CAFOD’s 50th Anniversary Mass - Thoughts from a laywoman

Altos - Ellen is 3rd from right

It was hard to sing with tears welling up. The words on the service sheet were blurred at times and my voice cracked. I was in the choir at CAFOD’s 50th anniversary Mass at Westminster Cathedral last Saturday, with Archbishop Vincent Nichols as principal celebrant and a packed congregation of around 2,500. And I was feeling quite emotional.

It started outside when Tony Sheen of CAFOD Westminster lined up London CAFOD supporters for photos. There were several generations of familiar faces who have a shared experience of study events, marches, lobbies, fund-raising and special liturgies. Fr Joe Ryan, Chair of Westminster J&P, came straight from giving a talk at the Occupy London Stock Exchange camp. Coachloads from around the country were arriving, with people from Plymouth, Hallam and Shrewsbury dioceses entering the Cathedral, many with their diocesan bishops. All around, colleagues and friends were greeting each other and countless happy memories were surfacing. It felt like a family reunion.

As Chris Bain, CAFOD’s Director, said in his introduction to the service booklet, we were coming together in prayer, “giving thanks to God for the grace which has enabled us to achieve so much and seek God’s blessing on all we do in the future”.

Many thousands of Catholics will say that involvement with CAFOD’s family has been transformative in their lives. Before the Mass started there was a reflection on inspirational people from each decade of CAFOD’s history. For myself, I go back to the late 70s when my then boyfriend, Gerry, and I were volunteers at their offices under St Patrick’s Church in Soho Square. His commitment to CAFOD and global justice impressed me enormously and was an element in us getting engaged and married in 1980.

It was at a CAFOD conference that I was introduced to the term ‘structural injustice’ and heard Brian Davies, then Head of Development Education, speak about the training for transformation programmes widely used in Latin America and Africa. He suggested that if you see the essential problem as poverty then your response is charity, but if you see it as oppression then the response is liberation and you are taken from purely a charitable reaction to one of working for justice. And wow! Liberation theology! Why had I never heard of this in my parish life or Catholic education? CAFOD offered a vision of a global Church where clergy, religious and laity all work together for the common good and that unity of purpose was felt on Saturday.

I joined the CAFOD staff in 1982 when the organisation was only 20 years old and had around 20 staff. It had recently moved to new premises in Stockwell, and so many fascinating people came through its doors. The original founders of CAFOD – Catholic women whose project in the Dominican Republic so impressed the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales that they formed the new agency around it in 1962 – popped in from time to time. CAFOD’s Director was Julian Filochowski who had worked in Central America and had known Archbishop Oscar Romero, martyred in El Salvador only a few years earlier. Big names in the church of the global South visited the office regularly and spoke to staff, such as theologian Fr Jon Sobrino from El Salvador and Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns of Brazil. Archbishop Denis Hurley from South Africa told us that apartheid was ‘intrinsically evil’ and pointed to the institutionalised violence and structural sin inherent and embedded in it. He motivated us in our campaigns and helped us understand how solidarity between North and South might be realised. Many prophetic women too came through the doors of CAFOD – Sr Bernadette Okure, working on training for transformation in West Africa, and Elizabeth Namaganda of The Grail in Uganda who spoke about the impact of conflict on communities and urged us to find out about UK involvement in arms trading. Meanwhile, hundreds of projects were assisting communities to secure livelihoods, food, healthcare and shelter.

For its 25th anniversary CAFOD took over the Royal Festival Hall for a day and the diminutive Dom Helder Camara from Brazil was a keynote speaker. Dressed in a simple beige cassock, he looked as though he had stepped down from his famous CAFOD poster, ‘When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist”. Barely five feet tall, he was a giant in terms of that dimension of the Social Teaching of the Church, the ‘Option for the Poor’. As Archbishop of Olinda and Recife in North-East Brazil for 20 years until 1985, Camera abandoned the archbishop’s palace for a modest house, warning, "be careful of the way you live, it is the only gospel most people will ever read!" He gave away Church land to landless people and set up a Justice and Peace Commission, which monitored human rights abuses. All this ensured that his barely comprehensible talk in poor English at the Royal Festival Hall that day received a standing ovation from the thousands present, deeply touched by his holiness, warmth and spontaneity.

The eight years I worked for CAFOD gave me direct experience of the Catholic Church undertaking jubilean acts of social justice, along the lines of the wonderful Jubilee reading from Isaiah 61, which was Saturday’s first reading. How appropriate to see it read by Mildred Neville, a former CAFOD trustee and former Director of the Catholic Institute for International Relations.

Some people who were at the Festival Hall 25 years ago were there again on Saturday in a congregation of CAFOD’s most active supporters, Justice and Peace activists, bishops and priests, religious and missionary societies. CAFOD’s impact has been astonishing. Its annual income is now in excess of £50 million and it works with partners in more than 40 countries. I am truly amazed at how many people with key roles in other agencies once worked for CAFOD: Christine Allen, Executive Director of Progressio; Pat Gaffney, General Secretary of Pax Christi; Chris Cole, founder of Drone Wars UK and former head of the Fellowship of Reconciliation; Cathy Corcoran, Director of the Cardinal Hume Centre; Richard Miller, Executive Director of Action Aid; Andy Atkins, Executive Director of Friends of the Earth; Martina Milburn, Chief Executive of the Prince’s Trust; Barbara Crowther, Director of Policy and Communications of the Fairtrade Foundation. Julian Filochowski is now chair of the Archbishop Romero Trust. So many more have had their career path determined and have grown in their faith because of the social justice formation provided by CAFOD. Fr Mike Fitzsimons, a priest of Liverpool Archdiocese who had travelled to Westminster at the weekend, told me that attending a CAFOD Campaign training Conference at Upholland when he was a teenager was instrumental in his decision to become a priest. CAFOD Salford’s Anne-Marie Coppock, who did the second reading on Saturday, worked as a volunteer on CAFOD’s campaign throughout the 80s and it then became her life’s work.

Saturday’s sermon by Bishop John Arnold, auxiliary in Westminster and the current Chair of CAFOD trustees, pulled so much together. He suggested thanksgiving for CAFOD’s humanitarian and development work over 50 years, providing livelihoods for the poorest communities in the global South and campaigning on a range of justice issues, from corporations pillaging natural resources to climate change to HIV/AIDS awareness. He had personally witnessed the giving of keys for new homes to tsunami survivors in Sri Lanka, and met survivors of sexual violence in DR Congo, all assisted by CAFOD-funded programmes. “It is a joy to see that CAFOD is a household name” he said “and to know that more than 90% of our parishes support CAFOD Family Fast Days”. Bishop Arnold then looked to the future and CAFOD’s on-going commitment to building “God’s kingdom on Earth”. He urged us not to be complacent, remembering that one billion people still live in abject poverty. This was picked up again in a post-communion call to recommitment by Margaret Mwaniki, a CAFOD trustee and partner from Kenya. She spoke of CAFOD demonstrating God’s love for humanity and participating in the mission of the Church. She called for on-going action to bring “life to the full” in the context of the economic downturn and climate change. Specifically, she called for support for CAFOD’s new ‘Thirst for Change’ campaign which addresses the growing global water and sanitation crisis.

Up in the choir stalls behind the high altar, a sense of solidarity had developed amongst the singers. In the alto section with me were women I was proud to stand alongside - Maria Elena Arana of CAFOD campaigns and Jo Siedlecka who founded and runs Independent Catholic News. We were ably led by Matthew Grehan-Bradley, Head of Music at St Leonard’s Catholic Secondary School in Durham, who had brought his chamber choir to swell our ranks. They do regular concerts for CAFOD and raised £7,500 last November alone. They had come south on one of the coaches from Northern dioceses that left around 6am, many of them taking in a tour of CAFOD’s new eco-building beside Southwark Cathedral before arriving at Westminster Cathedral. The others in the choir were from London parishes and we had been rehearsing from mid-morning down the road at Pimlico parish, under the leadership of Canon Pat Browne. We enjoyed coming together in a common cause, helping each other out with the task before us, and sharing food (and chocolates) at lunchtime. During that break I was chatting to a young CAFOD staff member and telling him that I remembered CAFOD’s 25th anniversary celebrations. “I wasn’t born then” he joked. Yes, I thought, it is important today to celebrate CAFOD’s past, but what is crucial from here on is CAFOD’s vital witness within the Catholic community of bringing “good news to the poor” in the years ahead.


Ellen Teague runs the media desk of Columban JPIC.

See the text of Bishop John Arnold's homily here: www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=19736