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| Feeding the hungry, at the Summer School |
There has been an interesting little spat in the Com box
over at Fr Blake's blog, about whether we should give cash to beggars without discrimination. Personally, I'm in favour of loving them without discrimination; this love does not invariably direct us to hand cash over. Would we hand over a syringe full of heroine, or a bottle of meths? There may be very little difference.
In fact giving people money is often the easy option: it is quick, it is simple, there are no ramifications to worry about, no ongoing relationship, and no superior people in the com box to say you are being patronising. The Bones has
written a lot over the years about talking to the homeless, helping them with often complex practical problems, supporting them in their dealings with the authorities. This takes time, emotional energy, even a degree of experience and specialist knowledge. There is an important apostolate here, especially now that the Citizens' Advice Bureau has
lost so many branches,
if the Church wanted to get involved in a systematic way. It would be a lot more complicated than handing over the price of a bus fare at the presbytery door after listening to a sob story you can't bring yourself to believe.
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| Passing on practical aspects of Catholic culture: the Summer School |
The idea that all problems can be solved with money, or at least with physical resources, is something which, without anyone explicitly believing it, might be called the guiding principle of the Welfare State. It is a paradox of the philosophy of action that you can be guided by a belief which you actually think is false, when you stop to think. We need to free ourselves from it. St Theresa of Calcutta
said:
“You, in the West, have millions of people who suffer such terrible loneliness and emptiness. They feel unloved and unwanted. These people are not hungry in the physical sense, but they are in another way. They know they need something more than money, yet they don't know what it is.
“What they are missing, really, is a living relationship with God.”
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| Giving witness to the Faith: the LMS Oxford Pilgrimage |
More broadly, the current generation of young people, indeed of young parents, have been deprived of cultural, emotional, and intellectual resources. Materialists will tell us we are all very well off, but we aren't, most people are poor. Most illiterate people 100 years ago, on the eve of the Great War, had ways of making sense of the world, and of conducting relationships to protect themselves and their children, which are today the preserve of an elite. No one at all today has even the chance of the kind of community, whether based on village or city block or parish, which was taken for granted a century ago, a community of mutual support and shared moral assumptions.
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| Passing on the Faith to children: Fr Booth talking about Bl Dominic Barberi at the Summer School |
The ordinary work of the Church, the liturgy, the sacraments, teaching catechism to children, receiving converts, is not an alternative activity, competing for scarce resources, with the service of the poor. It is a service of the poor. It is a way of giving resources to those who need them to live a full life, a life of more than bare existence, of meaningless intermittent pleasure and pain.
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| Walsingham Pilgrimage last year |
But we need to do more, we need to preserve and pass on a broader culture, an understanding of history, music, art. We need to strengthen a sense of Catholic identity, of Catholic solidarity and community, shared songs and spirituality, shared experiences, mutual understanding, sympathy, advice. This sounds like a tall order: it is a lot more than a soup-kitchen can deliver. But that is exactly what the St Catherine's Trust seeks to do with the
Family Retreat and the
Summer School, and it is what the Latin Mass Society is doing with our
Pilgrimages and
conferences.
I'm not suggesting that trads are the only people addressing these problems. Rather, I'm suggesting that the way to address them may already be under our noses. Perhaps people should
stop lamenting the fact that the 'Church should be doing more', and enable the Church to do more by getting involved in the things which are already happening in the Church. As T.S. Eliot
wrote:
The desert is not remote in southern tropics
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother.
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| Walsingham Pilgrimage on the Holy Mile to the Holy House |
The Latin Mass Society, through its Local Representative, does its best to keep the lamp of the Traditional Mass alight in every corner of the country. Every location has its own difficulties, its own opportunities, and its own Catholic history. The Isle of Wight, with a significant population but cut off from the rest of the country, exemplifies this. The Local Representative, Peter Clark, recently helped to organise a visit to the island by Fr Armand de Malleray FSSP. This report is from him.
Book now for the Young Catholic Adults weekend event at Cold Ash Retreat Centre (a couple of miles from Douai Abbey, which was booked up this year).
Among the events of the Retreat, we always have a Marian procession; this goes from the Oratory School's main chapel to the smaller 'old' chapel.
After this we have tea; St Philip's Books, the well-known Oxford Catholic bookshop (second hand and new), had a stall.
