NJPN Newsletter: Spring 2016
News from National Justice & Peace Network – Mercy and the Common Good: Our Responsibility
NJPN Newsletter Spring 2016
All posts by Ruth Hemmingfield
NJPN NW Justice and Peace E Bulletin – Jan / Feb 2016
The monthly e-bulletin for the North West, linked to the National Justice and Peace Network, is produced jointly by the dioceses of Lancaster, Liverpool, Salford, Shrewsbury and Wrexham.
NJPN NW Justice and Peace E Bulletin Jan- Feb 2016
Bishop Patrick Lynch – ‘Catholic Community will play its part in welcoming Syrian refugees’
Following a meeting (Monday 18 January) with Richard Harrington MP, the Minister responsible for Syrian refugees, Bishop Patrick Lynch issued the following statement
Statement begins:
“The UK has rightly taken responsibility for resettling some of the most vulnerable Syrian refugees in addition to its significant support for those sheltering in neighbouring countries. The one thousand people who have already arrived now have an opportunity to rebuild their lives in safety and security.
“I was grateful for the open and constructive conversation with Mr Harrington about some of the challenges ahead, such as making sure that no one is prevented from registering for the scheme and that everyone who arrives is properly supported as they settle into their new neighbourhoods. We also discussed the problems faced by Syrian Christian refugees and the steps being taken to include them in the scheme.
“The Minister is clearly committed to providing practical help to vulnerable refugees. The Catholic community in England and Wales also has a responsibility to provide practical assistance wherever possible and always to extend the hand of welcome. I was pleased to reassure the Minister that we will play our part.”
Statement ends
Source: https://www.catholicnews.org.uk/Home/News/Minister-for-Syrian-Refugees
An update from ‘Seeking Sanctuary’
Supportive Cards can be sent to exiles in the Calais camp.
If you wish to send cards of support for the refugees to the Secours Catholique Day Centre in Calais they’ll be passed on to people during the team’s daily visits to the camp.
Please bear in mind the following:
The vast majority of the people are Muslims: please do not be too overtly Christian in your messages.
Write in short sentences using simple words.
90% of the residents are young men, aged 15 to 25: choose cards that may suit their taste. (We suggest that you address cards to “An exile”; “An exiled family”, or “An exiled child”, which may provide scope for a little variety.)
Feel free to add a return address or your email address: you may get some replies.
The address: An Exile, chez Secours Catholique, 434 route de Saint Omer, 62100 CALAIS, FRANCE.
About ‘Seeking Sanctuary’. There are currently some 6000 migrants in Calais (December 2015) and more nearby. ‘Seeking Sanctuary’ aims to raise awareness about this situation and is organising basic humanitarian assistance through Faith Communities and Community Organisations in partnership with experienced aid agencies such as ‘Secours Catholique’.
For further information on how you or your organisation can help, contact Ben Bano on 07887 651117 or Phil Kerton on 01474 873802. To check the latest news, visit our website on www.seekingsanctuary.weebly.com.
Urgent appeal for help from ‘Seeking Sanctuary’
‘Seeking Sanctuary’ is launching an emergency appeal for funds to relieve the immediate human suffering following the recent heavy rain and high winds in Northern France.
With the torrential rain and wind, and now freezing weather predicted for January and February, conditions in the camp have worsened and are deteriorating still more. Tents cannot survive these conditions, especially as the ground (an old landfill site and swamp among sand dunes) is not suitable for firmly securing guy ropes. There are a group of volunteer builders doing a fantastic job of making more sturdy wooden structures to replace the tents, but ground sheets and tarpaulin are desperately needed to weatherproof these, as well as to try to patch up ripped tents. (In Dunkirk the conditions are reported to be even worse, and supplies even more limited – but work to move people to a new location is now scheduled to start any day.)
Despite the opening of 1500 dormitory places in modified containers at Calais, the French authorities have further exacerbated the problem there by announcing immediate measures to clear all tents and structures in a zone at least 100 metres wide alongside the motorway and neighbouring houses. Aid workers have less than three days in which to help at least 1000 men, women and children to move and rebuild their dwellings.
Due to the rain, firewood is not an appropriate fuel source at the moment. Gas is in high demand and there is now a good system in the camp for re-filling gas cylinders. But it is expensive, with each cylinder costing £21 to re-fill and sustain a family or small community group tent for four weeks. Tarpaulins and groundsheets are needed to weatherproof new wood-framed shelters and to reinforce the most flimsy tents.
Finally, the Calais aid warehouses have totally run out of blankets, we would love to take them more thick warm blankets this month, to be available for new refugees arriving in the camp with nothing.
The Tunbridge Wells support group which has already made several trips will again be travelling to Calais on 27th January with 17 volunteers. They had already raised funds for essential supplies such as clothes and footwear. We want to help to raise an extra £5000, with which they want to buy large tarpaulin sheets, groundsheets, gas canister refills (each lasts a family or small group for 4 weeks) as well as thick blankets. This will help at least 200 of the people most in need, particularly following the pending clearance of shelters and tents away from the motorway.
If you can help us to raise this money please let us know and we will pass on their bank account details to you.
With thanks for all that you already do on behalf of these vulnerable people.
Ben and Phil.
Seekingsanctuary.weebly.com
Mercy and the common good: our responsibility
In the February edition of the NJPN newsletter Jenny Sinclair – ‘Together for the Common Good’ offers the following reflection on the Year of Mercy.
‘Only mercy can truly contribute to a more human world’. Pope Francis emphasises again and again that it’s only mercy that can challenge the ‘globalised indifference’ that enables injustice and mercilessness to carry on. He sees a loving, personal responsibility as the foundation for the Common Good. It requires opening our minds and hearts to the dignity of every human person, including those with whom we disagree.
Having a Jesuit for a pope means we are to be on our toes when it comes to how we apply Catholic social teaching. It’s not enough to assume that it is ‘in our DNA’ or that we learn it by osmosis. There is a temptation to pick and mix, ignore some of the principles altogether, to speak a lot about solidarity and rather less about its equal partner subsidiarity, which stresses responsibility at the appropriate level and decisions taken closest to where they will have their effect. There is a tendency to forget that Catholic social teaching critiques not only capitalism but collectivism too. By introducing mercy into the equation, Pope Francis is showing us that both market and state will always have a tendency to dehumanise unless they are tempered by a more human, healthy civil society.
We have mistakenly put our faith in an administrative, procedural system where both market and state have become too dominant: neither can grapple with the poverty of relationships, the lack of power, agency and hope in people’s lives. Nor can they muster an understanding of the essential nature of trust, faithfulness, the sense of belonging and place, the necessity of skill and the institutions required to preserve and maintain honesty and vocation. These are things for which we must take responsibility. It is about rehumanising a system in which there is not enough love.
With this injunction to get personal, we may need to reconsider if donating to charity, joining demonstrations, campaigns and speaking out is really enough. What Pope Francis in this year of mercy is asking us to do is to offer a handshake, not a handout, to struggling families and communities, and work with them, not for them, to empower and encourage their own leadership.
When the ‘soft power’ of mercy gets involved, the messy and beautiful reality of humanity is revealed, and it becomes clear that the Common Good is a practice which requires us to balance competing interests through constant renegotiation: between marginalised and powerful, left and right, faith and secular, educated and uneducated, consumers and shareholders, management and employees, urban and rural, old and young. The Common Good is not a fixed set of conditions, a utopian ideal to be imposed by one enlightened group upon another. It is about working out those conditions together. That means brokering relationships between those who hold different views and traditions, both political and cultural. The gifts that each of us brings are necessary if we are to build a viable, sustainable common life together.
If we are to succeed in a new settlement for the Common Good, then we will all need to put our shoulders to the wheel and work together. The churches of all denominations, especially the laity, are well-placed to be at the heart of the solution, if we get out of our comfort zones, face outwards and open up to unlikely partnerships, and commit ourselves to bridge building – in our parishes, workplaces, in our social, political, economic and cultural life.
In an increasingly fragmented, unequal and divided society like ours, there is nothing more important than the reconciliation of estranged interests for the Common Good – it is an outworking of mercy, which, integrated with our spirituality and vocation, turns our desire for justice into a highly personal mission.
© Jenny Sinclair
Together for the Common Good, January 2016
Jenny will be speaking at the NJPN Conference 2016, 15-17 July, The Hayes Centre, Swanwick, Derbyshire.
NJPN NW Justice and Peace E Bulletin – December 2015
The monthly e-bulletin for the North West, linked to the National Justice and Peace Network, is produced jointly by the dioceses of Lancaster, Liverpool, Salford, Shrewsbury and Wrexham.
NJPN NW Justice and Peace E Bulletin December 2015 NJPN NW Justice and Peace E Bulletin December 2015
A message from the Refugee Council
Ask your MP to vote to reunite refugee families
Dear………………………
As the nights draw in and the temperature drops, many of us here in Britain are looking forward to spending the festive period with our loved ones.
Heartbreakingly, for many refugees, this time of year only reminds them of the family they are without.
We take it for granted that we’re able to live in safety with our loved ones, but for refugee families divided by war and persecution, the heartache of separation is a daily pain which is worsened by Britain’s unnecessarily harsh immigration policies.
Imagine you’re a Syrian father in Britain. Like many refugees arriving in Europe, you’ve risked everything to find safe haven. After an anxious wait you’ve been granted asylum and you’re now eligible to bring your wife and two youngest children to come and join you in safety here. To your relief, it’s confirmed by the Government that they will be issued visas to travel legally.
But your relief is short lived. You have another child – a daughter who is 18. The current rules say because she’s classed as an adult, she’s not allowed to come with her mum and siblings. Under official Home Office guidelines, she doesn’t count as your family.
This is clearly absurd. She’s your child. She needs you.
Like many refugees you’re then faced with an impossible choice: should your daughter be left behind, all alone in a warzone, or should you try and borrow money to pay smugglers to bring her to Britain? Either option puts your daughter in serious danger.
No families should be left to make impossible choices. No families should be unnecessarily, permanently divided and in danger.
This winter, we’re calling on the Government to change the rules to allow more refugees to be able to reunite with their loved ones in safety.
We have a chance to change things but we don’t have much time. On the 1st of December MPs will be voting on making changes to the rules which would which would allow more refugee families to live together
Ask your MP to support the reunion of refugee families. and please ask your friends and family to do the same.
Thank you for your continued support,
Maurice Wren
Refugee Council Chief Executive
https://www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/
Paris Attacks: Statement from NJPN
Members of NJPN executive are horrified to read the detail of the devastating events which took place in Paris on the evening of Friday 13 November.
We offer our sympathy and prayers to everyone involved in and affected by what is a tragedy for each one of us.
We resolve to continue to work for a more just and peaceful world for all, regardless of religion or ethnicity.
We urge all people of good will, of all faiths and none, to be vocal in their condemnation of these inhuman acts and work together to build relationships of openness, understanding and trust so that we can build a more tolerant world for our children and grandchildren.
Anne Peacey, on behalf of NJPN Exec.
Vatican response to Paris attacks
The following is a translation of the statement issued on 13 November, by the director of the Holy See’s press office, Fr Federico Lombardi, soon after the terror attacks on the city of Paris:
“Here in the Vatican we are following the terrible news from Paris. We are shocked by this new manifestation of maddening, terrorist violence and hatred which we condemn in the most radical way together with the Pope and all those who love peace.
We pray for the victims and the wounded, and for all the French people. This is an attack on peace for all humanity, and it requires a decisive, supportive response on the part of all of us as we counter the spread the homicidal hatred in all of its forms.”