@2025HereICome
I wonder if Ireland will see a change after the Celtic Tiger days of (seemingly) plenty. The new generation may well find that community groups who, at their core, are CC affiliated will fill gaps where the money doesn’t quite extend especially as new levels of migration take place.
i grew up in London of immigrant parents and the scenario I laid out before would be typical of what I experienced. We could use resources as traditionally we had good access to things ( libraries, free transport, etc) so we could close gaps ourselves and make our way through the education/ employment minefields. Obviously it’s not without its issues and there is an issue of feeling slightly different to wider society but I think in London today, it has flipped the other way. The next generation come in (both domestic and international) and bring their ideas with them and some have a more literal take on things than past generations. I’m also not seeing the same integration with groups like the brownies and girl guides that I had that kept us linked in to wider British societies.
What I saw when I last visited Church with elderly relatives is packed churches and families lining up to get into Catholic schools. I don’t know if they are all believers or not. I’ve also seen a noticeable rise in African evangelical churches and other non African evangelical churches that I don’t quite know where they come from. There is a noticeable increase in other communities and whilst I don’t know too much about the number of mosques in any area, I imagine they must be increasing in number inline with the population of practicing Muslims ( there is a large, established Turkish community near me).
This is why it seems so extraordinary to me when I hear voices saying we don’t need religion and religious groups - well, no some areas don’t. They are well resourced, stable and affluent with money circulating and enough people to manage the environment ( social and economic) so that things don’t dip too much in any given direction but that is because other areas have an overspill and resources are completely overstretched.
I’ve just had major surgery in a London hospital. All but two of my nurses were black Africans (Nigerian and Ghanaian I think) - not born here but migrants. Amazing nurses who were fantastic but how they did their job I do not know ( and I come from a family of Irish nurses) - they must have been shattered after each shift. I can’t definitively say they were all practising Christians but the ones I spoke to were. They are the women I see in Church - quietly just keeping everything together whilst sending money back home so their siblings can buy books for school in exactly the same way my parents did.
There are millions of people like that in London but we don’t hear their voices but I think they would laugh at our naivety. These are people who have left wars, extreme poverty and civil tension. For many of them, they say the Church was the only body that acknowledged them - gave them an education, a route out, gave them value in a society that didn’t value them. This is what they tell me and they don’t disregard the criticisms of the Church - they are acutely aware of the problems. It’s just that they have had to weigh up the realities of their options and for them, the Church has been a preferable option. What does that say? We have the luxury of thinking in simple terms but only because others in our society have to deal with the complexities. My surgeons were all Middle Eastern/Indian (I’m guessing by surnames). I received amazing care, truly fantastic care from them. At what cost to themselves did they prioritise my care?
I just think we are being so blinkered when we focus just on historical CC abuses when stuff is happening now - it is not beyond our abilities to consider both the past and the present yet we are being led into this polarised thinking by, imv, the media that says ‘everyone look this way’ when always, always ( if history teaches us anything), the real news is happening somewhere else.