Synodality has turned old ideas upside down. If the Church is to find its pathway into the future, we will all have to be involved. We must learn to respect and trust each other, share openly, listen carefully and discern where the Holy Spirit is leading us.
The Galilee where Jesus met the disciples after the Resurrection was an outpost. Today’s Galilee will be places and people on the margins, and the mission always includes building community. The key is always that we start where we are. We look around and we reach out.
GET STARTED
How do I find my mission? For a start, what are my gifts? What is my passion? Then the two things can be put together. Are there other people who will work with me?
I discovered I could write compelling letters. In 1994 I became aware of the abuse, neglect and exploitation of residents of licensed boarding houses for people with disabilities. In 1995 four advocates formed the Coalition for Appropriate Supported Accommodation (CASA) and designed a letterhead.
I took on the role of convenor and started writing on its behalf. In October 1998, the NSW state government announced a $66.23 million Boarding House Reform Program. Eventually, 500 of the 2175 people in such facilities had been relocated to 24-hour care in non-government-run and state-funded group homes. Those remaining in boarding houses received personal care, programs to link them to the community and develop their skills, and dental, podiatry and optical care. A total of $58 million in funding enabled these programs to continue until the NDIS was rolled out in 2018.
KEEP GOING
Continued letter writing over 17 years and membership of a Boarding House Expert Advisory Group led to new legislation – the Boarding Houses Act 2012 (NSW). This finally gave legal protection to residents. People with disabilities living in assisted boarding houses in NSW can now be protected from abuse, neglect and exploitation. There is constant monitoring. They can feel safe and have quality of life.
Shay Cullen SSCME could have led a quiet life. He grew up in Glasthule, a suburb of Dublin, Ireland. He joined the Society of St Columban in 1962 and was assigned to Olongapo city in the Philippines in 1969, notable for its US naval base.
In 1974 he founded PREDA: People’s Recovery, Empowerment and Development Assistance in Olongapo. Its main goal is to promote and protect the dignity and human rights of the Filipino people, especially women and children.
His campaign against the sex tourist industry is legendary. He went into bars and rescued children, often at great personal risk. In 1983, he went public against a city-wide child sexual abuse practice selling children for sex to US navy men. He opened a residential home for abused and trafficked girls and another for boys at risk.
PURSUED JUSTICE
He pursued justice for abused children. Victims won convictions of local and foreign child traffickers and sexual abusers. The conviction rate is now 20 a year. In the rehabilitation houses, he pioneered Emotional Release Therapy to treat the pain of childhood abuse and empower the young people.
Shay has campaigned in many countries for extraterritorial jurisdiction laws that bring travelling child abusers to justice in their own countries. In Australia, the Passport Legislation Amendment (Overseas Travel by Child Sex Offenders Bill 2017) prevents 20,000 convicted pedophiles from leaving Australia and engaging in child sex tourism. Then Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop promoted this legislation.
More than 2000 children have been rescued, healed and given a new life through the work of the PREDA. In 1976, Shay began Preda Fair Trade to help indigenous people. He developed an export business for baskets and later for dried mangoes and mango puree that pays fair prices to 620 farmers. This helps reduce poverty and provides an alternative to human trafficking of children of tenant farmers. Shay has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times.
I enjoyed working with Shay in English-speaking groups at two Vatican conferences, in Bangkok in 2010 and Rome in 2015. The conferences focused on homelessness, forced prostitution and human trafficking. At the end of the 2015 conference, our 42 delegates had an audience with Pope Francis, meeting him individually. Shay showed his photos to some diplomats in Rome who had been trying for a long time to get an audience. Asked how he did it, Shay laughed, ‘He asked to see me!’
PARTICULAR CALLING
Recently, I had been using First Belong to God: On Retreat with Pope Francis by Austen Ivereigh for prayer. Towards the end, there were some points that kept drawing me back. Pope Francis had said: ‘If the people of God have a particular calling at this time, it is to do what Jesus did: he came to strengthen and deepen the bonds of belonging – of the people to God and to each other.’
‘Our proclamation begins today, there where we live. And it does not begin by trying to convince others, but by bearing witness every day to the beauty of the Love that looked upon us and lifted us up. The Church grows . . . by attraction.
‘What allows us to do this is the Spirit; the Spirit shows us how and gives us the means.’
Ivereigh describes Pope Francis’ nine-hour flight to Mongolia to meet with the country’s Catholics, barely 1400 of them and 200 more who had come from China.
He suggests we imagine Francis saying to us, ‘God loves littleness and through it loves to accomplish great things, as Mary herself bears witness. Do not be concerned about small numbers, limited success or apparent irrelevance. This is not how God works. Let us keep our gaze fixed on Mary, who in her littleness is greater than the heavens, for within her she bore the One whom the heavens and the highest heavens cannot contain.’
