Hope in Spite of Present Difficulties

[This article originally appeared in the Lent/Easter 2025 edition of our newsletter; read the rest of it here.]

We seem to be constantly living with the contradictions of hope and difficulty here at Giuseppe Conlon House.

Usually, it is a long, slow grind for those who are guests living here with us, but in the last year, six of the men living with us were granted ‘leave to remain’ and were able to move on with their lives, despite the roadblocks of bureaucracy, the housing crisis, and the ‘hostile environment’. And we were able to help one to get compensation from the Windrush scheme. Lots of work on our buildings has also created a more pleasant, safer house to live in, thanks mostly to Tom, Richie, and Francisco, as well as Jurgen’s team. Tom and Natalie moved into their own home so they could welcome their baby, Silas, after a year and a half of marriage and a real health scare. At the same time, we have a great new team of Catholic Workers who have joined us in the last few months. Francisco, Moya, and Dottie have joined myself and Thomas. Together, these changes have enabled us to re-open the night shelter in the hall, at the same time as continuing to welcome guests into the community house. We welcomed our first guests into the shelter when I started writing this article a few weeks ago. We will soon be full again, with a house abuzz with life, grace, blessings, and challenge.

In the Catholic world, 2025 is a Jubilee Year of Hope. Pope Francis is trying to remind us of the importance not of superficial optimism, but of hope as an active and theological virtue: a deep trust that God is good, that God is love, and that Love has come into the world, and continues to do so with each child born and each act of generosity, care, or tenderness. These are truths we witness in the midst of struggle in a house of hospitality, where we might be ‘entertaining angels without knowing it’ (Hebrews 13:2).

At the same time, living among refugees and asylum seekers, the fate of those trying to get to the UK and the EU is never far from our minds. We remember and pray for those who have lost their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean and the English Channel, in particular during our monthly prayer and protest vigil outside the Home Office. And Thomas has recently pointed out that according to the UN, more people are now dying in the Sahara than in the Mediterranean, at least in part due to EU and UK funding for north African ‘border forces’, who often simply take migrants out into the desert and leave them there to die.

It can be hard for us to reconcile times that seem good for our life and work, but are also times of sadness, loss, tragedy, anxiety, or anger elsewhere. Recently, the Tottenham Refugee Alliance had to give up on finding a house to rent locally where they could sponsor and welcome a Syrian refugee family. The rents are just too high: it was impossible for them to find anywhere within the Local Housing Allowance (or Housing Benefit cap, in ‘old money’). As a result, we have received a good share of what was left of the money raised for that project. We are sad that they were unable to find a house, but grateful to receive the resources they had collected.

Reading the Times

I went on retreat at the start of Advent. It was a challenging and fruitful time, as I pondered where God has brought me to and where I am being led, in the midst of so much uncertainty, as so often seems to be the way with Catholic Worker life. Of course, the uncertainty is not just about our life here in the house. It feels like we are living in a world of so much uncertainty right now.

Jesus tells us to read the times. Reading our times at this moment in history makes me aware of the apparently powerful gods, idols, and demons of the new world order who blasphemously demand our allegiance, or at least seek to determine our futures. Uppermost in my mind right now are AI (artificial intelligence), the climate and environmental emergency, and Donald Trump and his allies both in the US and elsewhere, ‘moving fast and breaking things’ (or more accurately, breaking people), and his frenemies like Vladimir Putin, playing chicken with nuclear threats and preparations for war that should be no more (Isaiah 2:4). The times feel very dangerous as well as uncertain. We all are being played in a high-stakes game of Russian roulette. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently moved the hands of the Doomsday clock to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. We will write more about this in our next newsletter, when we have had more time to reflect on what is happening.

When I was a teenager, I told my Dad about a news story reporting that the Soviet countries would not let their people leave. I said “that’s terrible isn’t it.” He replied “well, if they did let them leave, we wouldn’t let them in”.

 These seem prophetic words today, revealing that it is not human nature that has changed, but the situation.

It is tragic that so many have to flee poverty, violent conflict, and persecution, which are fed by such things as the arms trade and climate change. On the other hand, at least they are allowed to leave and have the resources and ability to be able to flee. The poorest still do not have that ‘luxury’. And it is the same ability to travel fast and cheaply that so many Brits take for granted when going on foreign holidays that enables many from the global south to at least aspire to follow the wealth and the work to where it has been taken. Rich countries like ours are like King Canute, trying to hold back the tide of human movement. As we tell our house guests, if you look at the Earth from space, there are no lines around it. Borders that keep the poor out are not God’s creation or will. Nor are the injustices and suffering that both push and pull people to move. We pray that refugees are welcomed here. And equally, that they will not have to leave home in the first place and travel safely when they do, as we wish for our own family and friends.

The Pope of Mercy and Nonviolence

It has been an eventful twelve years. I was in the office here at Giuseppe Conlon House, getting

ready to move out after seven years as a full time Catholic Worker, making plans to start a Passionist

house of hospitality in Birmingham, when I heard we had a new Pope. I heard he had chosen the

name Francis, and had asked everyone to pray for him, a sinner. I didn’t want to hope because as

football fans say, it’s the hope that kills you.

After Francis’ first Papal Exhortation was published, “Evangelii Gaudium” – “The Joy of the Gospel”, a

circular email from a well known US Catholic Worker proclaimed “Holy Cow - the week the Pope

talked like us Catholic Workers". Two examples of Francis sounding like a Catholic Worker in that

letter come to mind: he called for a ‘poor church for the poor’ and for a church that came ‘out of the

sacristy and got its hands dirty’. Looking around me at the time, I thought – maybe we’re not doing

too badly at those here. And he actively practised what he preached, by his personal outreach to the

most marginalised, and by, for example, moving out of the Vatican Palace and into rooms in the

Santa Marta guest house, among the many from the world church who come and go there.

Francis continued sounding like a Catholic Worker in his advocacy for hospitality for the poor, for

migrants and refugees, for the practice of mercy generally and the works of mercy in particular, for

active nonviolence and an increasingly strong rejection of war. He declared the mere possession as

well the threat of use of nuclear weapons to be a sin, as well as making the Vatican one of the first

states to sign and ratify the nuclear weapons ban treaty (officially known as the Treaty for the

Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW). That would have made Dorothy Day very happy,

although she might have felt a bit ambiguous when he mentioned her name among four

praiseworthy representatives of the American people – alongside Martin Luther King, Abraham

Lincoln and Thomas Merton – when addressing the US Congress in 2015.

Francis sounded like a Catholic Worker in day to day life too. He spoke off the cuff and made

mistakes and asked forgiveness as a sinner, in contrast to previously careful papal ways, perhaps

wanting to avoid the mystique of creeping infallibility. Asking forgiveness for our mistakes feels like a

regular part of CW life too: we are definitely not perfect, always trying hard to respond to immediate

situations and crises, and often making mistakes and asking for and needing forgiveness, and

struggling to give it too. Activists are strong minded and can be difficult people after all.

Possibly Francis’ most significant legacy will be his first Encyclical Letter, published in the run up to

the 2015 Paris Climate Summit. In “Laudato Si - On Care for Our Common Home”, he called us to

hear ‘the cry of the earth and cry of the poor’. His critique of the ‘technocratic paradigm’ echoed the

analysis of ‘the dominance of technique’ by Jacques Ellul, a Christian anarchist writer popular with

Catholic Workers. It sounded a lot like Peter Maurin’s call for a “Green Revolution”, but with longer

sentences.

More recently, Francis has tried to create a culture of mutual encounter, listening and dialogue in

the Catholic Church, in place of our own internal culture wars. Time will tell to what degree he

succeeded. Among the unfinished business many will list more progress on the abuse crisis and the

role of women in the church. We are praying the Holy Spirit leads us to a new universal pastor who

can find the way to continue and deepen what Francis started.

Jorge Bergoglio, Pope Francis I: Pray for us. May he rest in Peace and Rise in Glory.

Statement on UK Rearmament

This editorial was published in the Lent/Easter 2025 edition of our newsletter. Read the rest of it here.

In 1940, Dorothy Day, Servant of God and co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, wrote that “we stand unalterably opposed to war as a means of saving ‘Christianity,’ ‘civilization,’ ‘democracy.’ We do not believe that they can be saved by these means,” with the understanding that support for the industrialised slaughter of men, women, and children which constitutes modern warfare cannot be reconciled with the vision of human dignity proclaimed in the Gospel.

Last year, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales declared that “as Christians, we are called by Jesus to be peacemakers (Matthew 5:9). In the modern world, an integral aspect of this mission involves working to limit the proliferation of weapons and advance the cause of global disarmament.” Pope Francis said that “to allocate a large part of spending to weapons means taking it away from something else, which means continuing to take it away from those who lack the necessities. Continuing to spend on weapons sullies the soul, sullies the heart, sullies humanity.”

Keir Starmer’s government has announced its intention to enact the largest increase in British military spending since the end of the Cold War, which will eventually cost an additional £13.4 billion every year. For comparison, lifting the two-child benefit cap, widely regarded as the single most cost-effective means of reducing child poverty, would cost £2.8 billion a year – the government has refused to do so on the basis that it would be unaffordable. This vast expenditure on arms will be partly funded by drastic reductions in foreign aid, likely to result in thousands of preventable deaths. Other European nations are making similar commitments in response to the supposed collective threat posed by Russia, a nation with an economy less than half the size of Germany’s, and a military budget which even during a major war is a small fraction of that of the European members of NATO, and roughly a tenth of the USA’s.

There is no moral or practical justification for wasting resources on arms, and we condemn the decision to do so in accordance with the teaching of the Church, the witness of the Gospel, and the evidence of our consciences. Jesus asks us “What profit will a person have if they gain the whole world and forfeit their soul?” Following him, we cannot buy security at this price.