The Problem of Riches: A Call to Conversion

The Call of Matthew, Caravaggio, 1600

We have two new priests at our local parish of St John Vianney. Fr Jerome Oduntan and Fr Vincent are members of the Spiritan Religious Order. They are also from Nigeria. Like most Catholic parishes in London, many in the congregation are also from one African country or another.

Africa is the part of the world where the Catholic Church is growing fastest. In terms of explicitly Catholic and Christian faith, Europe is very much in decline. The Catholic Church in England is once more an immigrant church, as it had been ever since the days of the Irish potato famine, made worse as it had been by the British colonial masters. Europe is generally rich, Africa generally poor, in material wealth. It seems God is choosing Africans, and the poor.

This should not be surprising. Living and working among refugees and migrants is a help in understanding these things. So is trying to live the voluntary poverty that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin talked about. They did not mean destitution. St Francis talked about Lady Poverty. It is a call to conversion away from the comforts and material addictions of our culture.

Voluntary poverty, real simplicity, is blasphemy to a culture of greed. If we take less, there is more for others who need it. If we can cultivate the virtue of needing less we are free to do what is needed and anything is possible, if we put our minds and hearts and backs into it.

In the Catholic Worker movement we seek to share life with, for and among the poor, and to live in, at least a relative, poverty. For God is there. As the estate agent said, there are three things that matter: location, location and location. We locate ourselves among the poor and marginalised, which is all the better to read the Scriptures and hear the voice of the Spirit. The Scriptures were, after all, overwhelmingly written from the margins, from places occupied and oppressed. So such a place should be a good place to read them and understand what God is saying to the Churches.

At this time in history, when riches are at least as great a problem as poverty, that certainly includes the Psalmists’ refrain, ‘In his riches man lacks wisdom, he is like the beasts that are destroyed.’ (Psalm 48)

Pope Francis, coming from Argentina, is also bringing us a view of the world from the Global South, from the poor. In this way we can understand his reminders that migrants seeking access to the riches of the world (that have been plundered from the south to the north) must be welcomed as Christ. And that the rich must stop destroying the life of God’s Earth that the poor most immediately rely on. As well as his repeated calls for the powerful to stop building and using their armies and building their wealth on the trade in blood that is the arms trade. From the perspective of the poor in the global south this is not controversial. In the words of Pope Francis, as well as the relative life and dynamism of the Church the respective regions, we can discern the perspective from which God sees the world.

It seems obvious that the rich will find it hard to connect with a God who blesses the poor, calls for justice, and critiques riches. A God who calls for simplicity of life to make space for true spiritual experience. It seems obvious that in order for the rich to hang on to Christian faith identity, they – we – might have to distort the Gospel of Jesus. That distorting might be to say that riches and poverty are of no concern. Or, it could be to say that God blesses riches and curses the poor – that is to say, their poverty is their own fault. This is a form of blasphemy, of ‘using God’s name falsely’.

We live in a culture that increasingly believes it has grown out of a need for God. But no amount of material prosperity and possessions can fill the spiritual void. And so addiction follows. We live in an addictive society: addicted to more things, more experiences, more comfort, more luxury, more profit, more of everything except those that really matter. We talk about ‘comfort eating’ and can see very clearly the effects of obesity. But with buying things we hide the truth by calling it (with a touch of irony, admittedly) ‘retail therapy’, when ‘comfort shopping’ would be more accurate. We cannot see the effects of comfort shopping as easily as comfort eating, but it has similar life-denying, self-harming effects on our spiritual selves, on the planet and on others. In fact it is worse because there is a limit to how much we can eat.

We talk about people suffering from addiction, but we live in a culture of addiction, promoted all the time by saturation-advertising in the name of profit. It is only the most extreme addictions that stand out. In a culture of addiction to hedonism, where this is lauded and celebrated, even the poor become hedonists. And all this is promoted by capitalism with its addiction to profit and ‘growth’. No wonder God is choosing the poorest, even if sometimes we – I – find it difficult to understand.

We are like the rich man tearing down his barns to build bigger ones in which to store his hoarded wealth while the poor starve ( Luke 12:16- 21 ) . People in this country nowadays ‘need’ bigger houses because they ‘need’ the space to keep all their stuff. And the corporations are continually tearing down their barns – their towers in central London and elsewhere – to build taller ones, all the better to accumulate more riches while the poor still starve. Very soon, the demand will be made for our souls.

Please God, the climate and environmental emergency will be a reality check that will bring us back to our senses. Please God, we will hear this call to conversion. Please God, we will hear the cry of the poor, the planet, and of peace, and begin to realise what it means to live simply and embrace Lady Poverty, so that all people and all creation may live life to the full.

A Short Soft Look at Child Labour

Girl in Jasmine Field, by McKay Savage.

A BBC investigation this week uncovered extensive child labour abuses in the supply chains of major beauty brands Lancôme and Aerin Beauty. Jasmine flowers used in their perfumes are sourced from Egypt, where children are regularly involved in the picking. This is due to the low wages which force families to include their children in the labour. The jasmine pickers, including children aged 5 to 15, work overnight under harsh conditions for minimal pay. In one highlighted case cited, a woman, Heba, and her four children together earnt a mere $1.50 for the 1.5kg of jasmine they managed to collect through the night.

The companies involved, L'Oréal and Estée Lauder, both claim to oppose child labour and offered statements saying that they will review their supply chains. But, as the BBC noted, the auditing systems meant to ensure ethical practices are deeply flawed, and completely miss the exploitation on smallholder farms. Factories like A Fakhry and Co, which supply jasmine oil to major fragrance houses, offer little oversight of the actual jasmine picking on these farms. Meanwhile, the large auditing firms, Sedex and UEBT, work hand in glove with the suppliers and manufacturers by rubber stamping these exploitative working environments with lax factory-restricted audits.

Whilst the BBC cites various industry insiders and human rights advocates who stress the need for better corporate accountability, the broader picture and root cause of the problem is obfuscated by the report. Child labour is not anomalous, nor is it the product of unfortunate gaps in otherwise functional supply chains, but rather it is built into the very logic of capitalism. Globally, one in ten children are forced to work, with almost one in four children forced to work in Africa. Meanwhile, one in four people globally live below the poverty line ($3.65 per day), with a majority of the populations of Africa, East Asia, and the Pacific living in extreme poverty. This is all a product of a predatory modern capitalism which exported the historic domestic slavery of the West to the global south in the form of a sanitised wage slavery. This has allowed us guilt-free westerners to continue to import a surfeit of cheap goods, without having to look at the terrifying human (and environmental) cost of our violently disordered consumption.

Whilst the plight of the jasmine pickers should serve to highlight the disconnect between the consumption of luxury perfumes and the harsh realities of their production, the BBC's technocratic framing repeatedly turns away from the contradiction. At the close of the article, the jasmine picker Heba cries: "I want the people using this perfume to see in it the pain of children." But the BBC immediately corrected Heba by following her cri de cœur with the absurd claim that "the responsibility does not lie with the consumer" since, in the words of lawyer Sarah Dadush, "this is not a problem that should be for us to solve", but rather a matter of "law" and "corporate accountability". Whilst we do, of course, need a global revolution in labour conditions, this can only be achieved if we collectively take a long hard look at ourselves and the people who bear the cost of our consumption. Whether it be changing our buying habits and/or upping our political engagement, this is very much a problem that should be for us to solve.

Blood On Your Hands

On 29th December 2023, my husband Chris (Cole) and I went to Downing Street with two bottles of red poster paint. When we arrived, we waited for the crowds to part, approached the fence, sprayed paint, marked our hands and made handprints on the railings and the pavement. We then stood with two placards ‘Blood on your hands. Ceasefire Now’, and ‘Stop the Slaughter’, as we read the names of dead children killed by Israel and Hamas and the reading of the Holy Innocents:

“A voice is heard in Ramah,weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”  Matthew 2:18

Our action came after witnessing the first two months of relentless slaughter of innocent Palestinians that we had been witnessing on social media and TV since Hamas’ October 7th attack.  While we have protested wars for decades - the cruelty and brutality of the onslaught of Gaza has been unprecedented. The deliberate withdrawal of food, water and utilities, the bombing of hospitals, the corralling of civilians into ‘safe’ regions where they were then bombed, the murder of so many children and targeting of journalists and hospital workers, the Tik Toks from soldiers mocking civilians and boast of war crimes has been horrifying to watch.  Even more horrifying has been the failure of the Western world to stand up for Palestine, and the complicity of our government in Israel’s actions, repeatedly failing to vote for a ceasefire at the UN and continuing to sell arms.

Before Christmas I wrote several emails and tweets to Rishi Sunak and my MP. They never replied. I attended two of the national demonstrations for Palestine in London. Nothing changed. So, it was an easy decision to agree to an action at Downing Street, calling on our government to change course. And my resolve was strengthened after watching Rev Dr Munther Isaac’s powerful sermon, ‘Christ among the rubble’, in which he condemned Western hypocrisy on Gaza and asked Christians to act.

Before going to London, we had agreed we would call it off if a ceasefire was agreed. But the remorseless bombardment of Gaza continued, so we went ahead.

As expected, we were quickly arrested and taken to Charing Cross Police Station where the desk sergeant was very surprised to see two middle aged white people in the back of the van. He seemed to need reassurance from the arresting officers that they really had due cause to arrest us. They made it clear they had, so he walked us over to the ‘cage’ outside the door, the waiting area where arrestees are held until taken upstairs. There was someone already there, and he apologised that due to cuts he didn’t have enough staff to process us both at the same time. Chris had to wait, and I was taken up a long slope to custody. The desk sergeant was very apologetic about lack of staff, and we chatted about government cuts to services and how rubbish they were.  He was very friendly and helpful and got through the bureaucracy as quickly as possible (complaining about the new computer system which of course was full of glitches). Everyone we encountered was equally pleasant, and I couldn’t help but wonder if they would have been so friendly if I’d been a young brown man. Perhaps the desk sergeant might have been, as he laughed when giving my equal opportunities information, I said ‘White British, basically all the privileges,  and he did bend over backwards to emphasise the Met’s latest efforts to reassure women they’ll be safe.

While I was having my fingerprints, DNA and photo taken, Chris was brought up, so I was able to say hi to him. It took ages because the computer kept smearing and the red paint didn’t help, but eventually I was taken to my cell. It was large, clean and bright and there was a thin plastic mattress and pillow on the bench. I was able to lie down and read my book and Bible which they’d let me keep and a welfare person provided me with a blanket so I felt relatively comfortable.

The first few hours passed quite quickly – I read, had some tasteless vegetarian food and dozed a bit. My book about the intelligence of animals, particular octopi, was a fascinating read so that helped. When I took a break from it, I read some Psalms and some of the Christmas Gospels and prayed for people in Palestine. It’s probably the most praying I’ve done in a long time, and I found it very helpful. I also thought a lot about Palestinian prisoners, particularly the activist Ahed Tamimi who was imprisoned as a teenage for slapping an Israeli soldier after her cousin was injured and the soldier had slapped her. She was recently rearrested on faked up charges and released in the first hostage exchange and her strength and determination has always inspired me. I also remembered the image I’d seen of a recently released Palestinian prisoner who had been treated so badly that in 3 months his body was a gaunt skeleton and he looked about ten years older.  I remembered of all those who couldn’t escape their situation including the hostages Hamas is holding. I felt exceptionally lucky to know I was being treated well and would be out soon.

At four I made the mistake of asking what the time was, as then I began to be aware of how slow time was passing. The person on welfare check didn’t know when we’d be interviewed, and so I began to feel a little bit fretful, wandering up and down to stretch my legs, before settling back to read again.

Eventually at around five, two young women came in to say they’d be interviewing me. They too were very pleasant and not too frustrated by my mostly ‘no comment’ answers. I told them the paint was poster paint, and that it was just us who acted. And at the end, when asked if I had anything else to say, that I was there because I couldn’t sleep thinking about Palestine and I wanted my government to take action against genocide.

Then it was back into the cell where I could hear someone talking to Chris, so realised he was nearby. (I discovered afterwards he was next door and he’d already worked out where we’d be because he’d heard them saying the cell numbers in the van). I didn’t hear him come back  from his police interview so I became fretful again. Time passed, 6, 6,30 and no sign of being let out. But at last they came for me and by 8pm we were both out, which was when we discoverd that we’d got a good amount of press coverage. Our friend Pat had taken some great pictures, and by chance a press photographer had also been there. The messages ‘blood on your hands’ and ‘stop the slaughter’ had been clearly seen and understood. There were also pictures of Rishi Sunak leaving Downing Street by the back door, and although it was unlikely that was due to our action, he would have surely known it was taking place and what it said.

Of course, one tiny action by two people is unlikely to change the mind of a government. And sadly, despite our efforts and the efforts of millions marching, writing to politicians, boycotting, blockading and taking legal action round the world, Israel continues to bombard Gaza regardless. The situation remains bleak and yet, not without hope. The day of our action South Africa launched its ICJ genocide case against Israel, and since then we’ve seen more and more governments ready to condemn Israel, and more and more people out on the streets. So we hope our protest has given encouragement to others, that perhaps some Palestinians saw the images and found them comforting, and we believe it’s provided an opportunity to keep talking about our government’s complicity in the genocide.

This article was originally published in the Easter 2024 issue of the London Catholic Worker newsletter.