Providing Christian commentary on the recent budget is not especially easy. There was a measure to remove the two-child cap on Universal Credit payments that was welcomed by many Christians. But the rest of the budget was really a collection of bits and pieces as well as deferred tax rises on which it is difficult to provide a Christian analysis.
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The topic of fraternity was covered in a post shortly after the death of Pope Francis. It is worth revisiting, especially following Pope Leo’s apostolic exhortation Dilexi te, though this was drafted before that document was issued. The starting point for this post is the question “how might Catholic social teaching affect our everyday lives?”. In particular, I want to consider how it might affect all our everyday lives, not just those involved, for example, in political lobbying.
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To know whether compassion is under threat, we need, firstly, to define it. In the Christian tradition, compassion means to “suffer together with”. It involves entering into the suffering of another. There are classic Christian examples of compassion. Mary shared her son’s agony at the foot of the cross. The Good Samaritan provided the financial means and put himself at considerable physical risk to help the person who had been robbed. St Maximillian Kolbe substituted himself for a condemned father in Auschwitz and, as a result, was condemned to starvation himself, though he actually suffered death from the injection of carbolic acid into his veins.
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In the coverage of the passing of Pope Francis to eternal life, surprisingly little has been said about an important aspect of Pope Francis’s social teaching – fraternity. This was the theme of his second social encyclical, Fratelli tutti. It is an important theme because it links the pastoral, spiritual, theological and social teaching of the late pope. The title of Fratelli tutti in English is “Brothers All”, and it is subtitled “On Fraternity and Social Friendship”.
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I wonder how many of us know what our carbon footprint actually is? The average for those of us in the UK is around 6.0 tonnes of greenhouse gases (GHG) each year (Our World in Data) For comparison, it’s 6.76 tonnes globally and 17.7 tonnes in the US and 9.8 in China.
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In the first part I wrote about the situation of families that do have children. However, have you thought recently about how old the population looks when you go out onto the street? This is not just because people are living longer. Where are the prams, pushchairs and babies? Pope Francis has talked about how we are moving towards a “demographic winter”.
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The family is a much-neglected topic in political discourse – even amongst Christian members of parliament. And, even where politicians are supportive of the family, they do not seem to be able to express an over-arching narrative that ensures that the family forms the focus for political decision-making.
Read more >>On 4th October, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, Pope Francis published an apostolic exhortation, Laudate Deum (Praise God). This is a summary of that document.
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“the right of association is a natural right of the human being, which therefore precedes his or her incorporation into political society…” Centesimus annus, 7, emphasising Rerum novarum
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The band “The Strawbs”, perhaps most famous for “Now, I’m a Union Man”, was formed at St. Mary’s before it was a university (they were originally called “The Strawberry Hill Boys”). The lyrics of that song, don’t really accord with Catholic social teaching on unions (“I say what I think, that the company stinks”…”With a hell of a shout, it’s ‘Out brothers, out!’ And the rise of the factory’s fall”…“And I always get my way If I strike for higher pay”…), but it is a good song and forms an interesting preface to an article on Catholic social teaching and trade unions.
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