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24 Jan – Good Shepherd Mytholmroyd & Live Simply

We asked people who attended our Live Simply Workshop in June 2017 if they had done anything following it. At the start of January Michael Emly gave an update from Our Lady of Kirkstall parish in NW Leeds. Here, Janet Almond provides an update from Good Shepherd Parish in Mytholmroyd.

As with everything, it is getting started that is the initial hurdle. However, as a community, and on an individual basis, members of the Good Shepherd parish have and continue to participate in a number of activities and have made a number of changes that move us in the direction of living more simply, more sustainably and more in solidarity with poor people across the world. We may not have formally signed up to the Live Simply Award scheme as yet but it is a definite intent.

These actions have included
– Installing solar panels to help put energy back in to the system.
– A parishioner has planted and nurtures an orchard on what would otherwise have been a small redundant piece of land beside the car park for the church.
– There is a policy to use/change to Fair Trade and Eco friendly products within the Parish Centre.
– The children are holding fund raising events to create a (CAFOD) virtual village, with chickens, donkeys etc.
– Parishioners are involved in the Ebenezer Food Bank in Halifax and with St Augustine’s. This assists refugees.

Others help with ‘pay as you can’ cafes and soup kitchens in the valley.

Meeting at Good Shepherd Parish Centre — Food bank talk at Good Shepherd Parish Centre

In June, a parishioner and volunteer from the Ebenezer Food bank came and gave a presentation about the food bank, and the work involved.

The parish centre toilets have been ‘twinned’ following fund raising by the children and young people of the parish. Toilet twining is through a charity (toilettwinning.org) linked to Tearfund. They provide toilets/latrines/sanitation/hygiene education in Asia & Africa. For £60 you can twin with one latrine, £240 with a block (in an education centre or similar). The organisation sends you a framed photograph of the toilet you’ve funded – one of our Parish Centre ones is in Guatemala.

Another thing we’ve done is arrange for battery recycling from the church. A company called Valpak provides boxes and collection free of charge.

24th January 2018 |

02 Jan – Creating a Buzz in Leeds

This update on one parish’s work towards the Live Simply Award has been provided by Michael Emly

What will help the “average parishioner” engage with the Church’s social teaching? What will build unity in a parish formed by the merger of 3 formerly independent church communities? How can we make Pope Francis’ teaching in ‘Laudato Si’ better known? These were three of the aspirations that led the parish of Our Lady of Kirkstall in northwest Leeds to decide to work towards certification by CAFOD as a “Live Simply” parish.

CAFOD’s website (https://cafod.org.uk/Campaign/How-to-campaign/Livesimply-award) sets out very clearly what is involved in the Live Simply award. A parish (or school) commits to living SIMPLY, SUSTAINABLY with creation, and IN SOLIDARITY with people in poverty. At the beginning of the process, an action plan is drawn up of how the parish will put these principles into practice. The plan should include not only activities already in place but also new developments or projects around each of these themes. Once the parish feels that it has made sufficient progress and can demonstrate this fact, then it invites CAFOD to visit and hopefully validate the award.

In Our Lady of Kirkstall, the parish CAFOD Group began the process in Summer 2016 by discussing the Live Simply scheme with our parish priest, Fr. Pat Smythe, and then taking a paper to our Parish Council. Everybody could see the opportunities for parish renewal and growth and a decision was taken to embark on the Live Simply journey. In March 2017, members of the parish council spoke at all 6 Masses in the parish and a questionnaire was handed out to everyone at Mass in order to establish where members of the parish already stood on a number of matters, including recycling, involvement in “green” issues and how they travelled to Mass. Two open meetings in the early summer provided an opportunity for anybody who wished to feed into the process of drawing up an action plan, and the parish formally registered with CAFOD in September 2017.
Our Lady of Kirkstall could already demonstrate its substantial commitment to the theme of living in solidarity. As well as supporting CAFOD and the SVP, our parish community provides the base for 2 registered charities, one engaged in healthcare in South India (the Sylvia Wright Trust) and one providing wide-ranging support for development in East Timor (the Peter Trust). However, many in the parish had been very moved by the plight of refugees from Syria and we decided that we wanted to build an ongoing commitment to welcoming and supporting refugees Building on our current practice of organising collections for various charities active locally, we hope also to provide encouragement and opportunities for people to engage at a more personal level. For the theme of living simply, we decided to produce a special monthly bulletin which would promote three “practical challenges” for that month and give a couple of short quotations from Laudato Si’. This bulletin also provides an opportunity to communicate the wider vision and involve parishioners in the various projects.

It is however on the theme of living sustainably that our plan is starting to become really exciting and showing potential for bringing the parish together in all sorts of new ways. Our plan always envisaged developing the use of the land around our 3 churches in order to bring people closer to creation. As we started to draw up firm plans, we discovered that Leeds is one of 8 cities involved in a national project called Urban Buzz which aims to increase the number of urban habitats for pollinating insects.

See https://www.buglife.org.uk/urban-buzz. Such insects are essential to the life-cycle of many crops and garden plants, but the countryside no longer offers such a hospitable environment because of agricultural monocultures and the use of pesticides. In contrast, urban parks and gardens already provide many plants rich in pollen. Urban Buzz works with schools and community groups to develop these and other spaces with this in mind. Planting native plant species such as primroses, bluebells, ox-eye daisies and campions is particularly encouraged. What this means in practice can be illustrated through the plans for just one of our churches, which has a plot approx. 20m x 5m down one side of the land between the church and the road. Currently, this is under grass and one end is shaded by a number of established deciduous trees. We would like to make this a more attractive feature for the community while providing a better habitat for insects. And for the changes to be sustainable, the maintenance requirements need to be low. After discussion with the project officer from Urban Buzz, our provisional plan includes:

Planting bulbs (snowdrops, crocus and English bluebells) under the trees.
Clearing an area of grass in the more open part to sow a small wild flower meadow.
Stopping mowing close to the boundary wall and allowing ferns, etc. to grow to provide cover for insects. Perhaps add some hellebores.
Putting up “bug hotels” to provide shelter for invertebrates.
Building compost bins to allow garden waste to be recycled.

An appeal for volunteers identified several individuals who would be interested in helping with this project. Discussions with the parish uniformed organisations (scouts, guides and their younger equivalents) are also proving fruitful and we plan to identify specific projects or activities which each group can undertake as part of their work for their badges. And our two parish primary schools are both keen to become involved.
The “gardening project” is already demonstrating its potential for bringing together parishioners, schools and uniformed organisations with a common vision. Hopefully, it will increase our awareness of the beauty and complexity of God’s creation and of our own responsibility to support and maintain the natural world. Pope Francis writes: “Our insistence that each human being is an image of God should not make us overlook the fact that each creature has its own purpose. None is superfluous.” (Laudato Si’, 84) Similarly, the 3 strands of the wider Live Simply programme are making us more aware of the interconnectedness of Catholic social teaching and helping us to understand what a gift we have received in the teaching of the current pope. “Everything is connected. Concern for the environment needs to be joined to a sincere love for our fellow human beings and an unwavering commitment to resolving the problems of society.” (Laudato Si’, 91)

For Our Lady of Kirkstall, this is still an early stage on our journey. Whether we will realise all our ambitions remains to be seen. But we hope and pray that the Holy Spirit will inspire and teach us along the way.

2nd January 2018 |

05 Dec – Bradford Peace Museum Faith and Peace Project

How often do we hear religion being blamed for the wars of the world? The argument goes that, as there is a religious dimension to the mess in the Middle East, Islamic State, Northern Ireland… so religion must be a force for bad.
Yet within each of the three Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – there is a priority of peace, a vision and longing for peace over violence. A new exhibition exploring the theme of peace within different faiths, glimpses the textual and practical search for peace in each of these “Religions of the Book”. It tells stories of their peace-makers. It shows how each stresses hospitality and welcome for the stranger, including the stranger of other faiths.

Faith and Peace is sponsored by the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship and illustrated with images of artefacts in the collection of the Peace Museum in Bradford.

Liz Firth, Peace Education Worker and Trustee of the Peace Museum and member of the Justice and Peace Commission has been working with local groups of women in Bradford at different community venues and places of worship. The groups were Syrian refugees who recently arrived in Bradford from Syria, members of the Shine Creative Threads group who meet at St Stephen’s church in West Bowling in Bradford and a group of women from different faiths who met at Bradford Cathedral.

Stitching a Tree of Life for the Healing of the Nations, or working on a faux-stained-glass representation of Naomi and Ruth, biblical refugees from famine, or creating a book of link prints has been a formative experience for these women.

What priority do we give to peace-making and nonviolence in our own faith? Seeing Faith and
Peace encourages us to work creatively with people of other faiths, side by side to learn the things that make for peace.
We hope that the exhibition will provide the opportunity to reflect on the male and female heroes for peace, on Jesus’s teaching and example against violence, and the importance of working alongside neighbours of other faiths. If we all act on the imperative for peace-making in our own faith, perhaps others will see that religion is not the problem but part of the solution for the peace of our world.
Exhibition
The exhibition was installed at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford and will be exhibited in Leeds and Bradford next year as well as further afield. Liz will be hosting more workshops with local women
to create new pieces of artwork as well as facilitating stand-alone workshops on the themes of the exhibition with other local groups.
Liz.firth@peacemuseum.org.uk

5th December 2017 |

30 Nov – Who says Young People don’t get involved in social action?

About 200 young people came together for the first Leeds Peacejam Conference (there has been a previous one in Bradford) on the weekend of the 25-26 November. Peacejam is an international organisation founded in 1996 by a group of Nobel Peace laureates. It is specifically aimed at young people and is about encouraging them to become more involved in civil society to address issues of social justice. The conference was hosted at Leeds Trinity University.

The keynote speaker for the weekend was Nobel laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire from Northern Ireland At a Trinity Talk on Friday evening she gave a movingly personal and passionate address, full of strength and hope, teaching us that “a real peace movement can be built”. ”Don’t get stuck in the past” she said’ ‘”be present in the community, in the moment”.

John Battle & Liz Firth from the J&P Commission led a workshop on each day of the weekend conference. On Saturday they used a case study to explore the difficulties that families on low incomes experience.

The Sunday workshops across the event were more focussed on undertaking some sort of practical action. John & Liz introduced the participants in their workshop to the basics of campaigning. The young people participating in the workshop were asked to go through that day’s newspapers and find a social justice issue about which they felt strongly. Then they had to find out who their MP was, what party they belonged to, what their particular interests were and so on. They then had to work out what they wanted their MP to do, prior to getting in contact with them. It was left to them to decide how they would contact their MP.

This picture shows one participant from Bradford Academy trying to ring his MP to ask him to lobby for more aid to go to Yemen.

Liz Firth tweeted this picture of one of the participants doing some research about his own MP – Alex Sobel of Leeds North West. Liz Firth took this picture and tweeted it with the message “Amazing participants @PeaceJamUK doing some research on issues of injustice and learning from @battlejohn on how to work with MP’s to get them to hear your voice – many can’t vote yet but we’re getting them ready early! @TheyWorkForYou” . To his delight, Alex immediately re-tweeted it.

It was encouraging to see so many young people come along and, hopefully, motivating for them to find that there are ways that they can get to the people in power.

30th November 2017 |

31 Oct – Update on Carbon reduction in the Leeds Diocese

In July we reported how the Commission had engaged with the University of Leeds for an MSc student on the Sustainability and Consulting course (Mohamed Juma) to evaluate whether the Diocese could do more to reduce its carbon footprint.

Climate change remains one of the biggest challenges to the world today. The challenge is huge because it needs action by everyone in the world – not just governments and big businesses but individuals and small companies and organisations like the Diocese as well.
The challenge for the Diocese is that it has a significant financial deficit so does not have the monetary resources to invest large amounts in ‘green’ technology just because it is a good thing to do.
Mohamed surveyed a sample of different churches across the diocese. He examined the applicability of a range of carbon reduction technologies: solar panels, wind turbines, and general construction materials – such as draught proofing, insulation levels, double glazing and the use of energy efficient lighting.

There was no ‘silver bullet’ in what Mohamed found out. Many of the churches he looked at do have roofs that would be very suitable for solar panels, for instance. A number have a large roof at a suitable angle on an East-West orientation (so they get the sun all day). Potentially, some of these roofs could support installations that could generate in the region of 30kW. However, whilst the cost of solar panels has reduced dramatically in the last five years, the amount paid for the electricity generated has fallen by an even larger amount. Hitherto, there have been companies interested in ‘renting’ roofs – which would have been a cost-neutral way of reducing the diocese’s carbon footprint. However, due to the reduction the amounts paid for the electricity these schemes seem to have largely disappeared.
This is not to say that individual parishes should not consider doing it. It is especially worth considering if a church building has to have some work done on its roof. A significant part of the cost of installation is hire of scaffolding whilst installation takes place – so if this can be done off the back of other work that has to be done then it becomes a much more attractive proposition.
A striking finding relates to the heating systems installed in different churches. Most of the churches had relatively new central heating boilers. However, in at least two of the churches visited the boilers themselves were of the order of 50 years old. Whilst it is fantastic that these boilers have lasted so long, they are very inefficient when compared with more recent boilers. So there may well be an economic case to be made in such circumstances.

What Mohamed’s work has illustrated to us is that there are possibilities but that they need detailed investigation and promotion at a parish level. If you are interested in helping us to do this then please email us at mailto:jandp@dioceseofleeds.org.uk

31st October 2017 |

30 Oct – First World Day of the Poor 19 Nov 2017

Pope Francis has instituted a new ‘World Day of the Poor’, inviting us “to embrace the culture of encounter” and to understand that sharing with those living in poverty “enables us to understand the deepest truth of the Gospel”.

In his message for the first World Day Pope Francis asks all of us, whatever our means or background, to unite in love, in acts of service to one another and in genuine encounter.

So what can we do to mark this Sunday in our parish liturgies?
The good news is that there are readily available resources with loads of ideas that you can just pick up and use ‘out of the box’.

If you want to hold a special liturgy or incorporate some specific prayers into the masses on that day then CAFOD have collected together all their resources that are suitable onto one webpage:
https://cafod.org.uk/Pray/World-Day-of-the-Poor

CSAN (Caritas Social Action Network) has put together a fairly comprehensive set of resources – including suggestions for liturgy groups – including childrens’ liturgy groups – intercessionary prayers, Homily Notes as well as testimonies so that the voice of the poor can be heard. In addition there are ‘print ready’ materials so that posters and prayer cards can be printed out if you so wish. Their website has all the details:-
http://www.csan.org.uk/worlddayofthepoor/#Print
With these resources every church can mark this special day in some respect.

Bishop Marcus will be celebrating a special mass on this theme at 11:00 on this day at St Anne’s Cathedral and there will be a Pastoral Letter that will be read in all churches.

30th October 2017 |

27 Oct – Inter-generational Conversations on Faith and Justice

At the end of September some people from the Leeds Diocese attended a workshop in Salford Cathedral centre about this. The idea behind it is that there is value in having a conversation across generations about Faith and Justice to see what different generations can learn from one another.
We were presented with a method of conversation reflecting on the call to justice and peace in relation to vocation, life choices and commitments. We also explored how older people could accompany young people and young adults more effectively in this area (always remembering that in church circles anyone under 40 is ‘young’)
The method used in the workshop was very effective and did enable some interesting conversations to take place. It wasn’t about formulating any kind of action plan or coming up with a set of recommendations to pass onto others. The emphasis was very much about listening to the perspectives of different generations.

As the process worked so well the Commission agreed at its last meeting that we should hold some similar conversations in our own Diocese.
Initially we are working with people to arrange meetings based at Leeds Trinity University, the University of Bradford and Leeds Cathedral.

The meetings will last for 2hours and we will try to ensure that there is an even mix of generations at each meeting. We will publish dates and times once arrangements are in place – but if you are interested in coming along to one of these sessions then please email us and we will make sure you know about the arrangements as soon as they are finalised.

27th October 2017 |

25 Oct – Diocesan Refugee Support Group: Grave Concerns about NHS Charging

Changes to the provision of NHS treatment have very recently come into effect.
The Diocesan Refugee Support Group have been very concerned about this and asked the facilitator, Lucy Irven, to write to all MP’s across the Leeds Diocese to spell out their concerns.
Below we reproduce the text of the letter sent to Government MP’s and we would encourage you to write similar letters to your own MP’s about this matter. At the bottom of this article as well as being able to download template letters you can also download the Briefing Paper prepared by Asylum Matters if you want more background information. If enough people take part it could have a real impact and get elements of these changes removed.
18 October 2017
Dear <name of MP>
I am writing to raise our grave concerns about the potential impacts of an amendment to the NHS charging regulations which was laid before Parliament on 19 July and is due to take effect next week and to ask for your help with challenging this.
The Diocese of Leeds Refugee Support Group was formed in October 2015 following the dramatic increase in refugee arrivals in the UK as a result of the crisis in Syria and the Middle East. The Pope asked that the Catholic Community take particular care of the migrant population, calling on our generosity and solidarity to recognise and act upon our common humanity in response to the growing crisis.

Since then, the Diocesan Refugee Support Group has been working in various ways to support the refugee population in our area. There are four pre-existing organisations which make up this group – Catholic Care, St Monica’s Housing, the St Vincent de Paul Society and the Leeds Justice and Peace Commission. In addition, many of the clergy, deacons, religious men and women and parishioners from across the Diocese are involved in providing an enthusiastic and generous response in their local communities. You can see examples of this ‘faith in action’ in the attached newsletter.
The NHS Charging regulations, which govern how people access healthcare in England and when they have to pay for it, will be subject to two significant changes.

Firstly, charges will be introduced for services provided by all community health organisations in England, except GP surgeries. This includes community mental health, health visiting, community midwifery, and school nurses.

Secondly, the regulations introduce up-front charging, which means that every hospital department in England will be legally required to check every patient’s paperwork before treating them. If a patient cannot prove that they are entitled to free care, they will receive an estimated bill for their treatment and will have to pay it in full before they receive any treatment other than that which is ‘urgent’ or ‘immediately necessary’.
We are concerned that these changes have been introduced without evaluation of their impact on health outcomes and health inequalities, and without a full and robust assessment of the long-term costs to the NHS. In particular, we would ask you to consider the following;

Up-front charging and the need to present paperwork proving eligibility for free care will increase barriers to healthcare for vulnerable groups – such as refugees, and people seeking asylum, who are eligible for free care, but will struggle to prove entitlement.
Additional bureaucracy will mean patient waiting times are likely to increase and there is a risk of racial profiling being used as a means to identify chargeable patients, leading to an increase in health inequalities.
These measures will cost the NHS more money as the only way to check eligibility for free NHS services which does not contravene equality law is to check everyone. Reviewing every patient’s immigration status will be time-consuming, costly to administer and frustrating for both patients and NHS staff.
Confusion over who is entitled to free care will deter patients from seeking medical advice at an early stage, leading to mounting costs for the NHS as conditions become more complex and difficult to treat and there is a greater reliance on emergency services.
There is a risk that healthcare, including lifesaving care, will be withheld from those unable to prove their entitlement to free NHS treatment or able to pay up-front, causing needless human suffering.
Refused asylum seekers will be chargeable, but with no permission to work and often being entirely destitute, they will have no means of paying. Once again they will be reliant on the emergency services.
The extension of charging into community care services, coupled with the likelihood that public health services commissioned through Local Authorities will also be affected by the regulations will stop patients accessing the preventative care programmes which protect us all, such as immunisation programmes.

I am writing to ask you to help raise these concerns with the Shadow Secretary of State for Health, Jon Ashworth, and the Leader of the party, encouraging them to look carefully at the regulations and to urge some response.

Thank you for your support and please let us know of any action you are able to take on this matter. We would particularly welcome your news on any progress made that we can share with the parishes.

Yours sincerely

Lucy Irven,

Diocese of Leeds Refugee Group Facilitator

If you want to write your own letter then you can download some suitable wordings here:-

Government MP Letter Opposition MP letter Briefing Paper from Asylum Matters

25th October 2017 |