Blog

31/07/2020

Justice & Peace vice chair Marian Pallister reflects on one of COVID 19’s less expected tragic side effects.

In the ‘old normal’, one in three women experienced some form of violence during their lives. In my former existence as a journalist, I once worked on a research project with a women’s organisation and Glasgow University. My role was to invite women to share their experiences of domestic abuse, which were analysed by the experts and statistics were extrapolated.

That was decades ago, and the figures then were one in three. I had hoped that by 2020, things might have improved, so when a Church of Scotland working party gave that very same statistic, I was disheartened.

And to put the Scottish figure into context, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of the UN’s Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), reported in April of this year that in the previous 12 months, around the world, some 243 million women and girls aged between 15 and 49 had been subjected to sexual or physical violence by an intimate partner.

That was before lockdown. As the lockdown was imposed across the planet, that already shocking figure rocketed. UN Women says that in times of crisis, there is always a rise in domestic violence, and despite the fact that so many women don’t report when they are abused, the figures that have been gathered so far are heart breaking.

For example, according to UN Women, helplines in Singapore and Cyprus have registered a more than 30 per cent increase in calls. In Australia, 40 per cent of workers in this field in New South Wales reported more requests for help with violence. Domestic violence cases in France increased by 30 per cent after their lockdown on March 17. In Argentina, emergency calls for domestic violence increased by 25 per cent since the lockdown there on March 20.

A spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe said “Unfortunately, every country in the region is already all too familiar with the source of interpersonal violence.”

A Scottish Government report issued in June says that the impact and risk of domestic violence during lockdown has been magnified and victims have found it more difficult to separate from a violent partner.

Can we create a ‘new normal’ in which women and girls are not subjected to such violence? And let’s add emotional abuse – equally as devastating as physical and sexual violence.

During lockdown, Pope Francis has urged us to pray that the Lord would give strength to victims of domestic violence, ‘and that our communities can support them together with their families’.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has already asked that all governments make the prevention and redress of violence against women a key part of their national response plans for COVID-19.

I pray that world leaders everywhere listen to Mr Guterres. Women and girls deserve to be safe in their own homes. As he says, ‘Women’s rights and freedoms are essential to strong, resilient societies.’ Violence is learned, and in the ‘new normal’ let’s speak out for victims and start rebuilding the basic structures of a nonviolent society.

24/07/2020

Kairos

Mike Mineter, member of the Commission for Caritas, Justice and Peace of the Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh, reflects on today’s Kairos.

This is a Kairos time: an intense time of crises that calls us to pray and work for transformation in many ways. We still hear people say “we are in COVID19 together” – yet it is now demonstrably true that the price paid in lives is much greater among care givers, ethnic minorities, and people in poorer communities.

Inequality has been highlighted. Over and above this crisis there is an urgent need to respond to how humans are harming the Earth: it is likely that world-wide this calendar year, more will die prematurely from air pollution than directly from COVID19.

Members of our Archdiocesan Commission felt that those of us in relative ease, with time and energy available, owed it to those losing lives, loved ones and livelihoods to strive to build a better future. The Commission is therefore launching working groups that will focus upon defined themes.

These groups don’t seek to be experts, but to be informed and to communicate with relevant parish groups, the Commission itself, and through it the Archdiocese in order that together we can be more aware, engaged and active in seeking a more just future.

The groups aim to pray, learn and reflect together, recognising that prayer and reflection need to end in action – including raising awareness in our parish communities. Groups will share ideas, experience and resources (such as liturgical, briefings, links to other initiatives). It is too early to say how the groups will develop; drawn initially from our Archdiocesan J&P network and parish groups it is hoped that in time these will broaden out to include other Christians, people of other faiths and indeed, following the Holy Father’s lead, all people of good will.

The groups aim to help guide us to positive, practical and sustainable action for the common good.

The initial groups are:

Laudato Si: It is five years since Pope Francis published Laudato Si, yet the Church seems far from committing to it seriously. Recognising ourselves as a part of the Earth in communion with creation, and hearing the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor, we are called to conversion in how we live, personally, in communities, and socio-economically. We are urging a) the formation of circles in parishes, urgently; b) people to join the GCCM animators course.

Food and Food Poverty: To identify where there is good practice - and where further improvements can be made in respect of the Ecological and Sustainability of food and management of food wastage.
Palestine-Israel: We will seek justice for all in the Land called Holy, alert to current and impending events and informed by the Bishops’ communique.
Refugees: Seeking that the human rights of all refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in Scotland are respected.
Poverty: bringing experience of responses such as credit unions, and aware that those paid least are keeping us alive.

The working groups will maintain links with each other because while their focuses differ, their domains overlap. There are guidelines for how they relate to the Commission. Each group is co-ordinated by a member of the Archdiocesan Commission and is at a different stage of development. Those interested in joining a group are invited to email mike.mineter@gmail.com.

17/07/2020

Statues

Gilbert Márkus reflects on how to read a statue. Weekly blog.

To be honest, I’ve been walking around ignoring statues all my life, the only time I ever paid attention to these monuments of civic ideology was when someone did something daft like plonking a traffic cone on its head or climbing up it naked.

In the last few weeks though, I have been forced to think about statues, largely thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has recently drowned a statue of the slave-trader Edward Colston in the Bristol Docks, and which has brought down

various Confederate monuments in America.

But is there a specifically Catholic story to be told about statues and their place in the Western tradition. What are they for? What do they say?

In Ancient Rome and its neighbouring societies, the public statue was a statement of power. The emperor or the god who rules and protects this city. Or the great general who overthrows our enemies. At a more modest scale, celebrating the power of ‘our troops’ overthrowing our enemies, like this carving of a Roman cavalryman at Bridgeness (West Lothian), trampling defeated and naked British warriors. Power and submission.

The public statue celebrated power. And into this world comes Christianity with a different kind of statue. A statue (or carving) turning the whole genre upside down. It shows a powerless human body, a body subjected to judicial murder on a hill outside Jerusalem. It first appears around AD 400, carved on the door of the ancient church of Santa Sabina - certainly one of the first representations of the Crucified Christ in the west.

It is not a large piece. It doesn’t tower over the viewer, like the imperial statue on its plinth. It meets you at eye level. You can touch it. And the figure is stripped of all power – and most of his clothes – inviting not submission or admiration, but perhaps compassion; inviting the viewer to see the presence of God in powerlessness. It turns the ‘Great Man’ sculptural tradition upside down. The crucifix becomes the central and subversive idea in all our churches, and every Catholic home.

Here’s my office wall at home, and I write under this ‘statue’ every day

Of course, people continue to make statues of powerful people that celebrate power. The human temptation to admire power is one of the hardest to shake off, in spite of two thousand years of the preaching of the Gospel: ‘the greatest among you shall be the least’. We still do it with our Confederate generals, Herbert Colstons, Viscount Dundas, towering over us on their plinths. But perhaps unknowingly, the mobs that bring them down have inherited something of our Gospel tradition.

In the 1940s, Hungarian Nazis took thousands of Jews to the River Danube in Budapest, stole their possessions and shoes, and shot them, dropping their bodies into the river. At that spot is a different kind of sculpture: a row of shoes cast in bronze, fixed to the ground.

The sculpture has become a shrine, revealing the bodies of the murdered men, women and children, but revealing them as absent, their shoes marking where they once stood. People now come there to pray, lay flowers, remember. Not a celebration of power but a celebration of humanity in the face of power. A celebration of solidarity and compassion. It is in the same tradition as the crucifix that is the essential ‘statue’ which has guided the Catholic vision for so many generations.

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