Blessed are the Poor

Martin Newell’s Home Office Vigil Reflection.

“Woe to the rich” (Luke 6:24)

Christ the Shepherd, Jaroslav, 2025

Those words are probably the least quoted words in the Gospels. They’re not popular, especially in rich countries. “Happy – or Blessed – are the poor” (Luke 6:20) is at least more popular.

But who are the rich and poor today, in the world we live in? It helps to understand our context. Despite there being a debate about whether global inequality is rising or falling, it is clearly true to say that there has never been a bigger gap between the richest and the poorest in human history. While Elon Musk is worth $400bn, and the super-mega-rich can talk of space tourism and going to live on other planets, millions of the poorest globally still die young, even in childhood, of preventable diseases, lack of clean water, and not having enough to eat. Obviously, we can see refugees desperately seeking a new life in the UK and Europe, risking their lives crossing the Mediterranean and the English Channel, and those who arrive here as among the poor, among those most vulnerable, suffering and in need of safety and welcome. And what happens on our borders reveals a wider truth: that the poverty and suffering of the poorest is not an accident, but the result of deliberate policy decisions designed to protect and enhance the place and wealth of the rich minority.

I think it’s also true to say that the biggest class divisions in the world are not between the working class and middle and upper classes, but between those who have access to “First World” lifestyles, passports and social security systems, and those who don’t. And it is the gulf that still exists between these worlds of Dives and Lazarus (as in Jesus’ parable in Luke’s Gospel) that is both a push and pull factor in driving global migration. But it would be good to dig a little deeper.

Catholic Workers used to talk a lot about being at the heart of Empire. We compared ourselves to the people of Rome in the time of Jesus. Jesus lived and died, was executed, on the margins, the peripheries, of Empire. But the early Christians in Rome had to work out what it meant to follow Jesus while living at the heart of that same Empire. We – Catholic Workers – saw ourselves in a similar situation. Catholic Workers in the US certainly live in the heart of a global Imperial power. And in London, we live in a similar place, where there is a concentration of economic, financial, political and military power. Such a place is crying out for communities of faith and resistance, to stand in places such as this place of power – the Home Office.

Ched Myers in his book Who Will Roll Away the Stone: Discipleship Queries for First World Christians, compared our situation to that of Peter, warming his hands by the fire while Jesus was being tortured nearby: like Peter, we are warming our hands with the minor privileges of Empire, while off stage we can hear the screams of the crucified of our times being tortured.  And so Catholic Workers talked about repenting from the privileges of Empire, and resisting its violence and injustice from within.

These days, the talk on the political left is more about de-colonisation than resisting Empire. I guess it essentially means the same thing. Working for the end of Empire, or Empires. While the age of the visible European Empires is over, the spirit of colonialism lives on.

Interestingly, it seems to me that the voices calling for de-colonisation often start from the global south. Which seems very right and to the point. And to me, they often seem to be the same voices that criticise things like “white saviourism” and “Band Aid” type portrayals of Africa and Africans as all being poor, starving wretches who need westerners to come over and save them.

I mention this partly because it strikes me that these days, pretty much every country in the world has what might be called a “First World Sector” and a “Third World Sector” – and others in between, but in very different proportions in different countries. Visually, virtually every country has a city with at least a district that looks like a west European city, for example. As a result of this increased prosperity in the global south, there are articulate voices from every country demanding respect, equal voices and economic equality, and saying “we don’t want to be represented like THAT! We don’t need your charity, your help, we need you to take your foot off our necks!” Revolutions are usually started by those who have newly entered the educated aspiring middle classes, who still feel they are being kept out of true freedom, opportunity and respect. It seems to me that the same is happening around the world today.

Those who make it to our shores are not from among the poorest in the world. The poorest might be lucky if they can make it to the nearest border or refugee camp. But those who do arrive carry with them the voices of their people, as well as sending money back home out of whatever they have, whether that is little or plenty, as witnessed to by the adverts on the tube for such things as the Remitly app.

As distressing as it is when there is so much suffering along the way, the great flow of migration at this time in history also represents something positive, that more and more people have the resources, the opportunity, the drive and the energy to seek and find a better life for themselves and their families. At the same time, as Pope Francis has said, there is such a thing as “internal colonialism”, such that at least some of the voices we hear from the global south don’t represent the poor at all, but the local elites, who may identify themselves more as part of the rich world, while happening to live in exile among the “great unwashed”.

I could go on, but I’ve said enough. Let us pray for soft hearts and open ears to hear the cries of the crucified of today, wherever and whoever they are, and to hear what the Spirit is saying to the Churches.

Anniversaries, Change and Renewal

Martin Newell reflects on the past, present, and future of the London Catholic Worker.

Giuseppe Conlon House, Print, Sarah Fuller

In May we celebrated the 92nd birthday of the Catholic Worker movement, launched as it was as a radical newspaper on May Day 1933. We also celebrated some other significant anniversaries that will pass this year: 25 years of the London Catholic Worker, 20 years of the Urban Table soup kitchen, and 15 years of Giuseppe Conlon House. Trying to see Christ in the least of his sisters and brothers who we welcome, and to advocate and witness in solidarity with them and others who are also the “crucified of today,” remains the animating and challenging force among us.

It might sound like an impressive story of continuous life, work, and witness. On the other hand, since I moved back into the house here, only one other person remains. Both guests and members of the live-in community that is the foundation of our life and work come and go. Like the human body that completely renews itself with new cells every seven years, the community here is a living organism. As I write, the Catholic Workers here are myself (Martin), Thomas, Moya, Harry, and James. Naomi will have joined us by the time you read this. I will have moved out nearby, but will still be working for the community at least part-time for the time being.

The newest good news is that Thomas and Moya have said they want to commit long-term. This is a real blessing. Deo Gratias! It is a gift from them, and a real commitment, because none of us are paid a wage. We give of ourselves freely in return for little more than subsistence living, and the joy and challenges that life in

community, in a house of hospitality, brings. Some of us are planning to move on in the next few months and others are expected to join us. And that is how it goes. But we look with hope for more who are willing to make that long-term commitment—even the “lifers” who may discern that this is the vocation that God has in mind for them.

Dorothy Day once wrote, “It really is a permanent revolution, this Catholic Worker movement of ours.”

She was adapting Trotsky’s call for a permanent revolution to the personalist idea that the Kingdom of  God, or the revolution, is not so much something to be aimed at for the future, as something to be lived out each day, each moment. She saw in this movement an attempt to do that, to be a permanent ferment in society, bringing God’s love to bear on the critical issues of the day.

We are still trying to do that here. The constant changes mean that there is another way our community and our movement continue to be a permanent ferment. Life in the house here never ceases to change. Not only do people come and go, but the way we live and work and have our being here changes as well.

When we first moved to Giuseppe Conlon House in 2010, we spent a lot of time cleaning and fixing and

organising the place, and collecting what we needed from so many different places and people who gave us donations.

It did not always go straightforwardly. I remember borrowing a van to pick up two rolls of carpet we were offered. But the carpet rolls were about twice as long as the van, so we had to leave them behind. And we had perhaps our most difficult day when local councillors and governors from the school opposite came, thinking we were going to bring “disruptive elements” into the neighbourhood. And I guess we have—just not in the way they were thinking of.

We ran the basic night shelter in the hall for nearly five years. For the first three years we were also supporting our other works started a few years earlier: Dorothy Day House, Peters Community Café, and the Urban Table. The Urban Table is still going—20 years this year, now independent. After five years the community at the time had the imagination to re-organise the space here so that nearly all the 20 men staying in the shelter could have proper beds in proper bedrooms for the first time. But it was still a (more comfortable) night shelter, three and four to a room for the guests, and sometimes for short-term volunteers too.

Lots of activism came through the house too. In the early years, it was mostly Christian peace witness. Then there were women’s groups, refugee groups, and community groups. Later, pre-Covid, it was most notably Christian Climate Action, Extinction Rebellion, and Palestine Action, whose nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience all owe a debt of gratitude to the hospitality offered here, and the networking a community makes possible.

Now, we have twenty-five people staying here. Fifteen live in the communal house setting where nearly everyone has their own room—ten guests and five Catholic Workers. And since March, ten men have also been sleeping in the basic night shelter, back in the hall. The place is full and busy again. After the money spent, and the work done, on the extensive renovations of the last few years, the buildings look better and it is a better place to live.

The registration of Giuseppe Conlon House CIO as a charity gives the work of hospitality a more reliable foundation, and hopefully access to more resources. But visitors should not be fooled—it is only comfortable in comparison to how it was before. We are still dependent on community members and volunteers willing to make a personal sacrifice, work hard, and do what is needed, as well as generous donors of all kinds, for whom we also thank God, to keep body and soul together and the roof on! May we continue to allow ourselves to be inspired by the Holy Spirit, and may the Spirit too bring us not just what, but who, we need. Amen.

Common Good and the Border

Community member Thomas Frost writes on his experience volunteering in the Maria Skobtsova House in Calais.

Refugees in the Korem Camp, Sebastião Salgado, 1984

 What surprised me most about Calais was how ordinary it was. You could easily spend a week or two there as a tourist, as people often do, and have no idea that it is the site of a humanitarian catastrophe caused by the brutal British-French operation, costing hundreds of millions of pounds, to prevent migration across the Channel. Great effort has been spent keeping migrants, and violence against migrants, out of sight. The proliferation of walls topped with barbed wire, and former public parks filled with boulders to prevent the pitching of tents, would not speak of the tear-gassing of children, of their being fired at with rubber bullets, of masked police sinking boats filled with terrified people by slashing them open with knives, or of the denial of medical treatment for injuries to those who didn’t already know about them. The authorities have decided that, for the sake of the common good in their countries, migrants have to be treated as though they were not human beings, and so, to avoid offending those who would see them as humans, they keep their practices largely hidden.

Even within political movements advocating for migrants there exists a tendency to overlook the dignity of some people for reasons of pragmatism. Most people in this country will still acknowledge that we have some collective responsibility to “genuine refugees,” so it is tempting to focus exclusively on the stories of those we might expect to be regarded as “genuine”—often children and those fleeing relatively well-publicised warzones—in the hope of convincing as many people as possible that some change of policy is required. A focus has been on the creation of limited “safe, legal routes” for at least some people to claim asylum without making the dangerous crossing. While the existence of such routes would be an improvement on the situation as it stands, they will fail to solve the problem just to the extent that they are limited.

Those excluded will continue to take dangerous routes, or remain in intolerable situations from fear of violence. The Refugee Council, against the overwhelming majority of groups working directly with migrants, supported August’s “one in, one out” deal between France and Britain on the basis that it would create an extremely limited route of this sort. Since under the deal equal numbers of migrants would be forcibly expelled to France, we might consider exactly what judgments need to be made about the dignity of the deal’s victims and the value of their interests for it to be regarded as supportable.

Christianity should provide a model for political thinking. Attention has to be continuously redirected towards the more marginalised and most easily ignored if we are to have a politics which genuinely reflects human dignity, and to think about the Cross should always be to think of these groups. Unfortunately, Catholic thinking on borders and migration has become very confused. If you are unwise enough to search the internet for the Church’s teaching on the matter, you will find a series of articles referring to paragraph 2241 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), which, after it refers to the obligation of wealthy countries to welcome foreigners in search of security (including economic security), states that political authorities may restrict the exercise of the right to migrate “for the sake of the common good to which they are responsible”. Even publications more sympathetic to migrants have taken this as a general authorisation for the illegalisation of migration whenever it might adversely affect the social or economic situation of the receiving country. More alarmingly, J. D. Vance has cited it to justify the spectacle of cruelty currently being carried out under the name of immigration enforcement by his government which, unlike most of its European counterparts, no longer feels a need to conceal its brutality. These being the stakes, it is worth thinking carefully about what the “common good” really involves.

The CCC itself refers, as it generally does when discussing political community, to Gaudium et Spes (GS), which defines it as “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”. GS refers to the need, in an increasingly interconnected world, for governments to consider a universal common good as well as a common good within their own communities, an idea taken forward by Pope Francis in Fratelli Tutti. But even leaving that aside, while the provision of basic needs such as food, shelter, and clothing are necessary for human fulfilment, they do not constitute it in themselves. Human fulfilment, ultimately, is to know and love God; this is the end for which Christians believe we are made. And to know and love God is to know and love him in his creation, and particularly in other people. GS goes on to identify the perfection of human community in the Church, a community defined by the self-giving love of its members towards one another (GS 32). If, therefore, political authority derives its legitimacy from its contribution to the “common good” (GS 74), which is the creation of conditions in which human fulfilment is made most possible, the proper role of any political institution is not dissimilar to Peter Maurin’s mandate to “make the kind of society where it is easier for people to be good”.

Consequently, the idea that a border policy based on exclusion, let alone one based on brutal violence, could be a means of promoting the common good of its members is incoherent.

Our faith obliges us “to make ourselves the neighbour of every person without exception,” and “everyone must consider his every neighbour without exception as another self” (GS 27). We do not need to count up exactly how many people we are willing to let drown or starve to sustain the GDP, or preserve social cohesion, or win political concessions from right-wing governments, because as soon as we have decided to sacrifice some people for political ends we have lost the only legitimate basis for politics, which is to love all of our neighbours without exception. If we take our responsibilities seriously, we cannot accept any of the violence of the border, in its practice or its effect as a threat. Whatever life is left in our culture or political institutions will be destroyed by the very means that are being employed in a misguided attempt to save it. We will not save our country by turning it into a fortress surrounded by walls topped with barbed wire. We will be left with no country at all.