“In a world where ideologies have collapsed, in which meta-narratives disappear – as Lyotard says – and there is general distrust in large institutions, the question about ultimate ends – those that allow roadmaps to be put together – is becomes fundamental.” This is how Suroeste Magazine is presented, a project of the NGO Comunidad y Justicia, from Chile.
Within this framework, and under different categories, Suroeste brings together articles that seek to “contemplate the depth of transcendence, the unique character of each consciousness, the beauty of our faith, the wonder of the truth that science and culture show us.”
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To this end, his articles delve into the thoughts of great personalities of the Catholic world. Among them, Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic writer JRR Tolkien, and the Christian author CS Lewis.
One of its managers, Vicente Hargous, spoke with ACI Prensa and explained that the NGO Comunidad y Justicia, from which the digital magazine project started, “is dedicated to the promotion and defense of Human Rights according to the perspective of the doctrine social of the Church.
“Therefore, we focus especially on the goods that the Church itself has considered to be ‘non-negotiable’, as Benedict XVI says for example in The Sacrament of Charity: life, family, religious freedom, the right of parents to educate their children,” he listed.
“We focus especially on the defense and promotion of these rights, both in the political arena, mainly through legislative advice in Congress; as in strategic litigation before Courts, that is why our work is mainly advocacy work,” she explained.
The organization’s scheme, Hargous acknowledged, meant that many times “one ended up being an institution that reacted to evil, to try to prevent evil, rather than to promote good.”
However, he continued, “we knew that in reality our task has to be oriented towards the positive, towards the promotion of goodness, of truth, and that this promotion is done with beauty too, with the beauty that good and truth deserve. ”.
This is how Suroeste emerged, a magazine that belongs to the organization, but at the same time “is a different brand, has its own aesthetic, and was born with the purpose of promoting, not only life, family, but also Catholic culture, a Catholic vision of politics, of the economy, of society, of the family, of life.”
The intention was to make “a magazine that, without being clerical, is not afraid to call itself a Catholic magazine, and therefore spread the Catholic perspective on different topics, admitting debates on economics, on politics, on literature as well, on art.” he summarized, thus creating a community of Catholic authors who seek to “defend the position of Catholicism in the public sphere.”
Although the majority of readers are Chilean, it is presented as a magazine with an international focus, which is why it is also read in Mexico, Argentina, Spain and the United States, among other countries.
Another purpose of the magazine is to rescue the thoughts of certain relevant Catholic authors – such as JRR Tolkien, GK Chesterton, León Bloy and Joseph Ratzinger – and to promote “the tradition in which Catholicism could be born in our region, which It is the Hispanic tradition, through which Roman culture and also Greek philosophy come to us,” explained Hargous.
These are not academic texts, but what the magazine seeks is to share “articles that serve wide dissemination for a university audience.” In that sense, the lawyer explained, “they are not articles with endless quotes or with an excess of technical words, but we try to make them as light as possible, as easy to read, and hopefully as entertaining as possible also in the style of the pen,” he noted.
At the moment, the distribution of the magazine is only digital, and those who wish to read it and subscribe can enter the website https://revistasuroeste.cl/.
For more information, you can also enter their social media accounts: Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) y Facebook.
Juliet Villar
I am a journalist, with a degree in communication from the National University of La Matanza in Argentina. I have work experience in non-governmental organizations. Since 2016 I have been dedicated to Catholic journalism, first at the Argentine Catholic Information Agency (AICA) and, since 2022, as ACI Prensa correspondent for Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia.