SOLIDARITY IN A TIME OF GLOBAL CRISIS

“Every world crisis is, as the word denotes, a judgement and a decision out of which something new must come.  It is therefore an opportunity to hear the Word of God and for the Spirit to manifest its creative power to humanity. This is the hope that the prophets always maintain in their vision of judgement against the nations, and which the Church constantly repeats in the liturgy”. 
 
Pope Leo on today’s crisis?  No, Christopher Dawson, writing in 1941.  He was a Catholic historian and Vice-President of Cardinal Hinsley’s Sword of the Spirit which dropped pamphlets over Nazi Germany calling Catholics to resist and, in the 1960s, produced the Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR), later known as Progressio.  Led by Mildred Nevile, CIIR developed a distinctive approach to solidarity with, what was then known as, the ‘Third World’.

With his hope that ‘something new must come’, Dawson might be speaking directly to our current global crisis.  But what might it be?  And where might the Church be hoping the Spirit would be manifesting its creative power today?  The suffering and prophetic voices of women in and beyond the Church, and in the solidarity with them, suggests itself. 

Mothers are last in the family to eat in Gaza and in countless areas of conflict around the world.  Rape in wars continues unabated.  The sexual trafficking of women, treated as a passing story in our own cities, has now been brought into global prominence by a criminal elite, Epstein and his powerful, rich friends.  Then there is the suffering of women oppressed by – what is imagined as - 7th century Muslim religious duties, imposed as the law of the land, cruelly implemented, even by the denial of education making gender equality in Afghanistan a distant hoping against hope.  A movement of solidarity with the plight of vulnerable women has been increasingly coming to the fore. 

It was Pope John Paul II in his 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (On Social Concerns) who gave a straightforward definition of solidarity as a virtue: “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good”.  It stuck because it bypassed binary arguments about the individual versus the communitarian, liberalism versus post-liberalism.  In that sense, and in that sense only, the Christian understanding of solidarity isn’t a political principle.  It is by definition a personal commitment to a type of relationship, to friendship and just social structures.  John Paul II also described what solidarity wasn’t: “not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many others”.   Solidarity was set in opposition to “structures of sin”, alongside individual moral failings, (he was celebrating the 20th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s  Populorum Progressio which condemned unfair trade practices imposed on developing countries by powerful states).  If “economic structures of sin” sounds a little academic, think of the cruelty and violence embodied in the laws and social  structures of former Apartheid South Africa and in Israel – and the resistance to them, past and present.

I remember taking Rev. Frank Chikane, soon to be General-Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, 1987-1994,  but on the run, a target for the apartheid regime, to see the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Basil Hume.  There was an immediate rapport between Robert Runcie and Frank.  Runcie had been a tank commander in the Second World War and knew what it was like having someone intent on killing you.  Cardinal Hume was kind and welcoming but the ‘vibes’ were more formal.  On another occasion, I asked Cardinal Hume to make an appeal for the ANC brother of a young South African women who had come to London to try to save him.  He was about to be executed in Pretoria.  The Cardinal was sympathetic but clearly wasn’t going to do so.  And there was not much chance it would have had any result.  I later heard he had driven to Heathrow the next morning to comfort her before she returned to Johannesburg.   People are different.   They show solidarity in different ways.

Pope Francis, too different for conservative tastes, added his distinctive coda to John Paul II’s words in 2013 speaking off-the-cuff in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Bonaria, patron saint of sailors, in Cagliari, Sardinia.  Francis called for compassion for “real people who are suffering and starving” - rather than abstract statistics on poverty.  He lived up to his words.

Why choose Cagliari on a coastal hill in a town on an island in the Mediterranean?   The clue is in ‘Bonaria’, Good air/winds that had blown sailors in the 16th century, with their veneration of Our Lady with them to Santa María del Buen Ayre, Buenos Aires, Good Air, Francis’ former Argentinian Archdiocese for 15 years. The Cagliari meeting was at his request with local prisoners and the unemployed.  His solidarity with them came at a personal level: from recalling stories of family poverty in Italy and how his unemployed father had suffered during the Great Depression in Argentina.  Unemployment, denying a vital space for human creativity, was a “wound to human dignity”.   Francis came back often to the centrality of solidarity in a life of faith responding to injustice.

Injustice has moved not only NGOs but has also evoked, directly and indirectly, Government concern and concerted action.    Both Conservative and Labour governments have promoted protections for women in war, culminating in rape being made a distinct, recognized war crime.  The Metropolitan Police set up a new Violence Reduction Unit in 2022.  Domestic violence against women is a key part of it.  Women played the leading role in making both the above happen.

Governments obviously have the power, money and resources to achieve more than any number of NGOs, though very often in democracies it is pressure from  NGOs, such as the Catholic Institute for International Relations using  effective advocacy alongside public opinion, that lies behind or promotes new government initiatives.  Building up public opinion against the headwinds of a Right-Wing press is no easy task.   In addition, any response to today’s prophetic voices has to weigh up what is doable in different contexts, in the short term and what may require a life-time.  It is one thing to seek justice in a land led by a narcissistic sociopath showing symptoms of cognitive decline, another to deal with a Communist Party led by a ruthless dictator, and another for those living in democratic States with fragmenting political Parties.  Each situation will demand analysis and dictate a different expression of solidarity.  Seeing round corners is not just a political skill.

The UK has the chair of the UN Security Council for this month of February.  OXFAM and other NGOs will be pressing for progress in gender equality and in countering violence against women. In all societies, secular or religious, in back-streets and in global institutions, the creative power of the Spirit is at work, bringing the prophetic voices of women to bear.   Christians are called to be its head, heart and hands.