In one sense, nothing could be more fashionable than a Catholic charity. Catholic Social Teaching has inspired a number of influential figures, from Bernie Sanders and the Blue Labour movement to IMF leader Christine Lagarde and Mark Carney, head of the Bank of England. As Maurice Glasman, the Labour peer, observed in a Catholic Herald interview: “This is the first time for Britain, really since the Reformation, that Catholic thought has really entered the mainstream.”
But the organisations that put Catholic Social Teaching into practice – the hundreds of Catholic charities around the country – have rarely faced so many challenges. Local authorities, with whom they work, have been badly hit by government spending reductions. As congregations shrink and parishes amalgamate, it becomes harder for Catholic charities to find a solid volunteer base. The abuse crisis has left Catholic organisations needing to prove that they can be trusted with the vulnerable. So can Church charities adapt to an age which is clearly responsive to their values?
That is one of the questions addressed in a new report by the think-tank Theos, Catholic Social Thought and Catholic Charities in Britain Today. The researchers interviewed hundreds of people who work for Catholic charities or were in receipt of their services. It focuses on six in particular: two marriage charities – Retrouvaille and Worldwide Marriage Encounter – as well as the St Vincent de Paul Society, Father Hudson’s Care, the Apostleship of the Sea and Caritas Archdiocese of Birmingham.
Reading the report, you get a sense of the bureaucratic complexities which charities face. It quotes, for instance, a member of Father Hudson’s, a wide-ranging social care charity. Their Birmingham day centre was being used by a severely disabled old man. Out of the blue, he got a letter from the council informing him that they were stopping his funding to go there. Father Hudson’s let him keep using the services for nothing – “because we could and it was the right thing to do”. But the charity had to manage the appeal to Birmingham council – neither the man nor his mother, in her 70s, could have done so.
As local services are stretched, more and greater responsibilities fall on the charities themselves. They are “extremely concerned”, says the report, about having “to meet more needs than ever, with less and less public financial support”.
There can also be a shortage of volunteers – and charities are not always good at publicising themselves. Catholic charities, though the laity are ever more involved, often depend on priests’ approval, which can sometimes he hard to gain. One trustee of the St Vincent de Paul Society, whose work revolves around visiting those in need, is quoted as saying: “Our greatest challenge is priests who say ‘I don’t need an SVP group: there are no poor in my parish.’ We find this ignorant and upsetting. Bereavement, ill-health, isolation, this is irrespective of wealth – they are poor.”
To be fair, these are minority complaints. A more common problem is that priests can burn out from the great demands placed on them; and there is a shortage of fellow priests who can share the work.
But Ben Ryan, author of the report, says researching it gave him cause for hope. “So many Catholics, lapsed Catholics and indeed non-Catholics are already so committed to their work – we’re very much building on firm foundations when we look to the future,” he says. “It’s absolutely incredible how many different types of work are going on in dramatically different contexts.”
The report notes that 388 registered charities have “Catholic” in their official description. There are many others which have a Catholic ethos; and then there are the innumerable acts of service carried out by Catholics which don’t show up on the records.
Many of those interviewed spoke about the importance of seeing everyone as having a special dignity, as being made in the image of God. “It defines everything in my work,” says a Father Hudson’s trustee. “It is that Matthew 25 idea of looking at people and saying ‘you have value in my eyes’. That’s what we do: we find the value in people.”
The report argues that Catholic charities do not evangelise those they serve as much as those doing the serving: many volunteers and charity workers find their faith strengthened by taking part in charity work. This suggests that, as charities seek to find a way through present difficulties, their greatest strength is their Christianity.
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