8 January 1936 – 21 March 2024
Fr David Standley
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Reflection on Fr David Standley
By Eamon Duffy
25 April 2024, Memorial Mass at St. George’s Cathedral, Southwark
FR DAVID STANDLEY, who died aged 88 in St Peter’s Residence in Vauxhall, London on 21 March, never held high office in the Church but was one of the finest and most inspiring priests of his generation. Educated at Wimbledon College and Downing College Cambridge, where he read law, he was trained and ordained at the Venerabile in Rome, and returned to England in 1968, working first as chaplain to Guy’s Hospital, and from 1970 as assistant to Richard Incledon at Fisher House, the Cambridge University Catholic chaplaincy.
The honeymoon years after the Second Vatican Council were a time of religious ferment, hope and experiment, and they shaped Standley’s tastes and priestly style. He would always prefer ceramic cups to jewelled chalices, tie-dye fabric and unbleached linen to brocade and starched solemnity. It was no surprise when he developed an enthusiasm for circle dancing, or that, when he became involved with l’Arche, one resident would appositely christen him “David Sandals”.
Temperamentally cautious and judicious, he was a man who weighed ideas carefully, who pondered: friends joked that he saw 27 sides to every question. But under the measured caution was a resolute obedience to what he discerned as the demands of the Gospel. In the last terrifying years of the Cold War he was stirred by the example of the Jesuit anti-war activist Daniel Berrigan, and by Berrigan’s inspiration, Dorothy Day: that led in the 1980s to his involvement in Catholic Peace Action, and, despite the disapproval of his archbishop, Michael Bowen, in the antinuclear demonstrations organised by Pax Christi. He was arrested on Ash Wednesday 1988, after daubing the walls of the Ministry of Defence with a cross of ashes.
Characteristically, before that arrest, he preached a sermon gently explaining to his far-from-radical Bexley Heath parishioners why, precisely as a priest, he felt driven to non-violent but unlawful protest. His six-year posting to the Isle of Sheppey from 1991 was seen by some as punitive exile but he embraced the opportunity to immerse himself in ministry in the three prisons in his parish: prison ministry would remain a commitment, even in retirement.
In 1976, while chaplain at Kent University, David first became involved with l’Arche, in whose houses people with and without learning difficulties live together on terms of equality. For the rest of his life the spontaneity and mutual support of l’Arche expressed for him the spirit of the gospels. He went to see for himself l’Arche’s work in India in 1979, and when he left Kent in 1984, he took a sabbatical to live and work as an assistant in one of the homes of l’Arche London.
Perhaps in contrast to his own tendency to overthink things, he relished the unexpectedness and fun he found in l’Arche, like the resident with cerebral palsy who livened an Ash Wednesday liturgy by carefully ashing David, the celebrant, in a long black streak down the full length of his nose. He treasured, while puzzling over, the judgement of one l’Arche resident that “I like David, I do, he’s handicapped on both sides”. One of the last events he attended was a l’Arche celebration of his 88th birthday, when, microphone in hand, he led the exuberant singing of “Soon, and very soon, we are going to see the king”.
L’Arche has been described as a school of attentive presence to other people, and for David that was the key to priesthood. Advising another priest who was new to l’Arche he told him: “Focus on what you receive, don’t try to control.” He recoiled from any association of priesthood with power or status, disliked concelebration, and avoided the annual chrism masses, because serried ranks of vested priests would process into the cathedral in what he thought was a glaring icon of male exclusivity. In each of his parishes he facilitated lay involvement, initiative and leadership. He was a remarkable confessor – wise, compassionate, non-coercive – and he was a committed ecumenist, keen to befriend and cooperate with colleagues from other Churches, respectful and appreciative of their ministries.
DAVID NEVER found celibacy easy, and believed strongly that priests should be allowed to marry. Women friends were important to him, and there were times when the strains imposed on both parties by such friendship made him question his vocation. Yet it seemed to friends that celibacy intensified his remarkable sensitivity to other people and gave him a depth and edge that he might have lacked in a more conventionally contented existence. He once said that when he presided at Mass, pronouncing the words “This is my body … given up for you” carried a very personal resonance. Above everything else, David was a priest for other people. He kept all the Christmas cards he received in a box by his bed through the year. Each night he would take the top card from the pile and spend a while thinking and praying about the sender: then he put the card back at the bottom of the pile. The same care went into the often whimsical individualised greetings cards that he crafted for friends by cutting pictures out of papers and magazines, pasting them carefully to cards trimmed exactly to size, with an appropriate personal inscription.
Retirement in 2011 from Battersea, his last parish, gave him more time for l’Arche, and to share with friends the love of music, art and books that fed the sense of reverence and wonder underlying his gentle and humane ministry. But although no longer in harness, his priesthood remained central. In lockdown he began weekly zoomed Masses, which continued on a weekday evening after lockdown ended and remained hugely important for the very diverse circle of those who shared them. He was always a man of prayer, nourished by his friendship with the Benedictine nuns of Minster, where he led annual retreats for people with learning difficulties, and his long involvement in the Jesus Caritas fraternity of priests.
IN 2018 he was diagnosed with bowel cancer, a condition whose indignities he bore with wry humour, and he used the subsequent years of remission to good effect, organising a book club, taking friends and l’Arche assistants to exhibitions and concerts; fascinated by the 2023 Marina Abramovic retrospective at the Royal Academy, he made repeated visits, and was memorably photographed passing through its mysterious illuminated portal.
Though his illness progressed more rapidly than he had hoped after his move to St Peter’s, he embraced the process without fear, even with curiosity: to one visitor he said: “I wonder what God is saying to me through this cancer: I wouldn’t want to miss it,” and he often recalled a story about a man at a talk of Dan Berrigan’s who’d said: “I’m dying”, to which Berrigan replied: “How exciting!” David said he didn’t find talk about heaven helpful – it seemed insufficiently centred on God and Christ, too knowledgeable about what can’t be known. He now found that prayer, and faith, though no easier, had become simpler. He’d stopped worrying, he said, about the big questions, increasingly resting in the one conviction that love was the heart of the mystery of God, and of our human existence. Love was in charge, so all would be well. He was much taken with a phrase from a poem by D.H. Lawrence, “dipped in God, and newcreated”: it’s what he hoped awaited us all.
Friends streamed to see him in his last weeks in St Peter’s: there, in his patient acceptance of his growing weakness, his tranquil trust in God’s love, in his affection for those who cared for or came to see him, in his desire to live every stage of what he called “the last stretch home”, he gave us the final gift of his priesthood. He showed us how to die.
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Eamon Duffy is emeritus professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow and former president of Magdalene College.
Published in the Tablet, 25 April 2024
Eulogy for Fr David
By Roger Hearing
To most of you here today, David was FATHER. To us, his family, of course, father is the one thing David wasn’t. A much-loved brother, son, uncle, a great-uncle too – the person whose choice of birthday card or Christmas present could be counted on to surprise; the card, or, often, the postcard coming with an observation, or a question – David was always keen to challenge, in the kindest way possible, our too-comfortable thoughts.
It’s hard to sum up a life so various, so full, but in the same way a family photo album holds instances, images, moments by which we remember a person, I’d like to pull out a few of our moments.
The four-year-old in wartime Worcester Park who’d done his first day at school, having to be dragged bodily back on day two – he had BEEN to school, he protested. He’d done all the learning that was necessary.
The stubborn lad who would take some pleasure insisting, to his older sister’s fury, that the weapon deployed against German bombers was an AUNTY aircraft gun
Much later – the lithe young, unreasonably cool Cambridge chaplain, enjoying a late sixties summer-of-love punting party on the river, falling in… and being unnecessarily rescued by… just about everyone.
The running, dodging protest priest determined to make it across the narrow lawn surrounding the Ministry of Defence to scrawl a cross on its concrete walls and make a point about nuclear weapons, as well as striving not to injure the policeman who rather gently rugby tackled him
The semi-retired gentleman who, confronted by the huge spiral slide at Tate Modern, decided it was not just for children, and came whizzing down, with a broad smile and a sense of perverse achievement
David could find the joy in almost anything. What echoes to me is his phrase – hands open and wide, when something really pleased him and fitted his ideal of the simple and the good – “Lovely, lovely” I hope, I suspect – somewhere he is saying that now.
Marking the MoD 13 March 2024
Today, Ray Towey marked the Ministry of Defence, UK, as a witness against the nuclear war preparations of this Government.
See pictures below.
Ray was supported by Carmel and Dan Martin.
As usual, we started in the nearby park with prayers and readings from the Bible and ‘Follow Me – The Way of the Cross’, with reflections taken from the writings of Blessed Franz Jagerstatter (pub Pax Chrisiti). Prepared and led by Carmel, see below.
The Police arrived after Ray had written several messages under the MoD plaque.
“The Cross
“Trident is Genocide
“Choose Life not terror”
He was stopped, arrested and then de-arrested. He was required to provide information, told not to return to the MoD, and sent on his way. ‘Go away and come back to write another day,’ one of the Officers said.
We give thanks to God for another witness for peace in this time of war, and threats of, and preparations for, nuclear war. We have engaged in this Lenten witness almost every year since 7 March 1984.
Catholic Peace Action
Ray Towey
Carmel and Dan Martin
https://catholicpeaceaction.org/
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Prayers for Ray’s Witness
Luke 23:23-25
‘The people kept on shouting loudly for Jesus to be put to death. Finally Pilate gave in. He released the man who was in prison for rioting and murder, because he was the one the crowd wanted to have set free. Then Pilate handed Jesus over for them to do what they wanted with him’
Luke 23:23-25
Lord Hear us
We recall the words of our brother Blessed Franz Jägerstätter:
‘Even if I write these words with my hands in chains, I still find that much better than if my will were in chains. Neither prison, nor chains, nor sentence of death can rob a person of his faith and his free will.’
Today we ask God’s blessings on Ray as he places a sign of the cross on The Ministry of Defence building. United in the suffering of Jesus’ way of the cross and death, and Franz’ ultimate sacrifice to death may this witness today pierce through the darkness of death and destruction that overshadows us through the Nuclear War preparations orchestrated within the Ministry Of Defence Building. May the light, hope and miracle of the resurrection be realised through this witness.
Amen
Our Father
Hail Mary
“Lord Jesus, increase our love for you and unite our hearts and will with yours, that we may only seek and desire what is pleasing to you.”
Africa
This exchange between Ray Towey and (Prof) Tina Beattie began on 07 December 2023, in The TABLET, a Catholic publication in London.
Topic of the week – the scourge the Church ignores
Professor Vimal Tirimanna (Letters, 2 December) makes the debatable claim that some topics omitted from the Synod report (LGBTQ, women’s ordination, priestly celibacy) are “hot-button issues” from the “developed world”. This cannot go unchallenged. In Uganda, gays and lesbians face the death penalty. Priestly celibacy is so alien to most African cultures that it has to be asked how often it is observed. Stories abound of priests with children, and of African and Asian priests sexually abusing religious sisters.
There is strong support for women’s ordination across many countries in Latin America and elsewhere. But the elephant in the room remains the total silence on women’s reproductive health. Nearly 300,000 of the world’s poorest women and girls die every year in causes relating to pregnancy and childbirth, and thousands more suffer debilitating fistulas and other injuries. The vast majority of these are in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. This is indeed a hot-button issue. Why, when the Synod involved so many women participants and so many bishops from the Global South, does this scourge on the lives of poor women remain unacknowledged and unaddressed? One can search church teaching documents in vain for any mention of the suffering caused to individuals, families and communities by maternal mortality, which is one of the most avoidable causes of death. It is vanishingly rare in countries with good obstetric care, though rates are rising in the UK and are shamefully high in the US.
As long as the Church’s teaching ignores this reality with its glossy romanticism about maternal life and its eloquent but selective rhetoric about poverty, it cannot claim to be a poor Church of the poor. Why don’t the African and Asian bishops speak up? Did any of the women at the Synod raise these issues? And given the much-vaunted inclusivity of the synodal process, is it not right that we, the laity, should be able to ask such questions of those who were there, and expect honest answers?
(Prof) Tina Beattie Rye,
East Sussex.
Catholic Heroism
I read with dismay Prof Tina Beattie’s letter (9 December) accusing the Catholic Church of ignoring the plight of health care for the poorest women in Africa.
Over the last 40 years I have travelled extensively as an academic and as a lay missionary and worked with the Catholic Church in some of the remotest parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and I can assure her and your readers that you will find entire religious orders of nuns and priests and brothers who have given their entire lives to the care of the poorest women in the world.
It has been my privilege to work alongside these heroic individuals who at significant personal cost show a living witness to the Church’s special option for the poor. You will see the Catholic Church at its most inspiring. The faithful in Africa remain a significant pro-life community in every meaning of the word because of the service of these generations of missionaries.
(Dr) Raymond Towey London SE5.
Church in Africa
Dr Raymond Towey (Letters, 16 December) read my letter (9 December) as an accusation that the Catholic Church ignores maternal mortality and other obstetric risks among the poorest women in Africa, so I’d like to clarify. My letter referred to the silence of the Church’s leaders and official teaching documents on these issues, including the Synod report. It did not refer to the Church at the grassroots.
I’ve lived in sub-Saharan Africa for much of my life. I know that Catholic religious orders work tirelessly to provide education and healthcare for poor women and girls, including care during pregnancy and childbirth, and for thousands of young women suffering from life-threatening infections and injuries after abortions. Dr Towey’s claim that “the faithful in Africa remain a significant pro-life community” risks glossing a more complex and often tragic reality, but I suspect we are on the same side.
(Prof.) Tina Beattie
Rye, East Sussex
2023
28 February 2023
In our traditional non-violent way, Catholic Peace Action returned to mark the MoD and call the Nation to forsake the use of nuclear weapons.
Ray Towey marked the Building but was not arrested. He received a caution and warned not to return to the MoD. We wait to see if the charge of criminal damage will follow. During the witness we had a good dialogue with the Police.
We three gathered at noon in the park adjacent to the main entrance to the ministry of Defence. It was a cold day but Dan’s heartfelt prayer warmed our spirits.
‘Oh Lord, bless us this day as we prepare to resist the Nuclear War preparations undertaken by our Government. We pray for those who make these decisions and for those who work in the building. Bless us, our families and friends; our homes and country. Bless Ray as he undertakes this action of Civil Disobedience. We pray for an end to war and nuclear war preparations.’
Ray is being cautioned by a MoD police officer.
What the Catholic Church Teaches on Nuclear Weapons
Catholic Peace Action since 1982 has advocated civil disobedience against nuclear weapons, encouraged others to do so and by its very name claimed this to be a consistent and defendable position as Catholics in good standing in a nuclear weapons state. It is probably therefore appropriate at some stage to take an overview of what the Catholic Church officially teaches regarding nuclear weapons. For Catholics the foundation of their faith is in the bible and in the teaching of the Church through its centuries of history. Personal conscience is also very important in individual decision making for Catholics but the Church teaches that personal conscience must be informed and rooted in the bible and in the official teaching of the Church.
The word atomic weapon can be found in the current Catechism of the Catholic Church and the relevant paragraph is 2314 and its support is reference 109, Gaudium et Spes a document of Vatican II 1965. All these documents can be freely downloaded from the internet.
“Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.”(109 Gaudium et Spes)
“A danger of modern warfare is that it provides the opportunity to those who possess modern scientific weapons especially atomic, biological, or chemical weapons – to commit such crimes.
The Catholic Church has always been consistent that there can be no moral case for the actual use of a weapon of mass destruction as it is indiscriminate. On this basis the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Catholic teaching are indefensible.
These writings however did not close the discussion as it was argued by many leading Catholics that the concept of nuclear deterrence would not only prevent the use of nuclear weapons but even prevent war itself. A balance of terror they argued would at the height of the Cold War preserve peace if both sides had nuclear arsenals. Pope St.John Paul II gave some support for this position when he wrote in 1982 to the United Nations,
“in current conditions deterrence based on balance, certainly not as an end in itself but as a step on the way toward a progressive disarmament, may still be judged morally acceptable.”
For Catholics in a nuclear weapons state this was a very interesting time with debate for and against the possession of nuclear weapons. These debates and exchanges continued for many years with respect shown on all sides.
The Scottish Catholic Bishops in 1982 also made a statement,
“If it is immoral to use these (nuclear) weapons it is immoral to threaten their use”
For many years the official position of the Catholic Church remained that of Pope St.John Paul II but the discussions continued and as time progressed the conditional acceptance of nuclear deterrence became more difficult to sustain as it became more evident the condition of progressive disarmament was not happening.
In 2005 Archbishop Migliore, the then observer of the Holy See to the United Nations wrote,
“The time has gone for finding ways to a balance in terror, the time has come to re-examine the whole strategy of nuclear deterrence…it is evident that nuclear deterrence drives the development of ever newer nuclear arms thus preventing genuine nuclear disarmament.”
In 2006 Pope Benedict XVI in his address on World Peace Day said,
“What can be said, too, about those governments which count on nuclear arms as a means of ensuring the security of their countries? Along with countless persons of good will, one can state that this point of view is not only baneful but also completely fallacious”
In 2011 Archbishop Francis Chullikatt the then current Holy See’s observer at the United Nations reviewed the Church’s teaching at a meeting in the USA commenting and quoting from Church teaching,
“Today, more and more people are convinced that nuclear deterrence is not a viable means of providing security. If some nations can continue to claim the right to possess nuclear weapons, then other states will claim that right as well. There can be no privileged position whereby some states can rely on nuclear weapons while simultaneously denying that same right to other states. Such an unbalanced position is unsustainable.”
“The Holy See has never countenanced nuclear deterrence as a permanent measure, nor does it today when it is evident that nuclear deterrence drives the development of ever newer nuclear arms, thus preventing genuine nuclear disarmament.
“Maintaining nuclear deterrence into the 21st century will not aid but impede peace. Nuclear deterrence prevents genuine nuclear disarmament. It maintains an unacceptable hegemony over non-nuclear development for the poorest half of the world’s population. It is a fundamental obstacle to achieving a new age of global security.
“Nuclear weapons, aptly described as the ‘ultimate evil’, are still possessed by the most powerful States which refuse to let them go…….. No weapon so threatens the longed-for peace of the 21st century as the nuclear.”
Pope Francis was elected in 2013 and he has addressed the issue of nuclear weapons. In 2019 in Hiroshima he said:
“The use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral, just as the possessing of nuclear weapons is immoral.”
During an inflight press conference aboard the plane bringing back Pope Francis from Japan in 2019 he is reported to have said,
“The use of nuclear weapons is immoral which is why it must be added to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Not only their use but also possessing them: because an accident or the madness of some government leader, one person’s madness can destroy humanity.
It is clear that the Catholic Church’s official teaching on nuclear weapons has moved on from 1982.
Ray Towey
Dorothy Day and Abortion
I feel that, as in the time of the Desert Fathers, the young are fleeing the cities–wandering over the face of the land, living after a fashion in voluntary poverty and manual labor, seeming to be inactive in the “peace movement.” I know they are still a part of it–just as Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers’ Movement is also part of it, committed to non-violence, even while they resist, fighting for their lives and their families’ lives. (They, together with the blacks, feel and have stated this, that birth control and abortion are genocide.)
I agree with them and say–make room for children, don’t do away with them. Up and down and on both sides of the Hudson River religious orders own thousands of acres of land, cultivated, landscaped, but not growing food for the hungry or founding villages for the families or schools for the children.
Dorothy Day Open Letter to Fr.Dan Berrigan On Pilgrimage 1972
It’s not often mentioned and perhaps not widely known that before her conversion Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, had an abortion. In her novel The Eleventh Virgin she describes her character having an abortion and then being deserted by her partner afterwards. This was indeed Dorothy Day’s own personal experience when 22 years old. She doubted that she would ever get pregnant again and she refers to this fear in her book, The Long Loneliness. Pelvic sepsis following this illegal and possibly unsterile procedure was not unusual and the consequent Fallopian tube obstruction could result in sterility. She rarely wrote about abortion but was profoundly remorseful of her lifestyle before her conversion. In the Long Loneliness she describes how very blessed she felt when in 1925 she realised that she had become pregnant with her partner Forster Batterham. One can only surmise how her faith journey was influenced by the remorse of her earlier abortion and her bliss at becoming pregnant again. This time this new life would be welcomed and baptised into the Catholic Church even if she was to lose the man she deeply loved.
Some might say what right have I have to even raise the issue of abortion because I am a man. We are all touched by human life but as a medical doctor and specialist anaesthetist I was particularly involved as I was asked to anaesthetise for abortions several times in my career and refused. I always noticed who was Catholic in the anaesthetic department by seeing who were claiming their legal right under the 1967 Abortion Act to be conscientious objectors. One colleague even said that he wished that he was Catholic so that he could refuse despite the fact that the legal right to refuse also applies to any person on simply conscience grounds. In my personal experience I don’t recall any other person refusing who wasn’t a Catholic. I should always be grateful to Cardinal Heenan who obtained that legal concession in 1967. When I hear criticisms of the institutional Church I thank God how its intervention in 1967 protected both my mind and soul.
There are probably two reasons why I could never have been a specialist in obstetrics and gynaecology. The first is that I don’t think I could have suffered well the severe sleep deprivation and secondly of how to negotiate the 1967 Abortion Act. As a young doctor with no friends in high places the last thing I needed was being a “troublesome” junior doctor with inconvenient scruples.
There are two Lenten witnesses I have tried do whenever possible in London. The first is the one that any follower of Dorothy Day would find not unusual. This is the marking of the Ministry of Defence building as a sign of Christian opposition to nuclear war preparations. Dorothy Day regularly did civil disobedience against the New York civil defence preparations for a potential nuclear attack. She viewed this as legitimising plans for nuclear war and opposed the nuclear arms race from 1945. As a consequence of this frequent witness she once spent time in jail. My second witness was praying at an abortion clinic which was usually until recently in Ealing London at the Marie Stopes clinic. Both require a commitment to non-violence.
When planning to pray at Ealing I was pleased to be asked to not only sign an online promise of non-violence both verbal and physical before the witness at the abortion clinic but also asked to sign a hard copy when I arrived. The anti-abortionists prayed the Rosary which I joined and I saw no intimidation of the patients going into the clinic. Their focus on the Rosary meant that there was little eye contact with the pro-abortion demonstrators which removed any spirit of judgement and antagonism and their prayer was combined with practical support for those women who decide to change their decision. However since 2018 anyone praying at this abortion clinic now risks arrest as the local council have instituted what is a virtual no praying zone around this clinic.
Would Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin have approved of my witness for peace at the Ministry of Defence? Would they have approved my witness for life at the abortion clinic? Would they see the connection between the two at a time when over 180,000 abortions are carried out in UK each year and when Parliament voted against a ban on sex selective abortion in 2015? Can you make a call to choose life in one issue and ignore the other?
The first century Bethlehem massacre of the innocents was then a gender discrimination against the male child whereas the global gender select abortion is now a discrimination against the female child. Academics can estimate the missing women globally when the gender balance in society is measured. One academic has made an estimate of 100 million missing women globally, mainly in Asia.
Ray Towey
2021 March: The Government announces an increase in Trident warheads.
Liz Yates – An Interview 1987
An Interview With Sister Elizabeth Yates FMM (Franciscan Missionaries of Mary)
Liz Yates RIP, 11th January 2021
Five years ago Elizabeth Yates came with three other FMM sisters to live in Brixton, the multi-racial area of south London where, the previous year, the tensions had produced a series of violent riots.
The four sisters live in a terraced house near the heart of Brixton. Community itself – to be rather than to do – is the priority for the group. To earn their living they have taken part-time jobs in the locality. Frances teaches in an Anglican school; Molly works with the mentally-handicapped; Joan, the senior member of the community, gives her time to ‘Age Concern’, a welfare group, and Elizabeth herself is a part-time community nurse in the area. What were the considerations which led them to Brixton and what does their presence there mean to local people?
“For most FMMs for a lot of the time in their lives the commitment to an ‘option for the poor’ is often worked out in the context of a mission to a country which has greater needs possibly than the one we’re coming from. Now that option for the poor has come a lot closer to home for many of us, so we have found ourselves returning to the West for various reasons. It so happened that there were five or six of our sisters who had come back from Pakistan, India, African countries, who said we’d like very much to have an insertion into a multi-racial area where there was a notable lack of peace and where we felt that our backgrounds from Third World countries would give us a chance of integrating there and so opting for a specific type of poor person in this country.
“The priorities of our community have a lot to do with open house hospitality, to take those who come to our door or who we bring to our home within whatever context – homelessness, youngsters in trouble with drug addiction, people who have experienced violence, all sorts of things. The second priority is to listen to what is said to us in a place like this, and the third priority has been prayer, which has grown in every way in our own community and with other denominations because in an area like this all the churches come together in the face of the problems of violence, unemployment and discrimination.”
These local churches unite to form the Brixton Council of Churches, led by an impressive Caribbean woman, the Rev. Esme Beswick, Pastor of the New Testament Church. “Down the way we have the Methodists who also have a well-mixed congregation and their church is actually on Railton Road, which we call ‘the front line’ and which I think most African and Caribbean people understand to be where the problems have occurred. Then there are smaller churches which are Pentecostal, which we have also been involved with. There’s a lot of solidarity witness in a place like Brixton. On Good Friday, for example, we walk through Brixton in a procession carrying a cross and there is always an ecumenical service. Most of us don’t go any more to our own church: we go and make our witness procession together. We pray a lot together and we also help in a practical way.”
There is no mosque or temple in the area and the opportunities for interfaith dialogue are fewer than, for instance, in a city like Coventry in the Midlands where another FMM community is living. “But,” says Elizabeth, “we also have a very high percentage of people who don’t practise any type of structured religious activity. We have a lot of marginalised people in the religious context and I think this has brought us together as Christian groups. Not that there are any problems with other people’s religious way of being. It’s not within the Brixton community itself that problems of racism and discrimination occur. There’s a violent element, anti-authoritarian, which perceives authority as a source of oppression and racial harrassment. Otherwise, no one really cares where you come from, who you are, what you do. So Brixton itself is a very free area really. In this context it’s not poor at all. That’s what you find out.”
PEACE WITNESS
For Elizabeth one of the most dramatic results of her coming to live in Brixton has been her growing involvement in the peace movement. Earlier this year she was arrested and imprisoned after a peace liturgy and act of civil disobedience in London. What developments had taken her along that road?
“When I think of myself in the 1960s in relation to the peace issue – I just didn’t think about it. I spent years in Pakistan during an unjust war – I was in West Pakistan when they raped East Pakistan. I’m amazed that these things didn’t cause extraordinary changes in me. They didn’t, although they must have come to bear their fruit. Coming to Brixton had a very serious effect on me in the context of what I understood to be reconciliation and the need for understanding: how, for example, an African woman and a woman from this country might come to understand one another. I had lived in both countries. This developed my awareness of what was meant by peacemaking.
“What I experienced in Brixton, and had already experienced in Liverpool, was that whole sections of our society were suffering abominably due to lack of funds and input to enable these people to live as full lives as possible. Knowing poor people, I realised that in the face of nuclear weapons we are all poor.”
Two other experiences also helped to change her thinking. “I had problems with the person in authority over me at work and I found myself enlisting the support of other colleagues to take my point of view. I suddenly realised what I was doing – that I was building her up into an enemy figure. So with thought and prayer I tried to change and to make peace. I asked forgiveness of all the people whom I thought I had wronged.”
The other moment of insight came on a beautiful spring day when Elizabeth was out walking with friends on nearby Clapham Common. “The blossom was magnificent. A friend said to me ‘Do you know that Clapham Common has been designated as a burial ground in the event of a nuclear war?’ and I thought: it’s all true. Our Government actually has the intention of using nuclear weapons.”
In 1984 Elizabeth went to South Zaire (Shaba) for six months to work on the Angolan border with other FMMs setting up an emergency post for the many refugees coming into Zaire. Afterwards she felt called back to Brixton and to be more involved in work for peace. “I felt that apart from my work locally and our presence here as a community, I had to be part of a national effort to oppose these nuclear policies.” So she went in search of the peace movement. She joined Pax Christi and also a small group called Catholic Peace Action whose focus was on the need for both dialogue and resistance – two things which Elizabeth feels should always go together.
With others from this group, Elizabeth took part in nonviolent civil disobedience when they chained themselves to the doors of the Ministry of Defence in London during a religious service held outside. At that stage few other Franciscans were involved in the peace movement but after this act of witness an Anglican Franciscan, Terry Tastard, wrote to Elizabeth. They met and formed a network called ‘Franciscans for Justice and Peace’. 80 Franciscan women and men, Roman Catholic and Anglican, now belong and they have held their own events and prayer vigils.
In undertaking civil disobedience, Elizabeth became engaged in a difficult and sometimes painful dialogue with her own sisters. “The sisters in this province have over a period of years come to an understanding that there are some people who find it impossible to refuse the call to make some sort of statement about what is really God’s will and what is the will of human authority. If there’s a clash that statement has be something quite serious – a statement in which a law is broken which is considered an immoral law, in fact an illegal law.
“I don’t believe in confrontational acts without dialogue. That’s not Franciscan. One perhaps has to make a rather startling statement but not without dialogue. At no time can I as a human being confront and judge the truth of another human being who has perceived something differently. Without dialogue ‘Franciscans for Justice and Peace’ and civil disobedience don’t even come together – and they must.”
On Ash Wednesday 1987 300 Christians from various Christian groups came together for an act of worship to be followed by an act of civil disobedience. “At the act of worship we prayed for forgiveness for our sins individually and as a nation and we took the blessed ashes and marked our foreheads with the cross, like Christians throughout the world. Then as a worshipping community we went to the Ministry of Defence, the ‘nerve centre’ of all plans for nuclear war and any other use of weapons. In prayer, we marked that building with the same sign of the cross, using the same blessed ashes, in acknowledgement of the sin of our society of which we are a part.”
For that public action 45 people, including Elizabeth, were arrested and charged with criminal damage. Those involved considered civil disobedience to be ‘holy obedience’ – an assertion that God’s law is above human law. At her trial Elizabeth told the court that she would not pay any fine once she was found guilty by the law of the land. Having acted in conscience on behalf of the poor, she felt obliged to accept any punishment in the same way a poor person would have to. The court’s decision was to send her to Holloway women’s prison for a week. What was prison like?
“I personally didn’t suffer in a way I might have suffered had I been younger. I was ready, prepared spiritually, in a way I might not have been before. I can’t say that what I saw appalled me, I suppose because I’ve seen so much worse. I know what really oppressive regimes can do. Nevertheless I was considerably distressed by the knowledge of the forgotten, which is what all these women were. They were forgotten women, for whatever reasons they had landed there, and some of the reasons were pathetic. One was that she hadn’t paid her television licence. Another one was offered bail of £2,000 and she had only received £8 worth of stolen goods. Other people had been involved in crimes of violence and many were involved in addiction. One little woman hadn’t been able to speak to anyone for three months because she didn’t speak English. She spoke Urdu and I happened to speak Urdu…
“The experience was that of the forgotten. There appeared to me to be vast numbers of women for whom much more could be offered which would be therapeutic rather than punitive. It seemed to be a vast lost opportunity because what I experienced most among the young women I was with was that they had no inner resources. So to be left in a room on their own – which you are in the first couple of days while they’re sorting out where you should go – some young girls couldn’t cope with being alone. One kid completely destroyed all the bits of furniture she had, screaming and howling with almost fear of herself. It would seem to me that this could be a place where people might learn something about inner resources which would build them up.”
Did Elizabeth find any common threads of faith or community amongst women from such diverse backgrounds as she met in prison? “There were problems as regards cultures which is perhaps new to the prisons. There was no problem with anybody’s faith at all, but neither did it surface in any way. There was a friendship and kindness one towards the other pf people in a common trouble, but ultimately it didn’t happen quickly. People were very wary. Then little things started to happen. Odd things were said to me like ‘It’s almost like having my mum in prison, you know, with you to look after me’.
“I felt guilty that I had only five days there when people had five years, ten years, fifteen years and I couldn’t get over the generosity of those women when they said on the Monday ‘You’re out tomorrow. Wonderful. Think of us.’ – I couldn’t get over their generosity. All I could offer was a kind of solidarity and a caringness and I think gentleness. I wanted to be gentle. I felt pretty meek. It would have taken me a lot longer to know what I could give really.
“It was an experience of solidarity with poor people. If you feel called to make a statement against that which is making us all poor, and it is the nuclear weapons which make us all poor, then of course it is part of the programme to know the poor in their poorest way. I feel grateful more than anything.”
On her way out of prison Elizabeth met a Quaker woman who was being released at the same time. In the peace movement Christians of every denomination come together because of their common purpose: “However we may be perceived socially, the authenticity of the Christian peace movement lies in that we come together in the name of Jesus Christ, with all our weaknesses and with all our differences. The other things don’t even get remembered when that happens.”
Work for peace by building up the local community in a place like Brixton and by building up the global community of the whole world is integral, Elizabeth believes, to the FMM calling. “We have had quite a period of renewal and we have emerged, I am happy to say, from the last few international meetings with four important themes: evangelising community, option for the poor, inculturation and dialogue.
“We’re asked to go to where the poor are and that can change constantly. We’re asked to try to become part of that, and we’re asked to try and keep all the doors and windows open, in the name of, and the Lord, Jesus Christ, and in the style that our foundress Helene de Chappotin, and St Francis of Assisi, offered. So I don’t personally believe that if that is what you follow that you can at any time avoid the issues of peace and what peace is about in the international situation today and in our local situation. I don’t think you can turn your back on the problems of racism and discrimination because of what we are asked to do. I don’t think you can ever opt out of choosing life rather than death, which brings you into the area of abortion, euthanasia, etc. I don’t think you can ever forget those who are unemployed, those whose lives are so limited – the elderly, the handicapped, the Aids sufferers, the outcasts. You can’t avoid what’s happened to the Third World, where Western aid is going, the refugees, the expense of the arms race. All this you can’t avoid if you follow what we have been asked to live.”
Valerie Flessati
October 1987
