The Sacrament of Brother

Adapted from Br Johannes' reflection at our monthly vigil outside the Home Office in February 2026.

Less than two weeks ago, I was in the refugee camp in Dunkirk, speaking with a young man from West Africa. He told me how he had tried to cross from Libya to Italy on a small boat—perhaps a fishing boat. The crossing went wrong. In the middle of the Mediterranean, people around him were crying, fading away, slipping into the deep cold silence. He and fourteen others survived. Around a hundred people disappeared into the water. That experience has marked or perhaps scarred his life forever. Next year, we may well be standing here naming some of those very people.

When I stand here outside the Home Office, this is not, for me, a political action. It is not driven by anger, even though righteous anger has its place. What we do here is liturgy; prayer, lament. Not hidden away in private, but in public, so that society can see and hear that there is real reason to lament.

And why here? Because this is the place where decisions about borders, belonging, and human life are made every day. For many of our refugee friends, this building symbolises waiting, anxiety, and judgment: judgment on their lives, their stories, and their casework. That is why we keep vigil here.

Here, too, we proclaim the Gospel. Jesus never told us to keep the Good News inside the church walls. He told us to bring it to those who need it. Our Gospel today speaks with disarming clarity. And I hope the people inside this building can hear these words—especially those who are people of faith, of any faith.

Jesus is asked: “Which commandment is the first of all?” He answers by quoting the Shema, the heartbeat of Jewish prayer:

Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

And then He closes this off with a verse from Leviticus: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’

He is not adding a second idea. He is revealing the visible form of the first. The Shema becomes flesh in the neighbour.

Jesus binds the two together as one movement of the heart. To love God is to love the neighbour. To love the neighbour is to love God. Because God is love, and without love, we do not know God at all.

It is vital to emphasise this double command today,  not least because there are people in this country, in the United States, in Russia, and elsewhere who are hijacking religious symbols, the name of Christ, and the very word ‘Christianity’ to drive an anti-Christ agenda, to launder their racism and their nationalism in the language of faith.

Mother Maria Yelizaveta Skobtsova

Mother Maria Skobtsova understood this with prophetic sharpness. She challenges us! What we do in church, at Mass or, as the Orthodox call it, ‘the Divine Liturgy’, where we celebrate Christ’s self-giving love, Christ’s self-emptying on the Cross, she links directly to what we do outside the church walls.

She wrote: ‘If at the centre of the Church’s life there is this self-giving Eucharistic love, then where are the Church’s boundaries? Where is the periphery of this centre? … The whole world becomes the single altar of a single temple, and for this universal liturgy we must offer our hearts, like bread and wine, so that they may be transformed into Christ’s love … and given as food for the world.’

For her, the altar is never confined to stone and sanctuary. The whole world is the altar.

Every street, every detention centre, every refugee hotel, every immigration office (and we can extend this to every prison, hospital, homeless shelter, or family where abuse happens) - every place where a human being waits in fear or hope, these are the places where Christ walks out of the church and into the world. And if He walks there, then we must walk there too.

To quote these powerful words of Pope Francis: ‘The Church (and this is all of us Christians) is called to come out of herself and go to the peripheries, not only the geographical ones, but also the existential peripheries: those of the mystery of sin, of pain, of injustice, of ignorance and indifference to religion, of intellectual currents, and of all forms of misery.’

Mother Maria believed the Eucharist is not only something we receive; it is something we become. The bread and wine are transformed so that we may be transformed, our hearts offered, our lives broken open in love, our presence given as nourishment to those who hunger for dignity, safety, and recognition.

So as we stand here, we are not outside the liturgy or the sacred. We are in its very heart. This piece of pavement here becomes our altar. The people whose names we speak, whose stories we honour, whose suffering we refuse to ignore, they are not interruptions to our prayer. They are the icons through whom God looks back at us.

To love God with all our heart means returning again and again to the Source, letting God’s mercy shape our inner being, praying with honesty, even praying with our unbelief. But that love cannot remain interior. It must spill outward. It must take the shape of hospitality, gentleness, solidarity, and practical care. It must take the shape of sleeves rolled up, of advocacy, of refusing to walk past those wounded by systems that should protect them.

To love God and to love neighbour is not sentiment. It is incarnation. It is the conviction that every person— man, woman, trans, straight, gay, refugee, migrant, detainee, survivor, stranger—is a sacrament of Christ’s presence. In them is the ‘very icon of God’, as Mother Maria Skobtsova said: ‘every poor person is the very icon of God incarnate in the world’.

And as a Church, when we remember the Passion—the suffering of Christ —when we hold up the Crucifix or the Cross, it is a symbol not of identity, but of struggle. As Fr Donald Senior CP wrote: ‘To remember the Passion is to stand with the crucified peoples of the world.’

So the question before us is simple and searching: what does love look like here?Not in theory, but on this pavement, in this city, in this moment.

Love looks like showing up. Love looks like refusing to abandon people who are neglected and suffering. Love looks like bearing witness when others turn away. Love looks like insisting that every human being is our brother, our sister, our kin. Love looks like believing that the boundaries of compassion are always wider than the boundaries of policy, borders, politics…

If the whole world is the altar, then every act of mercy is liturgy.

Every gesture of solidarity—or meaningful compassion—is Eucharistic. Every defence of the vulnerable is a hymn of praise. Every insistence on human dignity is a prayer that rises like incense. As we keep vigil, we offer our hearts like bread and wine.

We ask God to transform them into something capable of sustaining others—into ‘God-manly hearts,’ as Mother Maria said, hearts that carry Christ’s love into the places where it is most needed.

This is the sacrament of brother. This is the Gospel lived in the street.

This is the commandment that holds the whole Law and the Prophets—and the commandment by which our human laws and policies must be measured:Love God. Love your neighbour. And let nothing divide the two. Amen.

Br Johannes Maertens

The Tides of Life

Tidal Home, Jay Caskie

Though life unfolds in unplanned ways of moments amidst our lifecycles, each moment presents different challenges, and endurance is the cornerstone of our evolution. The ability to face adversity head-on and adapt could be the moment to test both the strength and weaknesses in human nature.

My topic of writing is taken from the angle of a migrant from the African continent to Europe, which is miles away from the community I was raised in, to a new, advanced, diverse country and another environment with different patterns of weather.

In the new community there was a lot to learn. As life went on, my living day-by-day came to be the reality of the plight of a failed asylum seeker - a status given to those migrants/immigrants the state does not recognise as bona fide residents in the community.

States create complex multi-layered hostile policies and laws making life both unviable and unbearable for new migrants and, in such a situation, puts migrants in a very vulnerable position, and with that shock of fear leads to despair and confusion, continuously disrupting their sense of the future and keeping them in uncertainty.

As states turn away from their responsibilities or minimise their help to migrants, there comes support from various worldwide organisations to help and support the needy ones, especially migrants.

The care and support from these non-profit-making organisations, including the London Catholic Worker, the Jesuit Refugee Service, the Refugee Council, the Red Cross, and Islington Refugee Council, offer a lot of support to the vulnerable and needy ones. The organisations’ unwavering support and care in connection with other charities of the like has indeed enabled some of us who had no hope to live with dignity.

The support and care I myself Have received as a guest at one of their family homes, Giuseppe Conlon House, is more than meeting basic needs. I have been able to live with dignity, and it has helped me with that sense of connections and confidence, as well as resilience, further opportunities in life, and the shared power of the community, and in all, with strength, experience and resilience, we are enriching our own Harringay and the surrounding communities.

LONG LIVE THE LONDON CATHOLIC WORKER and all the charities in this cause, and I give my sincere gratitude and appreciation to the great work given by communities worldwide.

Billy Tendo

Blessed are the Peacemakers

This obituary for Brian Quail was first published in the Glasgow Catholic Worker in February of 2026, reprinted in the London Catholic Worker - Easter 2026 by permission of the author.

Photo by Jamie Simpson

He came to mind the way the desert prophets do—a little wind-burned, a little out of step with the world, and wholly unwilling to soften the truth. John the Baptist, with his wild honey and locusts, his rough coat and rougher message, never tried to belong to polite society. He prepared a way. He made straight the path. He unsettled people into honesty. Brian Quail lived like that.

There was in him the same stubborn, luminous refusal to compromise—the same sense that faith was not meant to be tidy or respectable, but alive, inconvenient, and burning. The old Russians had a word for such people: a Fool for Christ. Not foolish in mind, but foolish in the eyes of a world that mistakes comfort for wisdom. The holy fool speaks plainly, lives simply, renounces applause, and becomes, just by existing, a quiet rebuke to complacency. We had one of our own.

I first met Brian on the evening of 19 March 2003, at a Scottish Socialist Party rally in Greenock opposing the second Iraq War. Within hours, the bombing would begin. Brian, already known as a tireless peace activist, spoke that night with a kind of trembling conviction—not theatrical, not rehearsed, but rising from somewhere deep and immovable. I was captivated. He was impossible to miss: an older man, white-haired, oddly dressed, wearing bright red braces, a CND T-shirt, and Doc Martens. Around his neck hung a large silver Russian cross. That, more than anything, startled me—this hardened left-wing peace campaigner marked so visibly by faith.

Someone in the crowd heckled him: ‘Aye, you’re bangin’ on aboot peace, but that cross roon yer neck is the biggest killin’ machine the world has ever seen!’

Brian looked down at the cross, then back up, and said slowly, gently, ‘This? This is Jesus of Nazareth.’

It would not be the last time I watched him disarm hostility with nothing but simplicity, sincerity, and truth. At that time, I had drifted from Mass and buried myself in Marxism. I did not know Christians like Brian existed, certainly not in left-wing political circles. I sometimes think that if I had not met him that night, I might never have returned to faith at all. Brian did not preach at people. He never demanded heroic gestures or arrests.

 Yet his life—steady, stubborn, sacrificial—unsettled our comfortable beliefs. He gave everything to peace, though he never romanticised it. He did not enjoy prison. He did not enjoy cold cells. Once, on our way to Faslane for a four-minute prayer vigil—four minutes, the time it took for Nagasaki to be destroyed—he confessed he felt physically sick every time we went. Courage, in Brian, was not bravado. It was endurance.

Even in later years, when his body began to fail him, he continued. Arrest, prison, witness—again and again. When he could no longer throw himself beneath military vehicles, he still showed up. Presence, for Brian, was resistance. Yet he was never dour. He could appear in full kilt and Glengarry at republican socialist commemorations, proud and smiling, a man stitched together from faith, politics, and history. At the end of our weekly Catholic Worker meetings, he loved to lead us singing the Regina Caeli in Latin—his voice thin but determined, as if heaven might lean closer if we sang bravely enough.

He had a gift for unsettling rooms. In 2016, at a polished event in St Aloysius’ School, he stood mid-lecture and reminded everyone it was the anniversary of Easter 1916, asking Glasgow Catholics of Irish descent to pause and remember. The air thickened with embarrassment. I felt only pride. He confused people, too—especially secular activists—with his seamless garment ethic: anti-war, anti-nuclear, anti-death penalty, pro-life. To Brian, consistency was not ideology but conscience.

He encouraged my writing, offered ideas, nudged me forward. I will miss him more than words allow. Last August, though frail and gaunt, he joined us once more at Faslane to mark the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He sat on a small stool, worn from a lifetime of resistance, yet still present. Around us hung peace banners. We carried a replica of the Nagasaki Cross—the only thing left standing after the cathedral was destroyed and its faithful incinerated. From ruin, a sign of reconciliation.

Photo by Jamie Simpson

Brian often despaired. He could not understand how humanity accepted what he called a portable Auschwitz. Many dismissed him as eccentric, unbalanced—a fool. But he understood something the world prefers to forget: sometimes one must become foolish to be wise. Brian was wise. The madness was never his. He stood, stubborn and gentle, a voice in the wilderness, pointing toward another way—a world beyond violence, made possible through the life and witness of Christ. He believed peacemaking was a calling, even unto imprisonment, trusting that faithfulness, not success, was the measure, and that in the end, resurrection would have the final word. Rest in peace, Brian Quail.

Ross Ahfeld