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.

The Divine Sophia

from Issue 77, Advent 2024

There are two ways through life: the way of Nature and the way of Grace.’ Thus begins Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (2011), a coming-of-age film chronicling the spiritual and domestic struggles of a Texan family in the 1950s. Animating the drama is the austere patriarch figure, played brilliantly by a crew-cut Brad Pitt, whose private failures as an aspiring concert pianist take their toll on his wife and children. With our perspective tidily framed by the opening dichotomy, we watch each character as they decide between that which ‘doesn’t try to please itself’ and that which ‘only wants to please itself’. But is the question of Grace and Nature a zero-sum game?

We are currently enjoying a ‘Bulgakovian moment’ in contemporary theology. Despite being condemned by the Patriarchate of Moscow for his writing, Russian Orthodox thinker Sergius Bulgakov is finally being recognised for his unique insights into Christian thought, complex as they can sometimes be. It is, perhaps, this difficulty that has sparked some controversy, as more traditionalist readers of his work find fault with his shocking, brilliant and elusive ideas about Sophia, the Wisdom of God. To elaborate as best possible this tricky (and historically polyvalent) term, a useful starting point might be Jordan Daniel Wood’s definition: ‘the divine splendor, the Shekinah, the entire content of the divine essence resplendently manifest and brilliantly burning with love in and among the Three Persons.’ As this rather majestic language would suggest, it is, in fact, a word that originates in scripture, specifically Proverbs: ‘The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; by his knowledge the deeps broke open, and the clouds drop down the dew.’ (Prov. 3:19-20 NRSV).

Bulgakov attempts with Sophia to bring together ‘Lord’ and ‘earth’, Creator and Creation, without introducing a fourth figure into the Trinity (as his detractors would argue) or collapsing into the kind of dualism that Malick promulgates in The Tree of Life. But how exactly does he avoid these two pitfalls?   Giving a full account of Bulgakov’s sophiological metaphysics is, of course, beyond the scope of this piece. But one facet of his approach provides us an alternative to the more common, binary arguments about Nature and Grace. It is the aspect of his thought that draws not only on his immediate intellectual predecessors (like Vladimir Solovyov) but earlier patristic figures too. It is the idea of Sophia as symbol for the presence of God in our creaturely world. It is the very experience we can all attest to when material existence appears to announce divinity itself, as the unspeakable beauty of a sunset or the wonder of a new-born’s laughter. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins knew it well, writing that ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God’.

Robert de la Noval, a leading scholar on Bulgakov, takes this notion further when he argues that Sophia is the ‘condition for the possibility of the incarnation of God as a human being’. With our charged world comes the possibility of the Logos made flesh, which logically means, for Bulgakov himself, that ‘man possesses in himself an uncreated-created principle, he pertains to the eternity of the divine world. Belonging to the created-animal world, he is at the same time god by grace.’ Not to be misunderstood as a vague form of pantheism, or worse a form of self-divinising heresy, Sophia is the created world’s yearning for God.

It would be an oversimplification to characterise Nature and Grace in The Tree of Life as simply either/or. In one of the most poignant moments of the film, following the death of his son, Pitt’s character (positioned largely as the embodiment of Nature so far) chastises himself for the way he has treated his boy: ‘When he was sitting next to me at the piano, I criticised the way he turned the pages.’ In a rare moment of self-awareness and humility, he goes to on to lament that he made his son ‘feel shame, my shame’. Here, Malick deftly brings together the two ways of Nature and Grace he had suggested in the beginning were divergent paths. If Malick’s step here is tentative, Bulgakov may offer us a fuller vision. After losing his own son prematurely, he articulated perfectly what may happen when you open your human heart to grace: ‘For the only time in my life I understood what it means to love not with a human, self-loving, and mercenary love, but with that divine love with which Christ loves us. It was as if the curtain separating me from others fell and all the gloom, bitterness, offense, animosity, and suffering in their hearts was revealed to me.’

Obituary: Edwin Kalerwa

from Issue 77, Advent 2024

On 10th September 2024, Edwin Kalerwa passed away in hospital, after suffering from cancer. Edwin lived at Giuseppe Conlon House from 2016 to 2018. He was also a member of the congregation at St Martin in the Fields in London, as well as Watford Chess Club, and he volunteered for many years with the charity Groundswell. Recently he studied IT and was designing a website where he hoped to platform discussions about politics and activism.

I first met Edwin when he came to Giuseppe Conlon House in 2016 during a time when he was homeless and fighting for his right to stay in the UK. He was only supposed to stay for a few weeks, so we gave him a spare bed behind the bookshelves. Being homeless had damaged his health in many ways. He often seemed anxious, worried that people were stealing his things or conspiring against him. He had brought all his belongings with him including furniture. We spent months putting him under pressure to sort out his stuff, his case, his life, and reminding his caseworkers that his stay with us was only supposed to be temporary.

From the beginning, I treated Edwin as a problem that I needed to solve. Edwin told me that we did our best, that we worked very hard in a difficult environment. He blamed the Home Office and the conservative government for his situation. But he was also honest about the hurt and disappointment he experienced while living with us. I am sharing this because I want to be honest about the small part of his life that he spent living with us, even if some of it is painful.

I reached out to him a year ago and we met up a few times. Only a few months ago in the summer, we met up in London and had lunch at a Kenyan restaurant. He told me how he wished we had let him stay with us as long as he needed, long enough to sort out his papers.

He talked about how difficult it is when everyone treats you as a number, when it feels like nobody really cares and there’s nobody you can trust. He described how difficult it is to think about anything, to make plans or act when you are so stressed. He also talked about the retreats we used to organise and how sometimes it felt like we were a family.

His honesty and generosity deeply moved me. It has inspired me and given me strength to engage

compassionately with people whose actions have hurt me or other people. Edwin understood the complexity of people, our emotions and mental health, our relationships, conflicts and the power we exercise.

Edwin was a great chess player. He offered to teach me once, but I felt too patronised to take him up on it. We were planning a trip to Snowdonia. He wanted to challenge himself and climb a mountain, but I had some doubts. He was also passionate about politics. We spent hours on a sunny day, sitting in Red Lion Square, talking about colonialism, gender, education, trade unions… He wrote an article for this newsletter about climate change, and another very candid article about his experience of homelessness. I am so grateful that we were in touch again and that I was able to get to know him more as a whole person, not just as a guest in a Catholic Worker house. Thank you, Edwin, for all you have shared and given of yourself.