Pope Paul VI Lecture challenges us all to think again about 'charity'

Fr Christopher Jamison OSB

More than 350 people attended CAFOD’s annual Pope Paul VI memorial lecture, given by Fr Christopher Jamison OSB at St Mary and St Michael’s Catholic Church in Shadwell, East London on Friday 18 November.

Fr Christopher, who last year took part in the BBC series 'The Big Silence', spoke on the theme of ‘Charity begins at home: but what is charity and where is home?’, looking at the role of the church in society and the importance of pursuing an ethical framework for the financial sector.

His lecture challenged our preconceptions of where the boundaries lie between helping ourselves and helping others, and he examined the healing and inspiring power that faith can have in our lives. He expressed the need for faith in action in our homes, our communities, and our world.

Before the lecture, Chris Bain, the Director of CAFOD, gave a short speech reflecting on the last twelve months for CAFOD, while Shelagh Fogarty, a BBC radio journalist, chaired the lecture.

Thank you to all of you who came along and helped to make the evening such a great success.

The full text of Fr Christopher Jamison’s lecture follows:

Charity begins at home: but what is charity and where is home?

Words are two-edged swords: they can connect us through shared meanings or they can divide us through misunderstandings. ‘Charity begins at home’ can be understood both as an invitation that unites and as a slogan that divides. The origins of the phrase are lost in the distant past but in times of crisis, the phrase can fall into malicious hands. In the name of ‘charity begins at home,’ people can tap into our anxieties about migration and stir up neo-nationalist hatred or, in smoother tones, they can prey on our fears about old age and sell us unnecessary pension schemes. Preying on our insecurity about home is a sure way to make ‘charity begins at home’ into a rallying cry for selfishness. Yet the phrase also has the potential to be a rallying cry for creative new ways of expressing generosity and this creative potential is what we’ll look at this evening.

People generally understand charity as donating money to organisations that care for those in need. It’s wonderful that, in spite of the recession, the Catholic community in this country donated £32million to Cafod last year. Charities providing aid and disaster relief remain the most popular cause for individual donations in this country.

But Cafod’s half a million supporters are not only donors they are also committed to the wider meaning of charity.

To find that wider meaning, there is no better place to turn than to the encyclical letter ‘On the Progress of Peoples’ issued by Pope Paul VIth in 1967. He insisted that ‘the social question ties all people together, in every part of the world’ and he asks that we show ‘universal charity.’ For Pope Paul, then, charity begins in our global home. As we honour his prophetic voice, we honour too an entire generation of Catholics who responded generously to his call to inhabit the global village; they did so through political action in Britain and through lives devoted to mission abroad. They were the unfashionable forerunners of Bob Geldof, Bono and the other rock stars of the 1980’s who brought these issues to a much wider audience.
 
Many of the solutions to the problems of our global home suggested by Paul VI in the 1960’s involved a central role for public authorities.iii But in the 50 years since then, we have discovered that the power of national governments is limited, limited by global economic forces and by global environmental problems. State intervention is only a partial solution to such problems so the agenda for promoting justice and peace has now to involve initiatives that are above and beyond the competence of state authorities. In the Operation Noah Lecture of 2008 'Transforming charity: the power of positive purpose' I outlined how the classical virtues of prudence and temperance, justice and courage are the essential elements of a new environmental ethic. This evening I want to consider that other global crisis facing us, the current economic recession. The classical virtues are vital here too but I believe that they need to be supported by the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.

So let me answer the question ‘what is charity’ by showing its connection to faith and hope.

Put simply, charity is faith and hope in action. Let me illustrate what this means with an example from my own experience. Last year, I took part in the BBC TV series The Big Silence, when five people agreed to follow a regime of silence and meditation, firstly in a Catholic retreat centre and then back home. The experience led to positive changes in the lives of all the participants. The change in Jon was particularly striking: aged 55 he was chief executive of a successful business but he was still restless and unfulfilled. He was also, as he put it, anti-religion. Through his encounter with prayer and the Church, however, he completely reshaped his life. He is now training to be a therapist and has used his business skills to set up NEET Interface, a social enterprise that is creating a network of companies offering internships to NEETS, teenagers not in education, employment or training. One of the first interns was Patrick; he missed out on good grades at school aged 16 and so was looking for work. A car hire company took him on and the project web site describes what happened next: ‘What started out as a six week intern placement has become a vocation for Patrick. He has now become a highly valued team member and a trained tyre fitter.’

The shape of this story is significant: the faith of the Catholic community helped Jon to find new purpose in life. Faith led Jon to a work of charity that inspires hope in unemployed youth. For Patrick, the internship opened up the vocational dimension of life and helped him to find new purpose. Jon found his vocation which in turn helped Patrick to find his. Positive purpose is what gives people hope. Jon could have done charity at home in lots of established ways but his discovery of new purpose in life through the Church transformed him and led him to create a new social enterprise that would pass on that sense of purpose to unemployed teenagers. The power of positive purpose is the force that transforms charity from a mere transaction into a dynamic force.

Pope Paul VIth explains why purpose is so transformative: ‘in the design of God, he says, all people are called upon to develop and fulfil themselves, for every life is a vocation.’
 
Unless people discover that they are called upon to develop and fulfil themselves, then they cannot help themselves. If our charity flows from our own sense of purpose then whatever work we undertake at the service of others, be it a youth internship scheme or housing for the homeless or a social enterprise company for poor farmers in Africa, if such works flow from a sense of purpose then a sense of purpose is what we pass on to those involved. If, by contrast, we simply do these works out of guilt or as a financial transaction of wealth transfer, then what is passed on will stop once we stop giving; charity without a sense of purpose is what leads to the phrase ‘cold as charity;’ without the warmth of purpose, good works will wither because those receiving help have not found the purpose that enables them to persevere when the sponsor stops giving. Charity is only really effective when it gives hope and this hope-inspiring charity springs in a special way from the belief that every life is a vocation.

The mission of the Church is to help everybody discover their vocation. We offer a space for personal, spiritual discovery that few other communities offer. Through our buildings as places of quiet reflection, through our outreach to the marginalised, through our community life, the Christian Church is the home from which many people draw strength and discover their purpose. In spite of the wrong doing of some members of the Church, this is something that we can still offer and that many people appreciate. We should not be shy to offer this and fear that this will be seen as proselytising. We do not ignore other needs but the discovery of purpose is our special gift. The underlying shape of a person’s life is always the life of Jesus Christ. This shape is present in every person, not just baptised Christians. We can help everybody to discover this Christ-like purpose, even if they do not acknowledge Christ in the way that the Christian does.

This insight begins with a person’s own life; part of my life’s purpose is to enable others to find their purpose. This process of discovery begins with a question, the question that Pope Benedict asked the school students of Britain during his visit last year: ‘what kind of a person do you really want to be?’

This is the human side of a two sided coin: on one side the question: ‘what kind of a person do you want to be?’ and on the other side the question: ‘what is God calling you to be?’ In our charity, we will begin with the human side and invite those who wish to turn over the coin for themselves to find the divine side. As we work with them to improve their housing, their work and their community, we are inviting them to live out the purpose for which God has created them.

When people begin to discover their purpose, then life starts to have meaning.

Meaning is the process by which the world to which people belong becomes the world that belongs to people. It is the process by which a person ceases to be a stranger in the world, the process precisely by which they come to be at home in the world. The world is God’s home so nobody owns it; we are all tenants and in that sense we have no abiding home here. But because this is God’s world, it’s friendly even when so much experience makes it seem hostile. Jon from the TV series told me that a key moment for him was when I invited him to see the world as a friendly place. Given his background, this was a big step but a life-changing one. People are alienated from their true place in the world through sin but grace restores a proper sense of being at home. Grace is the process by which God restores people to their true place, the process by which life is given its true meaning. In his letter to the Ephesians, St Paul begins with a great hymn in praise of God precisely because God has ‘made known to us ...the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ.’

Pope Benedict explains how we can offer this insight to the whole world. He uses the image of the Court of the Gentiles, that part of the Jerusalem Temple that was open to all peoples, the part that Our Lord cleared of money changers: ‘Today too, he says, the Church should open a sort of ‘Court of the Gentiles’ in which people might latch on to God, without knowing him and before gaining access to his mystery...there should be a dialogue with those to whom religion is something foreign, to whom God is unknown and who nevertheless do not want to be left merely Godless, but rather to draw near to him, albeit as the Unknown.’
 
At home in our neighbourhoods

People are drawn to the Church in order to find their spiritual purpose. They are not Godless and they wish to learn from our wisdom. This is part of the new evangelisation that will lead some, but not all, to church membership. Many people today seek meaning and purpose in life, be they affluent or poor. This contemporary search defines our charity: Christian charity today is faith that gives people hope by restoring their sense of purpose. With that light of Christian charity to guide us, let’s now go in search of home. Where is home? The Borough of Tower Hamlets, where we are tonight, is home to some of our country’s poorest communities and to some of our richest banks. It is a microcosm of Britain, a place where the meaning of home is historically complex and politically divisive. Some 200,000 people live here, of whom 57% are ethnically white British/ Irish and 30% are Asian.
 

On Brick Lane there is a building that is an object lesson in how this part of Britain has for centuries been home to refugees and migrants from all over the world. The Eglise Neuve was built in 1743 as a chapel for Huguenot refugees; in 1898 it became the Spitlafields Great Synagogue for Jews escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe; it is now a mosque, the Jamme Masjid, serving the one third of the local population that is Muslim, mainly of Bangladeshi origin. Into this rich cultural mix there also came Irish Catholic migrants who built this magnificent church over 150 years ago, the so-called Catholic Cathedral of the East End.
 
Accounts of East End life up to the 1950’s describe ‘street celebrations coloured by the various cultures that mingled in the area where everyone would join in.’

Cultural tolerance has characterised much of the history of this area but more recent events have echoed the battle of Cable St, when in 1936 the British Union of Fascists tried to march through the East End and were physically thwarted by an alliance of Jewish, Irish and communist groups. This September the English Defence League and their opponents held rival rallies here in spite of the Home Secretary banning all marches in the borough.

So where is ‘home’ in this and in similarly diverse communities throughout the country? In times of recession, it’s easy for different cultures to blame each other and to say ‘go back home.’ Our Prime Minister said recently that state sponsored multiculturalism had failed because it has led to different communities leading separate lives.

While state sponsored multiculturalism may have failed, experience in Tower Hamlets shows that local multiculturalism is still working. People from ethnic minorities here share in the suffering of their white neighbours and vice versa because they all experience the same social conditions, often conditions of poor housing and low incomes. We should take seriously the sufferings of all groups, white and black. The cross is a reality for people of every culture whether they recognise it as the Cross of Christ or not. The meaning of suffering is a key question in homes everywhere and the spirituality of the Cross combined with Easter hope is something that Christians can share with everybody. Among the most heroic people who have shared this hope for centuries are the women of Catholic religious congregations, such as the Sisters of Mercy who have lived and worked in this parish for over 150 years. They share the purpose of the Cross; suffering is never good but it can be made purposeful and the Cross can do that, both in the Church and in the courtyard of the Gentiles. So we start to see where home is: home is wherever we can bring grace to bear, wherever we can bring positive purpose alive once again.
 
Most religious communities share the conviction that life has a divine meaning and that all people share in that divine purpose. Having recognised that, we need to create places where those who hold different understandings of that divine purpose can talk to one another and act together. London Citizens is such a place, where the power of communities works together for the common good. Churches are a driving force in this remarkable network that is now spreading to other cities. Campaigning for a Living Wage in London, ending child detention, building up City Safe Zones; these are campaigns that bring meaning and hope to thousands of people by showing that ordinary citizens can change life at home. In London citizens, we see one of the key cultural shifts that has occurred in the last 25 years, namely, the shift from large institutions to flexible networks: instead of asking government to create new institutions, existing networks can work together to make charity active in the different places that are home to their members. Local churches are discovering a new voice as community organisers and if ‘charity begins at home’ has a 21st century Christian name it’s probably community organising. The Catholic Bishops of England and Wales have recognised the value of this approach by recently highlighting the work of the Caritas Social Action Network. CSAN helps Catholic charities to work together by providing a focus for networking, advocacy and professional support. CSAN is charity begins at home on a serious scale.

Next let’s look at what happened during the civil disorder that broke out in August this year within this borough and other parts of the country. These were not riots as that word is usually understood, because what began as a protest soon became opportunism and looting.

The simple insight that I offer is that this opportunism stemmed from a lack of meaning. If life is meaningless, then there are no restraints on my behaviour other than the limits imposed by force. Looking back at history, it seems that from the mid-Victorian era, roughly the 1850’s, to the 1950’s we have experienced an unusual degree of social cohesion and respect for law in this country. Unusual because life before the 1850’s and increasingly since the 1950’s shows that public disorder is not uncommon in societies. However justified it may be to send looters to jail we won’t solve the long term problem by locking people up.

Underlying the golden era of British social cohesion was a shared civil meaning and places like pubs or youth clubs were places for recreation that sustained that meaning. We have to create something similar today. Something similar will not involve just one meaning but a network of interlocking meanings. In Britain nowadays, the shared meaning is the world of TV for the middle aged and the world of Facebook for the young. Life is no longer divided into a virtual world and a real world; young lives involve an online and an offline element; home now includes both. But there is clearly a vacuum in the lives of many young people.
 
Not so much an entertainment vacuum as a meaning vacuum, often stemming from chaotic home lives. The Church’s work to support families has never been as important as now. To fill the meaning vacuum local churches could consider two further steps. Firstly, central to any meaning in life is having work to do and local churches might consider creating a social enterprise such as that I described earlier helping young people into work. Secondly, alongside the excellent youth ministry directed towards young Catholics, they might develop a new version of old style youth work to reach out to all young people: a court of the gentiles for all the young alongside the Catholic temple.

So Tower Hamlets shows us what home is nowadays: home involves people of different cultures, who share in the sufferings that affect us all; home involves networks that enable everybody to feel at home in their neighbourhood; home is above all a place where we pay special attention to the needs of the young. So we find that when we live Christian charity as faith that gives people hope by restoring their sense of purpose, then that very approach to charity starts to redefine where home is.

A person’s home is wherever they can bring the grace of positive purpose to bear on life. So charity begins at home translates today as the local grace of positive purpose.

Underlying many of the tensions felt in Tower Hamlets is the reality that this is one of the most economically deprived boroughs in the country now experiencing even more deprivation from the double whammy of government cuts and economic stagnation. Yet alongside this deprivation, we find Canary Wharf, one of the world’s wealthiest financial centres. The financial services industry is part of home not only here in Tower Hamlets but also in every community in this country. So how does charity begin in this particular part of our homes?

At home in our banks

Charity and banks are not words usually found in the same sentence but if we look at banks from the perspective of their purpose the two come together. In the words of the Chairman of HSBC, Stephen Green ‘You cannot have modern social and economic development without a flourishing, profitable, stable banking system.’ In addition, some estimate that the current global economic crisis has pushed anther 200 million people below the less than $2 a day poverty line. Banks provide services that enable the growth of economic justice; they can enable injustice too but popular feeling can too readily assume that the purpose of banking is fundamentally unjust. The challenge we face is how to make banks the servants of justice. If banks are the servants of excessive spending by us consumers and excessive borrowing by governments, then injustice is multiplied until the bubble bursts leading to the spending cuts and economic recession such as we now see contributing to a further rise in inequality.

Justice is ‘the primary way of charity’xiii says Pope Benedict, in which case a just banking system is a basic requirement of charity. The financial services industry employs over one million people in the UK and generates up to 8% of our national wealth.

Banking really is part of our home in Britain but our banking system also has a profound effect on other countries as well. Creating a just banking system here in Britain is an example of charity that begins at home but with global effects because London is a globalfinancial centre.
 
Since the beginning of the banking crisis in 2007 understandable public outrage has generated a great deal more heat than light. There is a vacuum of informed public debate. No Royal Commission has investigated the collapse of our financial services and the official reactions to the crisis have all been about improving systems. Yet the Walker Review of Corporate Governance published in 2009 stated that ‘the principal deficiencies in bank boards related much more to patterns of behavior than to organization.’ In spite of Walker’s insistence that people not systems are to blame, the body of his report never uses the word ethical and moral occurs only once, in the technical phrase ‘moral hazard.’ People not systems were the cause of the banking crisis yet the Independent Banking Commission chaired by Sir John Vickers is all about systems.

 His report published in September this year makes major recommendations about restructuring banks to make them more stable and to ensure that the taxpayer no longer has to bail out investment banks. The government has accepted these recommendations and is giving banks eight years to implement them. But neither
Walker nor Vickers addressed the moral issues raised by the banking crisis and so the moral dimension has continued to be ignored, that is until two months ago. Since I started writing this lecture, there has been a sudden outbreak of moral discussion about banks; first came the ‘Occupy’ movement that started in Wall Street and whose latest manifestation is on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral. These camps are like modern art installations; they perplex, inspire and annoy in equal measure. They symbolize an alternative vision of the world, trying to say what has not been said but struggling to say it coherently.
 
My only surprise is that the vacuum was not filled sooner and more violently by a morally outraged public. Then one month ago the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace published a statement on the global economy signed by Cardinal Turkson, followed swiftly by the Archbishop of Canterbury giving his support to many of the Pontifical Council’s proposals.

Most recently, the St Paul’s Institute published its report on Perceptions of Ethics in the City Today. All of a sudden, moral discussion is rushing into the vacuum; the long overdue moral debate about financial services has begun but it is by no means over. Bankers need to discover that their life too is a vocation. Now, the way to enable them to do this is not to berate them and visit retribution on them. In his most recent encyclical, Pope Benedict sums up the right approach: ‘Financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity, so as not to abuse the sophisticated instruments which can serve to betray the interests of savers.’

The English title of this encyclical is ‘On integral human development in charity and truth.’ We need to work towards a financial services industry rooted in charity and truth, an industry where the local grace of positive purpose is lived out by bankers with a sense of vocation.

That sense of vocation comes from the services that banking provides to the world outside the financial industry, not in the activity that it provides within the financial system. When the purpose of banking becomes the generation of financial products to pass round the monetary system and to increase remuneration, then its social purpose becomes obscured. If the purpose is the bonus then the system is failing society; it is deeply worrying that the St Paul’s Institute survey shows over 75% of City workers are there primarily because of the high levels of remuneration. The challenge we face is that both Walker and Vickers acknowledge that banking has social and moral purposes but they do not dig deeply into what they are and how they affect the moral conduct of those running the industry.

At present, most financial services employees in Britain believe that acting morally means acting in compliance with regulation. The old Financial Services Skills Council showed this equivalence in its qualifications framework where learning the rules is called ethics.
 
Rules are needed but they are minimal requirements not indicators of moral integrity. What bankers need is an ethic to help them identify moral problems that go beyond compliance and training in how to handle them. Some of the elements of such an approach are hidden away at the back of the Walker Review in Annex 4 entitled: Psychological and behavioural elements in board performance. Starting with a clear statement of their purposes, banks should devise an ethical ‘Good Financial Practice Code’ to support those purposes. Before they are able to fully practice in their profession, bankers should receive compulsory formal training in the ethical behaviour expected of their profession, especially on how to resolve conflicts of interest. This Code should be devised and enforced by a new professional standards body along the lines of the General Medical Council.

In addition, we can campaign for compliance with the Vickers proposals sooner than 2019. Next year is too soon but eight years is too long. Here then are the beginnings of a campaign with two prongs: firstly, an ethical code not just for banks but for the bankers themselves and secondly structural compliance with Vickers before 2019.
There is a parallel here with the Fair Trade Movement. This began when experts got inside the world of international commodity trading, a highly complex global market. With great tenacity and having first been labeled freaks, they offered an alternative supply chain model within the market. They challenged the big players and forced them to offer fairly traded products in all major supermarkets. The public is now aware of issues around international trade that were once closed to them and consumers have led a major market adjustment. The lack of any such movement around financial services is striking. In this regard, the Financial Transaction Tax (known as the Robin Hood tax) currently being considered by the European Commission needs to be given careful consideration. Such a tax would generate funds for international development but it might also be used by bankers toexonerate themselves from any further changes. And there is a danger that the tax would simply be passed on to ordinary investors as well as financial traders. The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace has asked us to consider this and other proposals as part of our thinking about the morality of the global monetary system. Cardinal Turkson proposes a global authority to ensure that markets behave morally.

The consumer watchdog Which? has made a similar point; we need, says Which? ‘a code of ethics by which bankers have to behave and training in it; a professional standards committee to investigate and act upon bad behaviour.’

We have here the beginnings of a fair banking movement, led by a Cardinal and a consumer watchdog, a pretty solid start.
 
Such a movement is a Courtyard of the Gentiles dedicated to the ethics of the international monetary system. The Occupy London movement has created such a space by pitching their tents right next to London’s largest Cathedral, a populist Courtyard made not by the Church but by the gentiles themselves. They are trying to model that space for wisdom and morality in banking that the rest of us have failed to provide. We need a William Wilberforce of banking who will bring amazing grace to bear on this vital aspect of our lives and enable bankers to discover in what ways their work is a vocation. As with Wilberforce and the abolition of slavery, we will be told that a Fair Banking Movement will weaken the British economy. But in the long run, the abolition of immorality never weakens an economy; it strengthens it. This I believe is the next step in advocacy for the world’s poorest, opening up a new agenda for charity that begins at home here in Britain but which affects the whole world.

To sum up: If loss of purpose lies beneath the disorderly behavior of the young seen on the streets of Tower Hamlets last year, then loss of purpose also lies beneath the disorderly behavior of the bankers who work in the offices that rise above those streets. We need to enable both disadvantaged youth and manic bankers to rediscover their purpose in life. I have sketched out how our neighbourhoods and our financial services can cease to be worlds to which people belong and can become worlds that belong to people. For those of us in active communion with the Church, this is an expression of our purpose in Christ. For those who come to join us in the Courtyard of the Gentiles, this is an expression of their deepest purpose in life. This Courtyard is open to everybody from unemployed youth to highly paid bankers; both alike can discover their vocation there. Here is our home where charity can begin. May the Lord inspire us all to embrace the vision of life described by St Paul in his letter to the Ephesians: ‘God has set forth his purpose in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.’