21 Sep – Acting with compassion – Seeking Justice
How can Christians in West Yorkshire respond to recent riots and racism? How can we build a better society? This was the theme of the recent Caritas Catholic Care Day of Reflection. Caritas Catholic Care focus on social action – what services can and should the Diocese provide to help those in need? This ranges from supporting older people to the Gianna Baby Bank to helping Syrian refugees get settled in Yorkshire to providing counselling in schools.
However, at the same time as responding to immediate need, we also need to respond to the root causes of problems such as racism, homelessness and local poverty. This is where SPARK comes in – SPARK is the J&P project working with younger people and is all about helping people tackle these root causes of social injustices. SPARK were invited to have a stall and also to do a short presentation to explain what SPARK Social Justice is all about.
One of the SPARK community is Lucy, a student teacher from St Winefride’s parish in Wibsey, Bradford. She came along and stole the show with an amazing and inspirational presentation in which she described her work helping young people to engage creatively with Catholic Social Teaching. Lucy has already organised events in her parish exploring themes to do with refugees and asylum seekers and the Season of Creation. All SPARK has done is to support the passion that Lucy already has for social justice. We are also sponsoring Lucy to undertake some training with Citizens UK. This will give Lucy a whole new set of skills to explore issues in more depth with other people and to engage them more easily.
Pictured here with Lucy is Tom Allan. Tom became involved with SPARK during our pilot project, when he was
still a student at St Mary’s school Menston, and featured in a number of the videos that we did during the COVID lockdowns. Now in his final year at University, Tom has continued to be involved and is a member of the Project Steering Group – ensuring that the voices of young people guide how the project develops and the sorts of thing that we do.
Bernadette Jordan and Emily Cahill (Laudato Si’ Centre Environment and Learning Officer, Diocese of Salford) will do an initial presentation headed ‘Diocesan and schools Laudato Si developments; responses to having a Diocesan Climate Strategy in Salford’. This will lead to a wider discussion on the work in progress across the northern dioceses. What lessons can we learn from each other?
SPARK is the faith-informed social justice project for people aged 18 to 30 years in the Yorkshire area. It was set up by the Justice & Peace Commission in 2019 with funding from the Porticus Trust. We are continuing to provide safe spaces for younger people of faith through helping individuals to follow their social justice concerns, organising events like this one and providing opportunities for them to explore the faith basis for taking action on social justice issues.
The Peace Museum re-opened its doors during August in its new location at Salt’s Mill in Saltaire. The museum closed its former location in central Bradford some time ago. The photograph shows the bare space before they started working on it. It illustrates why it has taken them quite a while to sort everything out and make their new location ready to receive visitors.
Now, next to the third-floor restaurant, there is the Peace Museum.
Hopefully, their new location will mean that they greatly increase the number of visitors to the museum (entry is free, incidentally).
Sometimes it can be quite depressing when you realise how few people have actually heard of Laudato Si. The fact that it is rarely heard about from the pulpit is also distressing. Yet, the background to taking action on our Climate crisis is a wonderfully positive ‘creation theology’.
We are delighted that leading us in this exploration will be the ‘Begin with the Heart’ team. This is a group of people who are carrying on the work of spreading and developing the insights of Fr Donal O’Leary of the Leeds Diocese, who died in 2019. He was a prolific writer and the team will only be able to scratch the surface of his work during this day. However, if you want to find out more about his thinking and see what this day might be like, then you can visit the website dedicated to his reflections: 
Forty years ago this Summer,in 1984, the Catholic Association for Racial justice was founded ( by Yogi Sutton) as a black-led independent organisation where ethnic minorities in our Church could find support and a voice and where people of all backgrounds could work together for racial justice. The mission was to struggle for a more just and cohesive society in which all God’s children can be truly sisters and brothers in Christ.
This day led by Fr Phil Sumner, who has long campaigned for community cohesion , will introduce a new structural agenda addressing “Belonging”,” Information” and ” Accompaniment” with experienced speakers and practical workshops. Importantly it will sketch out the development of a practical “strategy”; consulting with those directly affected; outlining a timetable of realistic measures to be carried through which need to be developed. In the past, as Yogi Sutton points out, the Church has tended “to lag behind secular mainstream secular society on diversity issues”. Encouragingly, Westminster Diocese is already working on “Rooting out racism” and the Archdiocese of Southwark led by Archbishop John Wilson is developing it own “Racial Justice Strategy”. Other Dioceses can learn from their lead and the Catholic Bishops Conference should now be emphasising the urgency.