During lockdown, families and individuals were stripped of the relevance of anything apart from the state of their home life, and inner attitudes. Every certainty became uncertain, and placed in lockdown, we had no choice but to sit with our being rather than our doing, and how uncomfortable that made us feel.
The basic question is simple: how well did the choices made promote the common good? The answers, however, are complicated and contested, since the common good is far from self-evident. Catholic Social Teaching can help, as it provides five sound, relevant, and quite practical principles of economic justice.
The suffering, uncertainty and fear caused by COVID-19 around the world seems to have helped many of us understand more deeply the need for God, and created a new heartfelt desire for us to speak with Him on a regular basis. And we have recently seen this manifest itself in many powerful ways within this diverse and global Mary’s Meals family.
Our conviction is that the experiences of the past months have underscored the centrality of community to the work of food banks, and, indeed, to the wider voluntary sector. And as we anticipate the impending challenge of the economic outlook, rising unemployment, increasing concerns around mental health and wellbeing, we will need to draw on the rich resource of community to enact and advocate for long-term change.
Dignity at work and the rights of the worker are at the heart of Catholic Social Teaching, which stands in total contradiction to the culture of profit-driven indifference to the lives of ordinary people in their places of work. Yet deaths from workplace accidents or diseases remain staggeringly high on a global scale, with the International Labor Organisation citing an average of more than 2.78m per year.
In the UK there appears to be some level of consensus, at least at the level of rhetoric, that things cannot go back to how they were before. These last four months could turn out to be our ‘teachable moment’ when we have come to the realisation that things cannot continue along the same trajectory.
In 2019, prior to the pandemic, the Amazon Synod took place and reinforced CARJ in its understanding of its role. We learned from the final document of the Amazon Synod that “synodality” is the process of Christians walking together in the practice of discernment, in order to read the “signs of the times”.[5] It can take place at various levels – small communities, parishes, dioceses, regions or globally; and it involves listening, dialogue, prayerful discernment and communal decision making.
Fear. The word and the emotion which has been at the forefront of my mind these past four months. When you leave work one day as part of a prison chaplaincy team made up of twenty two people but by the middle of the next day you are the only one permitted to enter the prison site, deemed as a ‘critical worker’, you know there may be something to be fearful of.
Early into COVID-19 lockdown measures, poet and author Damien Barr wrote a poem which became the basis for an oft-repeated phrase: “We are not in the same boat; we are in the same storm.” The aphorism highlights an undeniable reality: that the effects of COVID-19 have not been experienced equally by all people, a dissonance which has roots in many of the ‘usual’ marginalisation crossroads which facilitate structural inequalities, including but not limited to race, poverty, mental illness, and housing.
Regimes never break cleanly. Hitchens and his allies are right that the removal of statues to slavers and imperialists marks an end. But their timing is badly out of kilter. Like the fall of Lenin in Kiev in 2014, the dismantling of statues now marks the end of a regime which fell a long time ago, the statues are shards of an older social and political order protruding into a world now governed by very different ideologies and principles.
It is clear that racism is the pandemic within the pandemic, which was once held at the inarticulate level or the politically unconscious level for the most part, but has now come to the fore. The whole world is waking up to the reality of racism, and there is a renewed desire for anti-racist action.
