While Americans watched with horror the events of Sept. 11, 2001 tragically unfold, Maryknoll Father Peter Byrne was standing in the front yard of his mission assignment at the time, a Maryknoll home for girls in Lima, Peru.

At 9:15 a.m. a sister on staff ran out of the home and told him that something terrible had just happened in America. An airplane had crashed into a building.

A few minutes later she ran out to him again and announced a second plane had hit another building.

“It was a terrible human tragedy,” said Father Byrne as he recalled the event, stopping a beat before making his next comment. “But did you know, are you aware, that on that same day around our world 28,000 kids died from hunger, from contaminated water, from curable disease, thousands more died of AIDS and violence, and there was nothing in the news?”

Father Byrne made these remarks during an April 1 presentation on “The Humanity and Human Rights of Children” at a “Together in Ministry” gathering held at the Diocesan Pastoral Center.

The event, sponsored by the departments of Catholic Faith Formation, Catholic Schools and Evangelization, was attended by Catholic school principals, parish religious education directors and youth ministers.

The Maryknoll priest made his remarks based his more than 40 years of experience in Peru ministering to abandoned children and the past 13 years as a children’s human rights activist.

He said people need to realize that “children are real people, right from the beginning.”

“The Gospel challenge in looking at this issue of children’s rights is not what do we do about some children,” he said. “It’s saying how do we change and how do we change the world so these children can live with dignity.”

A starting point, he suggested, is understanding the sacredness of life does not end with conception.

“Just as abortion is unacceptable when a child is in the womb, the aborting of children once they’re born, making them throw-away children is unacceptable,” he said.

Father Byrne said individuals need to recognize the countless acts of violence against children going on in the world, the United States, and in local communities every day. He then ticked off some illustrations:

• 600 million children in the world are enslaved as child laborers.

• 43 percent of African American children in the U.S. live below the poverty level.

• 30,000 young women, most under age 18, many as young as seven, are classified as sexually enslaved women by the U.S. State Department.

“The most serious overall violence against children is us not speaking in defense of their lives,” said Father Byrne, who referenced Pope John Paul II’s 2004 Lenten message appealing to Catholics to express “greater concern for the needs of children in our own families and in society as a whole.”

He said whether its kids on the street selling candy and begging in Lima, Peru, or children on the streets in New York, Chicago or Sacramento, people need to break the silence about their suffering.

“We may find them inconvenient or they may put us in a little economic jeopardy, but they are the measure of our faith, the subject of evangelization,” he said.

Father Byrne said that the Catholic community needs to oppose proposed state budget cuts to health services for children and public education.

“Those kids in public school are ours. Those children who go to the public clinic don’t belong to our group or our neighborhood or our church, but they’re our kids,” he said. “We have to pay our fair share of taxes in order the children of our country live in dignity.”

During an interview with The Herald, Father Byrne spoke of the need for the church to be “a home place for children” — a safe place where they will be protected and nurtured.

He recalled one Sunday morning in Lima seeing children begging outside the church as Mass began. When he asked the children why they weren’t coming inside, he was told, “We don’t belong there.”

“The church should be providing that place — not just coming into the building, coming into the family of the church,” Father Byrne said, “a place where children are loved and cared for, embraced and encouraged to be who they are, given a place to grow.”

He said the Sacramento Diocese has a tremendous opportunity to address children’s human rights issues during the synod to be convened in October at St. Isidore Parish Center in Yuba City.

At that time laity, clergy and religious will be designing a master pastoral plan to guide the diocese through the first decade of the 21st century.

“People are asking for faith education,” Father Byrne said. “The well-being of children in the world — not just in the pews or in Catholic schools — is faith education.”

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