For my generation...

...religious freedom meant smuggling booklets and pamphlets to hard-pressed Catholic groups in Eastern Europe,heart-thumping moments at Customs, an address of a contact on a tiny scrap of paper, pinned carefully into deep recesses of clothing (I was given the useful advice "wrap the address in plastic cut from a plastic bag - you'll sweat, especially when you're scared, and the paper will disintegrate, so wrap it to keep it dry"). It meant trying to help people who were struggling under a Communist system which prattled about peace while persecuting people who just wanted to publish religious poetry or organise a pilgrimage to a shrine. It meant praying at the grave of the heroic Fr Jerzy Popiełuszko in Poland, and telling people back in London about the courageous Warsaw students who were carrying on his message. It meant vigils outside the Soviet Embassy, and fasting and praying for people who suffered in far-away labour camps and prisons beyond the Arctic Circle. We did talk, of course, about the possibility of persecution happening in our own country - we knew about the martyrs of times past and we were only too well aware of the battles we were already fighting against abortion and looming euthanasia...but...thirty years later, here I am, seriously pondering on the likelihood of horrible clashes with the law, here in my own Britain, if the Govt forces through the ghastly same-sex "marriage" plan, and schools are told that they must teach children untruths and openly attack the most everyday realities of human relationships and family life. And there is new pressure to legalise forms of euthanasia. And opposing abortion can mean, for anyone working in the Health Service, the end of a career. And so on. How ironic it will be if my earlier experiences of assisting Catholics in Eastern Europe turn out to be of raw practical value in keeping alive faith and freedom in my own native city, the London once hailed as a rallying-place for freedom in a dark world...