By Canon James Mustard, Canon Precentor
The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of those of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.
So opens “Gaudium et Spes” – a statement on the pastoral work of the church in the modern world, an outworking of the Second Vatican Council of 1965. The poor have always been a priority for the Church from its earliest days, from the solidarity and healing Jesus offers to the poor, sick, rejected and destitute, to the Apostles sharing of a common purse for the Common Good, to the establishment of myriad charitable movements and initiatives across two millennia. From a Catholic perspective, the Church has a priority for the poor.
It was therefore surprising to hear a traditionalist bishop, who identifies strongly with catholic tradition, and who has elsewhere promoted the church’s priority for the poor, speak against a proposal in the General Synod that sought to redistribute 1% of the considerable income of the Church Commissioners for England to its dioceses and support their ministry to every community in England. A “no-strings subsidy” the synod was told, would “encourage torpor and disincentivise missional imagination.” Big words for a synod: they’d go down like a lead balloon in any church I know.
The implication here seems to be that poor parishes are lazy parishes. Try telling that to the vicar dashing between fifteen rural churches, or the Churchwarden keeping the church open, and the rain out, the parish treasurer or parish safeguarding officer putting in long hours to keep parishes safe and solvent. The reality is that decades of centralising church assets, by parishes and cathedrals forced to cede land and property with the promise that they would be better managed elsewhere, has indeed produced great, and rapidly-increasing, funds for the Church Commissioners for England. Meanwhile, the burden of work expected of thinly-spread clergy and stretched parish officers has snowballed without the assets to support their work and ministry. The concept of the Common Purse is Biblical, but it is to be an open purse.
In this debate, traditionalist catholic voices joined conservative evangelical voices, against a 1% redistribution, the latter suggesting that “finance reflects spiritual reality”, an astonishing importing of an American “prosperity gospel”. Again, try telling that to the above in their parishes. It’s always interesting to watch unlikely alliances at work in the General Synod. If these two were to say what they thought of, for example, the Eucharist or the Virgin Mary, we would see a much less unified front. They have, of course, also discovered a recent unity in their rejection of Prayers of Love and Faith, the resources for the blessing of same-sex couples in church. So this voting and speaking pattern was not just about the matter itself, but of two disparate, instinctively opposed groups, each reassuring the other that they had one-another’s backs.
So here we are: the Church grows richer and the parishes grow poorer. It’s not Catholic, and it’s not Biblical. We can only hope that a revised motion comes back to the General Synod, giving a due priority for poorer parishes and their communities.
Photo: St. Peter’s Basilica, venue of the Second Vatican Council. Credit: Giacomo della Porta.