...at St James church, Spanish Place, of the committee of the Association of Catholic Women. Our meetings are always friendly and warm and have a special sense of welcome - committee member Monica Flynn invariably produces delicious cakes or biscuits and at this meeting she excelled herself with an array of goodies she had been given as Christmas gifts and wanted to share. Despite this, and despite the pleasure of being together again after the Christmas break, the swapping of happy news(two members busy with daughters' weddings) and our plans for the coming months including the Day of Art and Music on March 25th , there was a solemn air. Every day seems to bring some new crunch for the freedom to live and work in a flourishing way as Christians in Britain: if the Government's attempts to crush the freedoms of Church schools were not enough, we now have the Liberal Democrat leader's statement that such schools must teach the acceptability of homosexual activity. When we discussed isues concerning care of the elderly - an area of work in which a number of our members are involved as volunteers - terrible information emerged about ill-treatment, starvation, denial of water and other basic care, in hospitals. There is issues of the gravest possible kind here: death by thirst is ghastly.We need changes to the Liverpool Care Pathway.
When the ACW was first founded, we were particularly concerned about extreme feminist lobbying within the Church, pressure for feminist language in prayers, calls from groups denouncing the Christian teaching on marriage and protection of the unborn and so on...but now the focus has shifted and we find much less of that kind of rubbish in the Church, and many newer problems. Meanwhile the Association has flourished, and is active in a number of useful projects (come to our Day of Recollection in Lent, for instance!). But the future looks full of new challenges...
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What I have heard of happening here, from a nurse, in our aged care facilities is that people who need feeding are not being fed; the food is just set down in front of them and taken away later.
Everyone will agree that death by thirst is ghastly; much better and quicker to give them a needle. Promises of things to come.
I've gone to Israel for a bit, partly because of things like that back home.
I know that there's always the argument that you should stay in a troubled country to fight the mounting evils. But there's also a need to connect to a reality beyond your current ghetto, which is what I am doing.
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