Practise what you preach

‘This is the first (commandment): Listen, Israel, the Lord our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord you God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: You must love your neighbour as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.’

Mark 12:29 - 31

There are some people who always have a lot to say about how others should behave, so much so that that we put these words into their mouths: Do as I say, not as I do. It is a putdown of course, yet, believe it or not it has a foundation in sacred scriptures. In fact Jesus suggests that (when it comes to the Scribes and Pharisees) Do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach but they do not practise (Matthew 23).

Here is a list of things that we ought avoid, do or aspire to (this is far from comprehensive):

·      Don’t smoke or do drugs

·      Drink responsibly (and sparingly) (and don't drink and drive)

·      Save real $$ for household purchases and use your credit card judiciously

·      Avoid junk food (where possible)

·      Eat fresh fruit and vegetables

·      Exercise regularly

·      Contact your parents regularly

·      Affirm your friendships

·      Be faithful to your partner

·      Tell those you love that you love them

·      Read for pleasure

·      Don’t watch too much TV

·      Travel wide and far

·      Grow old gracefully

·      Be polite at all times

·      Make your vote count

·      Don’t speed (and leave your phone alone)

·      Laugh a lot

·      Pray with your family

·      Use sunscreen/wear a hat

·      Visit your parents/grandparents

·      Get to know your neighbours

There is no tick-a-box and no prize if you do any or all of the above. But if you put these into practice then your example would indeed be worth following. The problem Jesus has with the Scribes and Pharisees is that they made living a good life seem so difficult, so miserable. They surrounded what seemed like commonsense with so many rules that it was almost impossible to live the ‘good life’ they proclaimed.

There might be further maxims, proverbs or pieces of good advice that you might add to the list. These you might have learned from your parents, teachers, friends, books or just by being aware of yourself and others. There can be no doubt that Jesus gets right into the heart of what makes a good life. It’s by loving others just as I love myself. The key here is, of course, knowing how to love yourself. As parents we have our child’s self-esteem in our hands, we have the capacity to build up resilience, we have a once in a lifetime opportunity to teach them to love. It’s never too late. Live what you say.

Peter Douglas

Combating a cycle of despair

by Ruth Gledhill

Modern-day slavery

A young girl, almost as soon as she is old enough to walk, goes out to work in the fields with her mother and sibling. It is unrelentingly hot and the work is grindingly monotonous. In tilling and hoeing a small patch of unforgiving land, the family expend more calories than they will ever gain back from any produce they manage to grow. There is nothing left over to sell. A few years later, the two girls are teenagers. A man turns up in a people carrier. He offers them a free ride to Europe. Not ­surprisingly, they go.

This happens every day in Edo State in southern Nigeria. The youngsters end up in London or other cities in Europe and the Middle East. Some never make it, thrown out of the vehicles and left to die because they have got ill, or drowned after their boat sank in the Med. The human tragedies engendered by this cycle of poverty and despair have been observed with growing concern for several years by priests and religious sisters in Edo, where 80 per cent of the people are Catholic, and in London, where the church-run Caritas Bakhita House provides a safe space for women escaping human trafficking to begin the recovery process.

Now, transformational work is being done by the Church in both Nigeria and the United Kingdom, working together in a ­creative partnership to develop projects designed to tackle the problem at source. Behind the partnership is the Santa Marta Group, an alliance between the Church and the Police established in April 2014 by Cardinal Vincent Nichols and the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales to combat human trafficking and modern slavery.

In Edo State, the Catholic Church is one of the few parts of civic society that is functioning properly. Nuns have set up weaving businesses; bishops and local churches are overseeing the running of fish and arable farms; priests and laypeople are setting up and managing solar driers; monks are taking on mushroom farming. And they are all training young people, creating sustainable jobs and giving them reasons for staying in Nigeria. A large meeting of the Santa Marta Group, the African Regional Conference, is taking place in Abuja, Nigeria, on 14-15 November. It will embed more firmly the church-led projects that are already chalking up successes in addressing the problem.

Cork-born Patrick Lynch, an auxiliary bishop in Southwark Archdiocese and an outspoken defender of the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, tells me when he first realised the scale of the problem of trafficking. “About 12 years ago it became clear to me that human trafficking and human slavery was a major issue. Living and working in London, I couldn’t help but be increasingly aware of the exploitation of agricultural workers, cleaners and many other vulnerable individuals.”

Bishop Lynch is one of the people behind the GrowEdo project. This has been launched by the Dioceses of Benin, Uromi and Auchi in collaboration with the Santa Marta Group, and trains young men and women from all backgrounds in how to grow crops and manage plots of land. Working beside Bishop Lynch are Fr Mark Odion, a member of the Missionary Society of St Paul, founded in Nigeria in 1977, the project coordinator; a London-based lawyer, Eamonn Doran; and an agricultural expert, Richard Byrne.

One of their first meetings was in Peterborough about five years ago, Bishop Lynch told me. “A young Eastern European police officer told us that gangs were going to his country and recruiting people by making them all sorts of promises. They bring them over in coaches and then take their passports as soon as they have come through the tunnel.” It was, he told me, “a red flag”.

On the other side of the problem is Africa. According to some estimates, more than 60 per cent of the Nigerian women found in ­prostitution in Western Europe come from one part of Nigeria: Edo State.

Fr Odion is one of the key people bringing things together in Edo. He discovers who are the key agents and organisations and what partnerships will be needed to get a greater awareness of the problem and the solutions. GrowEdo is a pilot project. The hope is that in time it will be rolled out to other parts of the Church in Africa. The forthcoming conference in Abuja will explore how the whole African Church can be helped to replicate what is being done in Edo State.

Eamonn Doran explains: “We not only want to focus on looking after victims when they get to Europe, we also want to stop them from becoming victims in the first place.” Doran first went to Edo with Fr Odion about three years ago. “We were told of communities where there are no young people. They just wanted to get out. When we drove about there was no sign, in rural areas, of any economic activity at all. What we ate was largely imported food. The land was being farmed in a nineteenth-century, even an eighteenth- century way – people with pickaxes trying to till the ground.” What was needed was know-how, a little capital and some encouragement to persevere and learn the skills: “Some hope, if you like.”

Fr Odion describes going to Mass at the cathedral in Uromi, where the problem is at its worst. “On the way, you will pass a garage. A people carrier comes there two to three times a week. It takes young people on their journey north. Then they go north-east to Libya.” Young boys and girls starved of income and livelihood must find a way to survive. “Either they engage in robbery or they choose to leave the country,” he says. “Ninety per cent choose to leave. But they get into the wrong hands.” Fr Odion grew up in Uromi, and knows its problems at first hand.

Fifteen young men and women have begun a one-year programme in “agri-preneurship”, including learning basic farming skills, new techniques, and how to use social media to market the goods produced. In Benin and Uromi Dioceses, mushroom-growing is being explored in partnership with a traditional medicine company, Paxherbals, run by a Benedictine monastery. In addition, the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus have been commissioned by the Archbishop of Benin, with some funding from Santa Marta to run a five-year campaign to reach 500,000 young people in schools, towns and villages, educating them about the perils of trafficking in the hope they can be persuaded to remain in the state while the new agribusinesses develop.

The work exemplifies the “Three Ps” of the Santa Marta Group – Preventing, Protecting, Partnership. The importance of the latter ­cannot be overstated. Nothing can be done without the backing of the local chiefs, the archbishop and bishops, and they have all thrown their support behind the project. The Santa Marta Group has provided the sisters with a laptop and projector, a car, an electricity generator, and a five-year allowance for a driver. The marketplace is where the ­community comes together: the sisters go there and talk to as many of the youngsters as they can, as well as visiting schools, hospitals and other places. They warn constantly about the risks of being trafficked, and have been so effective that some traffickers have already left the area. But the Church wants the ­traffickers stopped altogether. Hence the new agribusinesses, to give young people a real incentive to stay.

A small-scale development like a GrowEdo project is the most effective way to undermine the temptation to leave to escape poverty, Doran believes. “The only way you can combat trafficking is by long-term ­economic development. The need is for small-scale, community-based development from the grass roots up.” It is probably only the Catholic Church and the promises of better things to come offered by projects like GrowEdo that keep the young here. As Doran says, “Relatively small amounts of capital and agricultural know-how about how to do it slightly differently goes a long way.”

For further information on the GrowEdo Project, go to http://santamartagroup.com/partners/nigeria-benin-project-grow-edo/

Ruth Gledhill is The Tablet’s multimedia editor. This article first appeared in The Tablet of 27 October 2018.

I want to see!

Jesus said to him in reply, "What do you want me to do for you?"
The blind man replied to him, "Master, I want to see."

Mark 10:51 - 52

American novelist and essayist Flannery O’Connor (1925 – 1964) was a Catholic writer who wrote from the depth of the American South and indeed from the depth of her faith. Her writing often focused on questions of morality and ethics. What makes her writing exceptional, however, is ‘how she challenged the self-assurance of her Catholic and secular readers. Her stories expressed her sense of sacrament and of the possibility of redemption in the midst of the strangeness of ordinary life’ (Richard O’Brien).

It is not that either sacrament or the sacred are missing from our ‘ordinary lives’, it is usually because we fail to see it there. For the community of Mark the evangelist, Jesus reveals himself, sometimes ‘secretly’, until his mission is fully unveiled. Indeed it is more through action than word that Jesus is truly revealed.

The story of Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46 – 52), in fact, epitomises the way in which Mark ‘feeds out’ information – the crowd is trying to keep this blind beggar from calling out for Jesus. He is rebuked, but he persists in calling out for Jesus, and he reveals Jesus’ messiahship in calling out, ‘Jesus, son of David!’ Bartimaeus is healed and he follows Jesus.

There are many levels to this story from the literal to the allegorical, but I like the idea, that like Flannery O’Connor, there is a narrative waiting to be told.

Undoubtedly we all want to have sight, but to see and understand, to have insight is something that we learn. On 14 October Pope Francis canonised seven new saints, including Giovanni Battista Montini (Pope Paul VI), Oscar Romero, martyr, Archbishop of San Salvador and the first saint of El Salvador. And while these lives have extraordinary merit and now recognition, it is in our own ordinary lives that Jesus walks with us. His vitality reaches into our acts of charity through to our concern for our neighbor and our care for the poor, into our conversations with the lonely, into the advice and encouragement of our children and those we mentor, into the generosity with which we give our talents to the community and into the joyfulness in the way we accept what life gives us.

It takes insight to see the hand of God at work, as each action ‘feeds out’ a sense of his presence, and those who recognize that hand do call out, ‘Jesus, son of David!’ and in doing so acknowledge the redeeming power of God, of the possibility of salvation. It is in the strangeness of our ordinary lives that God is truly revealed.

Peter Douglas

On the road to Emmaus

by Christopher Lamb

The Synod in Rome

During his first sit-down interview, at the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Francis made some remarks about synods which, at the time, were largely overlooked. “Synodality should be lived at various levels,” he told Antonio Spadaro SJ in August 2013, six months after election. “Maybe it is time to change the methods of the Synod of Bishops. Because it seems to me that the current method is not dynamic.” Five years on it is becoming clear that the Synod of Bishops has become one of the primary structures in Francis’ programme of church renewal.

When it comes to youth, which the current synod is focusing on, the Catholic Church could be described as the IBM of the religious world. In the early years of personal computing, lots of people bought IBM computers. They were solid, stable and did the job. Today, particularly in the West and in Latin America, many have switched to new, more nimble tech providers – just as many are switching from the Catholic Church to evangelical or charismatic Churches.

“Young people are disconnected, or seem to be disconnected, from the Church because they feel it isn’t relevant,” Sebastian Duhau, 22, from Australia and the youngest anglophone participant at the synod, told me. “In Australia, we’ve got Hillsong [Pentecostal church] and other movements that see young people flock to them on Sundays; there’s obviously something that’s attracting them. We can learn from that.” The question is whether the Church can develop the software and technology that will connect with young people. Can the synod provide the platform for a missionary Church imbued with the joy of the Gospel?

This Synod, participants say, is a strange beast: it’s neither a decision-making parliament nor just a debating forum; under Francis it is a space for listening and discernment. It seems like going on retreat, with a generous helping of church politics thrown in, and a complicated Roman structure, including “auditors”, “relators” and “special secretaries”.

Despite its limitations, most find that the new process works. “It’s an act of faith,” one participant said. Critics argue that too much focus on synods opens up the Church’s internal divisions, detracts from the office of the papacy and will get the Church bogged down with infighting rather than being focused on evangelisation. The two synod gatherings on the family in 2014 and 2015 saw fiery exchanges, and even a protest letter from a group of cardinals. To its defenders, the more open synods of the Francis papacy are exposing the divisions that were already under the surface.

“We’re walking together, and we are doing it as a family,” the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago, Blase Cupich, one of the most prominent synod fathers, told me. “It’s giving people a growing sense that we are moving into an adult Church, not an infantile Church. This is the way adults deal with differences, they don’t look to Daddy to solve all their problems, or hide them because they are afraid of conflict.” He added: “I grew up in a big family of nine children. We made sure people said what was on their mind, even if they disagreed with one another, and we found a new kind of unity because we could respect each other despite the fact we had disagreements.”

The youngest members of the family are certainly having a say. In the synod hall, a group of 18- to 29-year-olds sit at the back. They cannot vote, but they are making their voices heard. They have developed a “clap-o-meter” where each bishop’s intervention in the gathering is greeted with whoops, cheers or just polite applause. It is a slightly cheeky example of the organic “synodality” in action so loved by this Pope.

“A Church that does not listen shows herself closed to newness, closed to God’s surprises, and cannot be credible, especially for the young who will inevitably turn away rather than approach,” Francis told the synod fathers at the opening of the gathering. He shows his appreciation by raising his arms and clapping at the more inspiring interventions, and he has intervened himself on at least two occasions. The synod officials have not released what he said, but according to those inside the hall he synthesised the important points from other speakers in what was described to me as a “model of listening”.

It’s easy to assume that popes have all sorts of levers in front of them which they can pull to make things happen. The truth is much more complicated. For a reform-minded pontiff faced with an ancient bureaucracy dominated by the mantra “We’ve always done things this way”, there are limited tools at his disposal. One of these is the synod. Biblically-rooted, it has its origins in the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus who, as they “talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them”.

Local synods have been a feature in the life of the Church for centuries, but it wasn’t until the Second Vatican Council drew to a close in 1965 that Pope Paul VI announced the establishment of the permanent synod of bishops. Under John Paul II and Benedict XVI, bishops complained that while the gatherings raised important questions, the synod conclusions were tightly controlled by the Roman Curia. Under Francis, the first Latin American Pope imbued with his own synodal and collegial experience as co-ordinator of The Aparecida Document – the dynamic missionary blueprint produced by the bishops of Latin and Central America in 2007 – things look very different.

The synod process starts with consultations in the local churches, with Francis wanting more “synodal”-style structures from parishes upwards. Bishops are called on by the Pope to speak with “frankness” and not to be afraid to have disagreements.

Francis walks from his Casa Santa Marta residence each day to attend the synod sessions, greeting participants at the door, drinking coffee with them, posing for selfies and exchanging jokes. But the gathering taking place in Rome’s autumn sunshine and sporadic showers comes after a torrid summer of sexual abuse disclosures. The discussions, as Cardinal Vincent Nichols told me, have taken on a “tone of realism” and “self-critical reflection”. Clerical sexual abuse will feature in the final synod document.

For the first time, two Chinese bishops are attending the synod. Watching the participants come and go is an instructive exercise. Young people from every continent arrive together with bishops in mini-vans; Religious walk up to the hall in their habits and the odd prelate turns up sporting a cassock with trainers. The overriding sense is of a global, colourful and multidimensional melting pot of a Church. Francis is trying to realise the dream once expressed by the late Jesuit Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini of a Church which is “synodal, poor among the poor, inspired by the gospel of the beatitudes, leaven and mustard seed”.

To the Pope’s critics the message is the Bishop of Rome “walking with, and listening to” his flock, and placing those intent on undermining his papacy outside the ecclesial reservation. It was no coincidence, perhaps, that the Vatican chose the first weekend of the synod to issue its one-two punch fightback to Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s allegations against the Pope, with an announcement of an internal inquiry into the Archbishop McCarrick files on Saturday, and releasing Cardinal Marc Ouellet’s fiery response on Sunday. Then, a week later, Francis canonised two pillars of the contemporary Church, Oscar Romero and Paul VI, who both epitomised a Church focused outward, and close to the marginalised. 

Under Francis, synods are not just meetings taking place in Rome every two years, concluding in a papal document published several months later. Synodality is a new expression of the Church’s life and mission, a way of inviting constant dialogue and discernment. The next formal synod gathering will take place a year from now, and it will focus on the Amazon. The role of women and the ordination of married priests are both on the agenda. The Church’s synodal journey is just beginning.

Published in The Tablet of 17 October 2019