JDPC (Justice, Development and Peace Commission)

The concern of the JDPC Ijebu-Ode with these issues derives directly from the deep concern of the Catholic Church with the development of peoples. In Populorum Progressio, the 1967 Encyclical in which he set up the pontifical Justice, Development and Peace Commission, Pope Paul VI, declared the concern of the church with the development of peoples. This concern was particularly with “the development of those peoples who are striving to escape from hunger, misery, endemic diseases, and ignorance; of those who are looking for a wider share in the benefits of civilization and a more active improvement of their human qualities; of those who are aiming purposefully at their complete fulfilment.” He charged the commission with the task of “bringing to the whole of God’s People the full knowledge of the part expected of them at the present time, so as to further the progress of poorer peoples, to encourage social justice among nations, to offer to less developed nations the means whereby they can further their own progress.”
The JDPC Ijebu-Ode is an organisational manifestation of this concern of the church’s. We work to name and address the evils of our time in line with the life and teaching of Christ, to bring to the oppressed and the suffering the concrete reality of the love of Christ, to practice the love of Christ beyond the mere preaching of it. Our work in respect of poverty, human development, democracy, and human rights draws directly upon the Church’s call for a charitable response by the people of God to the cry of the poor, the injured, and the vulnerable. Poverty – and the hunger, ignorance, disease, and fear that are its manifestations – desecrate the God-given dignity of human beings and deny them the full flowering of their potential as beings in the image of God the Creator Himself. Injustice and human rights violation also contribute to this dehumanisation while, in addition, generating in their own capacity social antagonisms and conflict within the society, thus endangering peace and security and making more difficult the task of ensuring social conditions that enable people to live in dignity.
Pope Paul VI identified these conditions clearly in describing the simple desires of the oppressed of the world: “Freedom from misery, the greater assurance of finding subsistence, health and fixed employment; an increased share of responsibility without oppression of any kind and in security from situations that do violence to their dignity as men; better education – in brief, to seek to do more, know more and have more in order to be more: that is what men aspire to now when a greater number of them are condemned to live in conditions that make this lawful desire illusory.”The work of JDPC Ijebu-Ode is to help bring these conditions to reality.