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.
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.’
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.
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.
The three offered clear and moving accounts of their peace actions at the Ministry of Defence during Holy Week 2012 when they marked the building with blessed charcoal using words such as ‘Trident Crucifies the Poor’ and ‘Disarm Trident’. Reports from arresting officers were read out in court which affirmed that there actions had been totally nonviolent and that they had not resisted arrest in any way. While not disputing the fact of their action, they all argued that they had lawful excuse and moral convictions for what they did.
Twenty-five supporters joined Dr Ray Towey, 68, Henrietta Cullinan, 50, and Katrina Alton , 44, for a time of prayer outside Hammersmith Magistrates’ Court today before a three-hour hearing which found them guilty of causing criminal damage.
Ray, Henrietta and Katrina explained the relevance of the time and symbols used: Lent, a time for reflection and repentance at both personal and community levels and charcoal, a known symbol of that repentance that is used within the Christian faith community. The protection of life and people was at the heart of their actions and they all stated that these were more important than property or buildings. Their intention in marking the Ministry of Defence building was to engage the Ministry and those who work there in critical reflection on the UK’s nuclear defence policy and the Trident programme in particular in order to change it and prevent nuclear weapons from ever being used.
Judge Susan Williams acknowledged her understanding of this in her questioning of Ray Towey, and again in her summing up saying that these were profound means used to highlight the folly of humankind.
The three, who defended themselves, were given substantial time to present their own evidence and outline why they did what they did. The Judge said that she needed a good amount of time to reflect on what she had heard and the legal implications and adjourned the hearing for almost two hours.
Before adjournment, Ray Towey made a short intervention inviting the Judge to discharge them and to stand outside the normal boundaries of the legal institution and set a precedent. On her return she gave a fulsome summary – showing that she had listened with great care to all that she had heard – but ultimately finding them guilty of criminal damage. They were each charged with paying £200 court costs. While the Ministry of Defence had put forward a claim for £400 cleaning costs the Judge refused to enforce this.
The three were given an absolute discharge. All of them made it clear that they could not in conscience pay the court costs.
Their action was supported by the London Catholic Worker, Catholic Peace Action and Pax Christi.
For Ray Towey the outcome of this trial would be finalised on 24 June 2014 when he was called to attend Camberwell Magistrates Court to explain why he had not paid the court £200 costs. He had during this time several letters from bailiffs requesting the money and he had replied that as a Christian to him nuclear weapons were immoral and that he could not in conscience pay the court as he considered his actions in 2012 justified and therefore he was not guilty. Usually this defence is not accepted and a prison sentence of about 7 days would be expected. The judge listened to his explanation and replied that she would not accept this refusal but would give him more time to pay. He asked her not to delay her judgement as he was not going to pay and he wished to resolve the issue that day. She told him to go away and consider payment. He therefore left the court disappointed that the issue still remained unresolved. As he was descending the stairs leading to the exit the Clerk of the Court called out to him to return to the court as there was now a possibility of another outcome which might be beneficial to him. On return to the court the Judge sentence him to one day in jail. A one day sentence means that he was confined to the court till the end of business that day. It is in effect a symbolic sentence which meant he had no longer any need of paying the costs and would be free that day to go home. Ray Towey thanked her when the court rose and went home as a free person.
Pat Gaffney (second from left) on a march against the 1991 Iraq War. Photo: Giovanni Scudiero
After 29 years of being the general secretary of the Catholic peace organisation, Pax Christi UK, Pat Gaffney stepped down in April. This first part of our interview with Pat covers the years before Pax Christi – liberation theology, death squads, direct action and new models of education.
The first time I took part in direct action was amazingly powerful, at every level. It was with Catholic Peace Action on 14 April 1983.
We decided we were going to pour our own blood over the doorway and steps of the ministry of defence in London, and scatter ashes.
The symbolism was: this is the blood that would be spilled and this is the ash that would be created if there was a nuclear war. Those things also have powerful meaning in scripture.
I remember several days before, one of our group decided he would take our blood from us. That was a pretty profound evening for us, where we were all literally giving our blood that was going to be part of a peace action, a pledge of our commitment and love.
We burned letters and memorabilia that meant something to us, that were also going to be part of this peace action. It was very powerful preparation.
On the day itself, I remember almost going into a zone, walking up these steps and just focusing on: ‘I want to shed this blood here, I want to spread this ash here, and then I just want to kneel and wait.’ I remember being very focused down into a zone to get you through what you’re doing. So that was my first step into civil disobedience.
Looking back, it was a very dramatic action to start one’s direct action with.
Four of us were arrested and that just began the whole sequence of being arrested and charged and then going through the court system and attempting to use that court experience to further tell the story of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and what you’re challenging. Then taking the consequences of that further.
Sharing nonviolence
If I look back to the ’80s, when I was just beginning to discover nonviolence, through doing actions but also from practitioners in this country and also from the Americans, I suppose I was responding to it personally: ‘I’ve got to try and be nonviolent as a person, in my lifestyle, and in the way I act when I do peace things.’
That’s still there, because I do think nonviolence is about life choices, more than just nonviolent direct actions.
“We were all, literally, giving our blood that was going to be part of a peace action.”
Now, because we’re trying to grow it, in the sense that we’re trying to help more and more people better understand what nonviolence is about, I do also see that it is something that can be taught: we should be better at sharing skills and communicating about it, strategising about it.
I see that happening in the Global South and there is a lot we in Britain can learn from there. Nonviolence can be woven into the way we do things – in schools, in communities, politically. There’s a huge toolbox there and there’s a lot more we could do with it.
Keep your roots
I grew up in Hillingdon, in West London, which, in the ’50s and ’60s, had a lot of Catholic migrants. A very Irish Catholic community in the school and the parish.
I had a very strong Catholic Irish identity, very working-class as well. I had lovely parents, just one brother – we’re very close, we’re just two years apart. We had a fantastic, very normal working-class childhood, playing in the street, doing things with church, doing things with your mates, over the fields at night, a lot of freedom. My dad at that stage of his life worked at Pinewood film studios in the property and sets department, so he had quite a glamorous job for those times. Before that, he’d been a coal miner in Scotland.
My mum, when we were growing up, was with us at home and then did cleaning jobs and dinner lady jobs to be with us.
She was remarkable. She came over here from Ireland at 20, never had a formal education, but she decided in her 40s she wanted to be a nurse. She went off under her own steam and registered and trained, then became a district nurse. She created a whole life for herself.
When I look back on it, it’s amazing.
“I was a little boring conformist! I absolutely loved school.”
My dad was a shop steward, he was full of the Keir Hardie sense of socialism. Because he was born in 1907, he had a very strong sense of that period of time in Scotland. I grew up with that, and the sense that you keep your roots: you don’t stray from your roots and your roots keep you straight. ‘Always keep the common touch’, that was very strong in our community; ‘don’t get above yourself’. Not in an oppressive way but in a social way.
The fact that my mum was so committed to nursing, to the health service, to serving people in her professional work and beyond that.
That was part of the culture, working people do this, you work together and you work with other people. It came across in that way, in a very organic way. I used to hear a lot about Ireland, especially from my dad, he had the Charter for the Irish Free State up in his bedroom. There was a bit of this dangerous romantic notion of Irish freedom fighters, and of Catholicism over and against everybody else. I was always hearing stories about Mary and Elizabeth, Mary queen of Scots. It seemed a bit more special to be Catholic, something to hold onto.
I loved being good
I was at a Catholic primary school that was, at that time, still run by religious sisters. It was very strict, focused. I didn’t pass my 11-plus,* I went to a new secondary modern. It was the very early days of that style of education. It was still very much looked down on. A lot of my friends were going to grammar school.
It was called the Douay Martyrs (after 158 Catholic priests who trained in Douai, France, who were executed in England in the 16th century) and quickly grew into a larger comprehensive school.
When I look back on it, and even then I appreciated it so much, the teaching, the teaching staff, the opportunities, were absolutely fantastic – singing in choirs, taking part in school plays, and being taken to the theatre.
That was because it was small, about 400–500 students, we were in it from the beginning of the school, they treated people as individuals. I felt very nurtured, but my brother, who was at the same school, had a very different experience.
That was because I was a conformist. I loved school, I loved all the structure, I loved being good and being patted on the head. And I loved joining clubs and being part of things. I was a little boring conformist! I absolutely loved it.
And the people there encouraged me to apply to go on to higher education. They would take us to visit colleges. We were working-class kids, none of our families had ever been to colleges or universities. Even to go and visit was a huge thing. All those doors were opened for me.
My parents were supportive of me going on to higher education, but not in a competitive way. They were of that old generation that said: ‘So long as you’re happy….’ To them, that was the important thing – you were a good person and you were happy.
People’s education
I always wanted to be a teacher. I think it was just bossiness!
I went on to Maria Assumpta College, a Catholic teacher training college – they don’t exist now, but they did back in the ’70s – it was part of London university, run by the Religious Sisters of the Assumption, it was all girls. It was a fantastic foundation. “These models of education start with people’s lived experience, that’s the core.” We don’t call it this now but it was vocational. You knew from the start that everything you were doing was to prepare you to work as a teacher.
You were doing psychology and philosophy, lots of practice, your own subject area, a lot of contact work with schools, a lot of good stuff about communication and how to teach, which, again, I don’t think is present today, but I felt provided me with skills way beyond my teaching. It was such a fantastic grounding.
You were constantly thinking about what it was to be a teacher and how you teach, and relationships, and the nature of education. We were reading Celebration of Awareness and Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
These models of education and working with people that start with people’s lived experience, that’s the core, that’s the working material for what you want to reflect on and build on. Using language and accessing people’s experience in creative ways that don’t just rely on language but could use other things as well.
Recognising the value of common sense knowledge and experience. Recognising that most people have the ability to analyse things and question what’s going on in their lives. Also, moving away from the elitism of education. Saying: ‘No, it starts somewhere else, and it’s about something else.’
It was extremely new and challenging, but also, in some ways, it resonated back to my dad talking about worker education in Scotland among the mining communities and the power of the library system, or the hedge schools in Ireland.
There was a link to the sense that, yes, everyone has a right to access to this information and how we share it and how we get it and how we use it. It challenged the way we look at education here in this country.
Pat Gaffney with a ‘Bread Not Bombs’ banner at the ministry of defence, Whitehall, during the 1984 visit to London of Mikhail Gorbachev, soon to be Soviet leader.
Liberation
We were also hearing, in Latin America, about this great thing of ‘liberation theology’, of the Catholic church going in a very different direction, identifying itself with the poor, with the oppressed, with people who were in social struggle.
You had movements in Chile, and Brazil, and Central America, where there would have been a lot of social unrest at the time, a lot of social injustice.
People in the church, not the whole church, but some priests and lay people and religious, were returning to the gospels and asking: ‘What does this have to say about what is going on in our society, our workplaces, our communities?’
They were recognising that the message of the gospels was about a challenge to the status quo and those who want to keep you down or repress you. Challenging that through education, through engaging politically, and – for some at that time – it would also have meant engaging in armed struggle.
That movement of liberation theology, in the church and beyond, said: ‘Well, if we’re serious about overcoming injustice and lack of democracy, we have to join the people’. In many of those countries, there was armed struggle, and there still is today. There was a big tension.
Some went down the route of saying: ‘It’s our role to support, even if we don’t take part in it, to support that armed struggle for freedom, for liberation.’ Others said: ‘It’s our role to support not through armed struggle but through other ways.’
That was a huge eye-opener to me, to what was happening, to what religion can do in society, how the church can be a positive agent for change, and how people can use their skills and resources to serve that.
It also had implications back here, for us. It brought in new styles of liturgy and worship that reflected more that commitment to the poor and nonviolence and challenging injustice.
I find it really hard to talk about faith because I don’t think faith is something that you have and then it’s with you. I think it’s something that you are constantly renewing.
I don’t think I have the certainty, 100 percent all the time, that I have faith.
To me, there’s a part of it which is the tradition I’ve been brought up in, that framework of Irish Catholicism. That created a structure of ritual and values and practices that were good – for me – and that helped me reflect and have a sense of ‘There are other things in life beyond family, beyond what you do… there’s a big community of people who believe in God; they practice it this way.’
Until, probably, I was in my 20s, I didn’t think much about faith as something beyond all that structure and that ritual.
It was when I went to Maria Assumpta College that I was exposed to this other level: It’s more than ritual and it’s more than practice. It’s to do with values. It is to do with mystery, it is to do with something that is unexplainable. And that’s why it becomes so difficult to talk about.
It challenged me a lot that there’s something more serious to this faith thing. It’s not just about ritual, going to church, giving yourself a label. It is about your relationships and how you see yourself in the world, what guides that. And doing that with others who share that vision. And doing that out of a history and a tradition.
I was tremendously fortunate to be at a college that exposed us to what was going on in the Catholic church in the 1970s, in Latin America and in Africa in particular. Where the church was really taking off and seeing itself as really serving people.
The college also made us think: ‘Okay, what does this say to you, as you want to become a teacher? As someone who wants to be living in the world identifying as a Catholic person of faith?’
I suppose a bit of intellectual thought came to that but more of it was the practice, of people putting what they believed in into practice. That set the groundwork for me.
Moving on
In my early teaching, my subject was science and biology, I wasn’t able to do a huge amount around that.
I was teaching in West London, in a Catholic comprehensive, the same school I had been to! It was very comfortable being there again, it was just like another phase.
I taught science, but we all had to teach religious education, I suppose that’s where I had a bit of a chance to bring in what’s going on in the world.
After about six years, we heard about the changes coming down the pipeline, the national curriculum and more administration. That didn’t attract me. I thought, either I could stay here in this school because it’s so comfortable, forever and ever, or I move now. I decided to move.
I had nothing other than my teaching background to offer, so I went and did another course for a year. It was a retraining course where we did some human resources stuff, economics, management. It was very useful but, half way through, I thought: there is no way I could go into business or commerce or anything like that.
I started writing round to Oxfam and Christian Aid and Amnesty. I wrote to all these agencies working on development or human rights issues. I just said: ‘I will come and do anything, I will stuff envelopes, I will do anything you like, I want to use my background, all these things I’ve done, I’ll just come and do anything.’
CAFOD, which is the Catholic aid agency, wrote back and said: ‘Well, we’re actually starting an education department, come along and have a chat.’ It was the era when you went along and had a chat. They said: ‘You can start next week.’ So that is what I did.
Death Squads
In 1980, I started working with CAFOD, which was a very small agency at that time.
Today, if you applied for a job in a development agency, you have to have three degrees, 20 years’ worth of experience, proven this, proven that, proven the other. I just got in on a letter and enthusiasm!
I was able to create an education programme, providing resources and teaching input on teaching about the causes of poverty and the causes of underdevelopment. I was just at the right place at the right time. I was very, very lucky.
I was exposed then to another amazing group of people and more amazing stories from the Global South. It was a deepening of all that stuff that started at college.
We were meeting people almost weekly who were coming over from El Salvador, from Nicaragua, who were living under death threats, who were challenging death squads, people from South Africa who were challenging apartheid.
We were meeting the most amazing people, whose lives were at risk on the ground, who were committed to staying where they were, working with the people they were working with, but who were also pushing us in the First World to say: ‘You’re part of the problem here.’
I then became aware of the role of education in opening up those stories to communities here, opening up those stories to young people to reflect on how systems work, what’s going on in the world, opening up opportunities for us as an agency, and then the church, to be a voice for change.
“Nonviolence can be woven into the way we do things – in schools, in communities, politically.”
It was just mind-blowing, really, to be in your late 20s and exposed to all these people.
You were seeing the real dark side of what was going on in communities but you were also seeing amazing push-through and hope and sticking power of the people.
These would all have been Catholics or Christians from other traditions, working out of a faith base.
I suppose that is when I started to become a bit more about the nonviolent dynamic as well, realising that a lot of these people were living in situations of violence, were experiencing violence, seeing what violence was doing to people, and were there on the ground trying to change that but not going down the armed struggle route.
I couldn’t frame that clearly in my head at the time, but I was very impressed with the sense that these people were ready to absorb the violence that is going on around them.
I do remember reading from the Philippines, there were some Filipino and Irish Catholic priests who were imprisoned at the time for doing human rights work, I remember one of them writing that one of the roles, he felt as a Catholic, was to absorb the violence around you and stop it being passed onto other people. I remember that sticking in my head for some reason.
It wasn’t in a ‘walk over me’ kind of way, it was: ‘By challenging, we are absorbing some of this violence – we have to challenge it’. It was just beginning to make me realise that there were other ways of doing things and people are taking risks and there was an element of sacrifice in there, though people wouldn’t say that.
It brings a different meaning to solidarity when you are with people in that way. It’s a different quality of solidarity.
Direct Action
Work was pretty all-consuming, but I didn’t see it like that. I didn’t experience it like that. It took a lot of weekends, it took a lot of evenings. It was great. I didn’t think of it as slogging work.
I was lucky, my work was taking me out and about. I was going into schools and doing stuff with young people and doing in-service training with teachers.
At weekends, doing adult education work. I was just meeting lovely people all the time, so it was just great.
Everything spilled over, there weren’t clear lines of: ‘Now I’ve got to have fun’; ‘Now I’ve got to work’. I was very lucky and I do acknowledge that very much. When you look at the way some people have to work, and the nature of work, I just think I’ve been so lucky.
In the ’80s, we set up Catholic Peace Action, all these things were interconnected.
In the 1980s, I met up with these great people who were, initially, challenging the militarism of the Falklands War, and we were meeting once every couple of weeks for discussion. We were reflecting on scripture, what was going on in the world, in order to prepare ourselves as an affinity group, a group that could begin to take more direct action against militarism.
We decided that, for us, because we were all London-based, the focus for any of our activities was going to be the ministry of defence in Whitehall.
We decided that, for us, the thing we’d be challenging would be nuclear war preparations because that was the era of moving from Polaris nuclear missile submarines to Trident nuclear missile submarines.
That was amazing, meeting specifically to reflect about what these policies of nuclear weapons and deterrence were doing to our country, to us as people.
We were also learning from what was going on elsewhere, from the peace movement in America, learning out of the Vietnam experience, of how they challenged that war. We were kind of building up experiences and practices that would help us begin to take action at the MoD in Whitehall.
It was a small group to start with, the core people were: Dan Martin and Carmel Martin and their young family; Sarah Hipperson, who went on to be a Greenham Common woman; Sarah Grayson, a mother in South London; Liz Yates, who was a religious sister, who’d worked overseas; Ray Towey, who was a doctor at Guy’s Hospital, who’d worked for many years as a missionary in Africa as a mission doctor; Tony Bartlet, a Catholic priest; Linda Frewin, a theology student; and myself.
We had a whole year of meeting, discussing, learning.
What does civil disobedience mean? What does nonviolence mean? What are the implications? How do we bring those into this arena, here in London? How do we frame activities that challenge? How do we create actions that take you over the line? How do we plan for the consequences of these actions? How do we communicate about it?
It was well over a year of all that before we did anything. Then we started taking action in the early ’80s at the ministry of defence, using religious days that had a significance and a meaning that could be both secular and religious.
Some of those actions continue today. For example, the actions we do on Ash Wednesday have been going on continually for 38 years, so we’ve created a tradition of Christians being at the ministry of defence on Ash Wednesday to challenge nuclear weapons policies, and we’ve maintained a community who’ve come and want to do that every year, which I think is pretty amazing.
Pat Gaffney marks the ministry of defence in London, Ash Wednesday, 1992.
Represent
That first arrest, after pouring blood on the MoD steps, came before the Ash Wednesday actions. It was a very dramatic action based very much on one of the US peace actions.
It’s quite hard to remember that far back, but my memory is the police were quite respectful.
It must have been a mystery to these poor policemen, coming into a place and seeing blood. How worrying that must have been. Where did this blood come from? Was somebody hurt? There must have been all those things going on in their minds, which I hadn’t thought about.
We were held in the old cells at the back of Rochester Row, very old police cells behind Portcullis House, as it is now. I remember just being there with other people and we sang, we prayed, we were released later that day.
Eventually we went back to Bow Street magistrates’ court. That first trial, we were partially represented – which helped make up our minds that we would never be represented by a lawyer again!
“I do think nonviolence is about life choices, more than just nonviolent direct actions.”
I think it’s very difficult for someone wearing a legal hat to represent you because they’re doing it through the lens of the legal system and you want to do it through a slightly different lens.
A strong plank of what we wanted to say was that we had a legitimate cause. We wanted to talk about motivation and the imminence of the nuclear threat. You can only do that speaking for yourself, it’s speaking out of belief.
A couple of us were charged with contempt of court on the day, for persisting in reading out our personal statements of intent, and taken down to the cells and brought back up. The magistrate was terrified – we had a Catholic priest arrested in our group.
I think the magistrate dealt with us very quickly to get rid of us. We got a conditional discharge which was to last a year; if we broke the law again it would be taken into account. [They didn’t receive a fine, or community service or a prison sentence – ed]
Subsequently, we always represented ourselves.
I found it very helpful when we were able to cross-examine one another, because that is a good way of further bringing out motivation and also clarifying the nonviolent nature of the action and clarifying the lack of threat that you were bringing to the situation, and all that was important to me as well.
That’s what I was doing in the ’80s in my spare time!
—
The 11-plus exam (taken in England, Wales and Northern Ireland when you were about 11 years old) decided what kind of secondary school you went to. A grammar school was for more academic students who were likely to go to university. A secondary modern delivered more basic, more practical education, and rarely offered A-levels. By 1975, most local authorities in England and Wales had abandoned the 11-plus, which was criticised as giving most children a sense of failure. Northern Ireland held its last 11-plus exam in 2008. — ed
Pat Gaffney has been arrested 11 times for her civil disobedience actions, and has been imprisoned three times. She has refused to pay fines and has been visited by bailiffs, but has never had any property seized. The second part of this interview with Pat will appear in the next issue.
First Published in Peace News https://www.peacenews.info/node/9442/making-nonviolent-faith
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