CAFOD Director Chris Bain visited our Diocese in September when he gave the keynote address at our annual Supporter’s Day which was held under sunny skies at the Endsleigh Centre in Hull.

Chris began by sharing some of his experiences of meeting different people around the world. Like that of Rukmani, who was one of the survivors of the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 Chris said,

‘I met her whilst visiting Sri Lanka with Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. What she told the Cardinal and me was chilling. She was sitting in her home when she heard people shouting in panic before a huge wave washed her house and the whole village into a land-locked lagoon. The family were separated in the confusion and she was washed up on the lagoon shore. Rukmani lost her new baby and her father. We stood with her as, in tears, she pointed to the wreckage and rubble that was her village. Only the church survived and was shelter to all in the following days.

‘Cardinal Cormac and I met Rukmani in her temporary wooden home, basic but dry, built by CAFOD’s partners. Her village has new boats, shops, wells, and a bakery and there are plans for a school. At every stage she has been consulted about the design of her new brick home which she now lives in ‘ again funded by CAFOD. From despair, she and her family can dare to hope.

‘In Darfur, in the west of Sudan, CAFOD is the lead member of Caritas – the worldwide network of Catholic aid agencies. Together with the Protestant network, we are providing support to over 400,000 people in Darfur, displaced by the fighting and murderous attacks by Arab militia. You, the Catholic community in Wales and England, raised over £3m for this work.

‘I met a woman called Fatima who told me the story of her and her four children. Her village was raided by armed militia who wanted to drive her tribe from their land. Her husband was killed, and she was forced to flee to a refugee camp near a small town called Kubum, 40 miles away. Her family had nothing and for months they lived on the generosity of local townspeople.

‘When our humanitarian workers first arrived the situation was desperate, hundreds of children had died of diarrhoea and malnutrition and people were starving. The UN provided plastic sheets and flour and asked Caritas to provide water wells, sanitation, health care and special nutritional food for the children. A few months later when I visited, Fatima was still missing her home and grieving her husband but hugely grateful to Caritas and CAFOD, and her children are looking healthy again.

‘In Ethiopia, I met another woman and her family. They had a small plot of land but absolutely nothing else ‘ no school, no clinic, and for six months of the year, she had to live on food aid from the Government. To pay for medicine for her daughter, she had to sell her livestock; she does not even have a lamp since hers broke.

‘Her name is Amane and she is one of 28 million people in Ethiopia who live on less than 25 pence a day. I have never witnessed such depth and breadth of poverty in all my travels as I did in her village. And yet now hers is one of 6,000 households benefiting from an irrigation, seeds and livestock scheme set up by the local Catholic Diocese and funded by CAFOD. Irrigation means she has food all year around, and the little cash she has will enable her youngest to go to school, medicines when needed, some goats and chickens, and of course a new lamp. Amane is delighted.

‘Maria has three young children and is from El Salvador. She was given HIV by her womanising husband. Her family threw them out, her boss sacked her, and her husband left her. She was pregnant at the time and her new baby had HIV, too. They lived in a most appalling shanty town and begged for a living before being befriended by the Maryknoll sisters. The Maryknoll’s provided anti retroviral drugs, food and school fees and found them a basic clean home. Maria is proud not to have succumbed to the temptation of prostitution, often the only way for young women in the shanties to earn a living, but is immensely grateful that her ten year old daughter, with education, may never need to be tempted.

‘Finally, Josephine is from Madi in Northern Uganda. When she was 10, a civil war broke out between a vicious group called the LRA and the government. That was 20 years ago, and for the past 15 years she has, for safety, lived in a camp away from her home. That’s where her six children were born and the six nieces and nephews she also looks after because their parents were killed. Another nephew and a niece have been abducted by the LRA and they don’t know whether they are alive or dead. But for over a year now, there has been a fragile peace and the Archdiocese, through its agency Caritas Gulu, has an innovative programme, funded by CAFOD, helping 6,000 families reclaim their land, often many miles away, and farm it efficiently providing technical support and seeds. Already the results are amazing. After a year, Josephine showed me her bank book with the savings she has managed. It was only about a pound but for someone who’s lived off UN food aid most of her life, it was a statement of dignity not just wealth.

‘I spent some time on these stories because they are the living evidence that together, through CAFOD’s programmes with some of the poorest and disadvantaged people, we are making a difference. They are nearly always stories of lives transformed or in the process of being transformed. They show love and solidarity in practice. Amane, Fatima, Rukmani, Maria, are part of the one-fifth of humanity that live in extreme poverty. They represent people of all faiths and none. And they’re all being helped and supported by parts of the Catholic Church ‘ dioceses, religious orders, lay organisations. And I could have told many more personal stories: the mother and child clinics run by the Daughters of Charity in Tigray, the Carmelite’s work with street kids in Manila, the literacy work with street kids in Tegucigalpa, the excellent primary health care programme in northern Nigeria, and so on, all supported by CAFOD.

‘In fact, it is estimated that more than half of sub-Saharan Africa’s health, education and social services are provided by the Catholic Church and nearly a third of all care to those with HIV and Aids worldwide. And it is people of the church, all over the world, that are often in the forefront of working for justice for the poorest people, and working for peace.

‘In Zimbabwe, the Bishops’ Conference was one of the foremost voices in the country challenging the brutal excesses of the regime in power and defending the powerless. Sr Dorothy Stang, a CAFOD partner who worked in the Amazon for many years, was silenced three years ago by an assassin’s bullet because she stood up to greedy ranchers who were stealing land from indigenous people.

‘In Eastern Congo, I met priests and lay people working for their diocesan Justice and Peace commissions who were daily in fear of their lives because they were working for peace in a conflict ridden land. When I met the local Archbishop and told him I had met priests and lay people who were daily in fear of their lives, he said he understood their fear: two of his recent predecessors had been assassinated. This is love and solidarity in action, transforming lives, making a difference, and all this work has been supported by you through CAFOD.‘

Chris went on to draw the links between CAFOD’s work and Catholic Social Teaching saying, ‘CAFOD’s basis for its work has its roots in CST which reinforces the integrity and sanctity of every life, at what ever stage of development, of whatever social class, or gender, or race, or religion. Within our Catholic tradition, individual people matter because God loves each of us and knows us by name. In return, through free will He asks that we love Him.

Fr Tim Radcliffe in his lovely book, ‘What is the point of being Christian?’, concludes that, when all is said and done, the point of being a Christian is to love God. Catholic social teaching goes further than the individual. Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, Populorum Progressio, explained that love of self has to be balanced by love of neighbour. If it is only about us as individuals, about individual human rights, ‘us’ as the ‘be all and end all’ then the danger is we can become self absorbed and selfish. We must all work for the good of all humanity. As the parable of the Good Samaritan showed us, neighbours are not just in the next room or next door – but in the next town, the next country, there are strangers living thousands of miles away in our ever shrinking global village. Indeed, they could be our enemies. The parable of the Good Samaritan is not just about charitable giving ‘it’s about solidarity’ in short, anybody who needs us and whom we can help is our neighbour.’