotes, or sometimes consists of, a real conversation. We have clear views, purposes, allegiances of our own, but we need also to respect our opponents and be open to their views. Only in this way can something new emerge, perhaps some richer and therefore more truthful understanding of the situation.
3. It is a communitarian process
Ignatian advocacy is practised in community, facilitates the building of community, and involves personal encounter with allies as well as with opponents, sometimes across borders. To speak of community here means two things. At the operational level, Ignatian advocacy is a collaboration among different partners: more deeply, it is directed at that overcoming of injustice that allows the building of more inclusive communities. The interaction of, say, a business corporation with its neighbours may itself amount to a denial of true relationships: for example, a mine that discharges poisonous waste into the local water supplies, and thus damages the health and agriculture of local people. Therefore advocacy is not only an ‘issue-based process’. Community is itself an intrinsic value that requires deepening.
Operationally, this community dimension entails:
information-sharing: in the age of the internet, certain types of public information are more widely available than before. But 'inside information, by definition, is not! Which politicians are more reliable partners than others is not disclosed on the websites of any parliament.
campaigning: this may be understood as public (as opposed to secret) lobbying. Campaigning naturally entails close attention to the use of the media. Effective media work can be an instrument of persuasion, even of ‘pressure’. Campaigners need a clear, even simple, public message, no matter how careful the analysis must be that underlies and justifies the message. But ‘Ignatian advocacy’ implies that we are as truthful as possible, that we serve truth as well as justice.
in a globalised world, networking: the various actors pool expertise and complement each other by working on different elements of a situation.
agreement about focus: each group in a healthy network recognises other groups’ relative autonomy. Willing agreement may sometimes be difficult to achieve.
4. It involves contemplation, self-awareness
In the Ignatian ‘way of proceeding’, advocacy is 'spiritual' animated by a contemplative view of the world and its people (contemplative, in that people are appreciated for their own sake and not only for their usefulness to us). The ultimate motivation of an Ignatian practice, inspired by the Gospel, is the good of the other, whom we are called to ‘amar y servir’, just as we love and serve God.
A contemplative approach to situations is also reflexive: that is, it will be aware of our own share in the responsibility for social injustice, so that we do not project all criticism outwards. For we are involved in injustice, and may gain from it whether we like it or not. The Buddhist writer David Brandon, who wrote a book called Zen and Social Work, recalled that his social worker colleagues liked to think of themselves as ‘catalysts’. He commented wittily that they spoke more truly than they knew. A catalyst is an agent that brings about change in chemical processes without being changed itself. In justice work there are no catalysts!
The commitment to social justice may reflect some previous degree of personal ‘conversion’ – that is, in this case, liberation from individual or collective selfishness – but can also result in conversion, through the encounter with colleagues of manifest courage and integrity, and through the element of suffering that often touches those who face squarely the evil of the world and their own part in it. The Jesuit network in Latin America, Fe y Alegría writes of ‘personal and institutional testimony’: in this phrase the idea of ‘testimony’ unites communication, together with the commitment to ensure that our practice is coherent with that proclamation.
Contemplation is never an escape from realities and facts; instead, it empowers us to face them without being dominated by fear. Even animated by contemplation, advocacy nevertheless involves hard work and competence – for example, in the analysis of situations, theories and (not least) the ideologies, the world-views that underlie specific political positions.
5. It has a clear framework of reflection and purpose
Ignatian advocacy is rooted in the principles of Catholic social thought: notably of ‘common good’ (the sum of those social conditions that enable persons and communities relatively thorough access to their own fulfilment) and of the ‘universal destination of the goods of creation’. This latter principle undermines any notion of a ‘right to private property’ on a scale that dispossesses others.
Such advocacy will take seriously the various analytic dimensions appropriate in any given context – sociological, economic, political, but also moral, philosophical and theological. It also requires reflection on personal experience, since our own lives, too, are sources of theology and of political insight.
We analyse the situation that concerns us, in as much complexity as we can grasp, given the necessary time-frame of our action, and the limits of our resources. Since advocacy seeks to be practical, to rectify injustice and suffering, there may well be tension between the refinement of the analysis and its urgency. Advocacy may focus on structural injustice, with a correspondingly long-term perspective, highlighting the need for ‘quality’ research even at the expense of rapid results; or it may respond to immediate threats to people and their rights, in which case speedy work is essential even possibly at some cost in nuance or comprehensiveness.
‘Ignatian advocacy’ is rooted in and directed towards the apostolic action of Ignatian associations, lay movements and religious congregations. Naturally, those engaged in ‘the advocacy dialogue’ itself will not always be involved in practical measures of solidarity, fund-raising, pastoral care, etc. If advocacy is Ignatian it is thereby ‘ecclesial’; and part of the point of being ‘Church’ is that no one can or need do everything.
6. It involves discernment
The Ignatian tradition embodies not only reflection directed towards action, but also feeling. We believe that when we face significant life choices, God's Holy Spirit can enlighten us at the level of feeling about the decisions to be made, and their likely effects. Feeling’, here, refers not to casual preference or whim, but to the deeper desires and passions of our hearts. The Ignatian tradition dwells on the sustained quality of these feelings in order to ‘discern’ which are of God, and which genuinely enrich our lives and unite us with others. Whereas Ignatius himself, in writing of discernment, primarily envisaged the specific life-choices facing an individual, our method assumes that the process is no less valuable when the ‘decisions’ facing us concern the service of justice.
Experience shows that in matters of justice, such feelings usually need to be nourished and tested by personal encounter with the oppressed. It is quite difficult to sustain long-term motivation in the struggle, from a distance, without such personal experience.
It will often also be necessary to discern what level of social remedy we seek to commend. The two poles of this tension are:
‘prophetic’ advocacy, that holds up some ideal state of affairs: even if this is not readily attainable the ideal must be stated, so as to serve as a compass for the direction of current policy
‘pragmatic’ (but still principled) advocacy, seeking certain measurable, incremental changes in specific policies or practices.
This tension is intrinsic. It is important to reject facile attempts to reject specific attempts at advocacy by criticising what they are not. The ‘prophetic’ stance can always be criticised as ‘naïve’ or ‘impractical’, the ‘pragmatic’ stance condemned as ‘compromised’ or ‘short-sighted’. In any given case the challenge might or might not be fair: discernment is required.
Advocacy on justice issues will quickly bring the advocates into potential conflict with vested interests that appear to sustain injustice. Discernment needs to be applied to our own capacity to handle negative or hostile reactions, to our own attitude to conflict and to our ‘enemies’.
Recent Jesuit documents have urged us to see justice as reconciliation, ‘to become instruments of God who “in Christ reconciled the world to himself, not counting their trespasses” (2 Corinthians 5: 19). This is a key challenge. But the more elevated the spiritual language the more there is need for discernment to ensure that it is not betrayed. We must ensure that reconciliation is directed towards a deeper justice instead of denying the claims of practical justice.