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Robert Burnett of the Scottish Laity Network reflects on a journey taken during the pandemic to seek the Church’s future post COVID.  Weekly blog.

During the lockdown, the Core Group of the Scottish Laity Network began reflecting on The Future of the Church After a Time of Pandemic and how that related to our core vision of enabling Scottish laity to come together as disciples of Jesus, and through prayer, dialogue and discernment find ‘new ways’ of being Church in Scotland in the 21st Century.

We asked: how could we come together and pray, dialogue and discern new ways of being Church during the pandemic? Reflecting on Pope Francis’ leadership, we saw clearly the centrality of discernment in his life and in his papacy and that his hope is for a discerning Church that finds full expression as a synodal Church. In his address on the 50th Anniversary of the Institution of the Synod of Bishops, Pope Francis powerfully articulated this vision:

A synodal Church is a Church which listens, which realises that listening “is more than simply hearing”. It is a mutual listening in which everyone has something to learn. The faithful people, the college of bishops, the Bishop of Rome: all listening to each other, and all listening to the Holy Spirit, the “Spirit of truth”, in order to know what he “says to the Churches”.

So during lockdown, we reflected on how we could nurture the process of becoming a discerning Church and engage in a process of mutual listening and learning.

The initial fruit was to initiate an online Journey of Discernment. At the end of April we invited renowned Christian speakers to share their thoughts and reflections with us and to be part of this stage of our journey. We believe their positive response was an affirmation of the Spirit for our journey that began on Thursday 28th May.

We have had presentations from Fr Jim Martin, Massimo Faggioli, Austen Ivereigh, Mary McAleese and Lorna Gold. Our final session is with Jim Wallis.

Each speaker has shared insights into the ‘signs of the times’ and engaged fully in question and answer sessions. We are profoundly grateful to them.

Our journey reaches an important stage with our Assembly tomorrow, Saturday 11th July, when Fr Augusto Zampini will share the vision and hope of the Vatican’s COVID-19 Commission, and Mary Cullen will help root us in the ‘signs of the times’ in the Scottish Church. We will try to discern what the Spirit is saying to the Scottish Laity Network at this crucial time, not only for our nation, but our planet.

It was never the idea that our speakers would give us a definitive way forward: there was always the understanding for the participants in our journey to discern both individually and communally. We each need to discern where the promptings of the Spirit are calling us to act. As the late Dan Berrigan, America’s finest poet-prophet-priest said:

One cannot level one’s moral lance at every evil in the universe. There are just too many of them. But you can do something; and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything.

Each of us may discern a different call and we will look at ways that we can affirm people in their discernment and support them in their action.
 

Bishop William Nolan, Bishop President of Justice and Peace Scotland, reflects on a visit to Calais, and the effect this week’s parliamentary vote may have on migrants like those he met there.

It is a cold November morning. We come to a clearing in the woods and see the remains of a makeshift fire. We are in Calais and this is obviously a spot where migrants gather. There is no one there when we arrive but as we wait, one by one, young men appear.

Most of the group are Ethiopians, Christians. They welcome our visit, and welcome also the hot tea we bring with us. One or two are chatty, but most take their tea and sit on a wooden log and stare into the distance. The vacant look on their faces makes me wonder about their mental health. Their one hope is to get on a lorry and get into the UK. It is then, the aid workers tell us, once they reach their goal, that their mental health problems will come to the surface.

For these young men are traumatised: by the events in their homeland that caused them to flee; by the journey through Africa and across the Mediterranean; by the constant harassment in Calais, as they are woken in the night by the police and pepper sprayed, their tents and sleeping bags confiscated.

While they see the UK as the Promised Land, they will be sadly disappointed when they get there. They want to work, but they will not be allowed to work; they want to begin a new life, but that new life will be put on hold while their asylum claim is assessed. They risk being put in a detention centre, locked up for any length of time. The UK government don’t call them detention centres, they are called Immigration Removal Centres, and while in other European countries there is a limit on how long a person can be detained, there is no limit in the UK. A criminal guilty of murder knows how long they will be locked up, but not a migrant whose only crime is to seek asylum.

There was a hope that Parliament might put a legal limit on detention, but on Tuesday 332 Members of the Parliament thought otherwise, and that amendment failed.

And the fate of child migrants is not any better. At the moment the Dublin III Regulation means that child migrants in Europe who have family in the UK can come to the UK and stay with their family while their asylum request is considered. This is an EU agreement and so will lapse when the transition period ends in December. On Tuesday, 342 Members of Parliament voted against continuing to allow children that legal right to come here.

Pope Francis tells us that we should look in the eye the person in need and see a fellow human being. There are many in our country who do just that and show concern for migrants and refugees. But sadly the Westminster Parliament puts us to shame. Maybe one day we will live in a country where Parliament votes to respect the human dignity of those who seek our help – but not yet.

The Westminster Government is to merge the Department for International Development with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Marian Pallister, Justice and Peace Scotland’s vice chair, offers a very personal reflection on the implications.

I’m afraid I agree with those who have called the merger of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office with DfID an ‘act of vandalism’, rather than welcoming it as the ‘long overdue reform’ that Boris Johnson says will ensure ‘maximum value’ for taxpayers. 

Mr Johnson’s comment that aid recipients have looked on DfID as a ‘giant cashpoint in the sky that arrives without any reference to UK interests’, was to say the least insulting. It encouraged headlines (already recycled many times) to be dragged out in support of the merger. The trapeze, acrobatics and juggling lessons funded by British taxpayers (claims last sighted in 2015 and 2017 in publications such as The Daily Express, The Sun, and The Daily Mail) have been dredged up as evidence of wasted cash. 

The idea of aid for trade has long been controversial. The fundamental concept? We give water; they buy our cars. In its current incarnation, DfID hasn’t worked like that, but rather for the common good – for development. Mr Johnson will keep DfID’s £15bn budget intact, with the UK committed to continuing to spend 0.7% of national income on aid projects. But - he wants the aid to be given only with our national interests at heart.

The remit for DfID is wide, but sustained poverty reduction has been a major factor in all that it does. I fear that will be threatened by the merger – because what does the UK get back from that?

Wearing another hat, that of the chair of ZamScotEd, a very small charity based in Argyll that supports the education of some of Zambia’s poorest children, can I tell you why even juggling lessons are worth funding without asking anything in return?

Our charity is a member of Scotland's International Development Alliance. Like us, members are non-government organisations working in many developing countries in many different ways. To illustrate the ‘crime’ of ‘funding juggling lessons’, let me tell you about one organisation that gets street kids playing football and doing acrobatics in Tanzania.  Those children are attracted from surviving on food picked from the rubbish dumps of Dar es Salaam into sporting teams and given skills they enjoy. From there, the majority go on to school, to jobs, and to contributing to their society. 

Many of the children attending the secondary school ZamScotEd initiated on the outskirts of Lusaka are former street kids, (and yes, learning to perform traditional music and acrobatics, though not with DfID money).

By engaging the poorest of children, funding the means to give them skills, then channelling them into an education that can transform their lives, we help to achieve the UN’s first sustainable development goal – the elimination of poverty. Catholic Social Teaching says: ‘The common good is the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfilment.’
(Vatican II)

What do we get back? Fulfilled people less likely to migrate. Countries with educated populations able to govern well for the benefit of the peace of the whole world. 

But those educated people will also be able to negotiate trade deals that are fair and just – now there’s a concept for Mr Johnson to juggle with. 

(Picture courtesy Yes! Tanzania)