Welcome to the new holy land. (Yeah, it's frigging TOXTETH)
Ed Vulliamy
Sunday December 17, 2006
The Observer
They come to Britain in their hundreds of thousands, the poor of Africa, Asia, South America and eastern Europe, all seeking refuge, asylum or just a better life. And for many, the first port of call is the Catholic Church. Together they form a diverse new flock that is revitalising - and reinventing - the faith
... (for the full article
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1973527,00.html)
If the Good Book is true, and the driving character of its New Testament did indeed come again, looking for signs that his word was alive in this country, I would recommend a visit to the traditional capital of British Catholicism, Liverpool. Not that the original reasons for that title are really there any more: many of the original Irish parish churches that made Merseyside the Naples of the North have closed. Even the lovely 19th- century Polish church has, in the spirit of my mother's native city nowadays, been converted into a snazzy bistro. But other things are happening. Attendance at the glorious modern lantern of a cathedral has doubled due to Filipino and Indian migration. Then there is the singular flock of Fr Peter Morgan.
Liverpool, along with Croydon, is where people register for political asylum in Britain. An intimate Mass on Thursday morning in a little room at the back of Fr Peter's church of Our Lady of Lourdes and St Bernard in rundown Toxteth is also attended by people the priest has invited to stay in his home. These include Martin, a man with a haunted expression who is seeking asylum after torture in Congo; and the wife and child of another torture victim recently deported to Togo (where he was promptly rearrested). This brief, private ceremony does, somehow and perhaps absurdly, recall days when Fr Peter would have been burned at the stake for performing it. His day with the outcast and untouchable, the asylum seekers, has only just begun.
Adjacent to Fr Peter's other parish, St Anne's, Edge Hill, is a large church property which he has given over for use by the Merseyside Asylum Link. It is populated by what must be the most traumatised collective memory within any building in Britain: those in flight and in terror of returning whence they came. And although he has regular communicants, native to the city, it is these people who have become Fr Peter's flock, which he, a clutch of lawyers and staff at St Anne's fight to protect from the nightmares awaiting them back home. Others are referred to Fr Peter as a result of his chaplaincy to Liverpool Women's Hospital and by a women's centre, Blackburne House.
They are people like the woman for whom a Scouse taxi driver called Neil, parking his cab to attend that little Mass, had requested special prayers: Charlie Happi Koameko, one of several mass rape victims from Africa to whom Fr Peter has been summoned. Ms Koameko was ordered to become the 18th wife of a tribal chief in Cameroon and refused. Her punishment was 17 months of incarceration, serial mass rape, whipping and cutting with chilli rubbed into the wounds. She arrived in Liverpool traumatised and pregnant by one of her rapists, only coming round when one of Fr Peter's communicants placed a French Bible beside her hospital bed.
'As she recovered and gave birth,' says Fr Peter, 'she kept her faith and was regularly at Mass. But her application for asylum was rejected and Ms Koameko was taken to Yarlswood detention centre in Berkshire for deportation last week. At the last minute a solicitor, Pete Simm, located an arrest warrant awaiting Ms Koameko on her return. New evidence obliges the Home Office to rule again, but, an hour before her flight, Ms Koameko knew nothing about this development until Fr Peter reached her at the airport by phone. On Thursday she was granted bail and returned to limbo in Toxteth. Fr Peter says: 'When four men and two women came to detain her, they watched as Charlie removed her nightgown and dressed. After that degradation, for 20 hours before her planned deportation flight, her baby had neither milk nor food. It is people like that mother and child who have become my calling.'
'Charlie was my best student,' says Fr Eamon Doyle, a Christian Brother and retired teacher from Dublin, who tutors those sheltered in English. 'Our inclination is to believe them, while the government's is the opposite,' he says. 'Not that we're so naive. I was woken at 12.30 one night and asked to help because one of my people had been arrested driving without a licence or insurance. "No", I said.'
His pupils gather round him and Fr Peter, their lives in the balance. Ali was an opposition activist in Iran, recently baptised into Fr Peter's church, terrified to return. Rebwar Zabari is also from Iran, partially paralysed after torture. Warda Dared lives in Fr Peter's house: an Iraqi Christian who fled after her husband was incarcerated by Saddam Hussein. She won her appeal to stay but faces a Home Office appeal against that victory, insisting that now her country has been 'liberated' it is safe to return.
'In 2003,' says Ewan Roberts, who runs the centre, 'there were 100,000 asylum applications, plus some 30,000 dependants, with 50 per cent granted status. Now there are 30,000 applications, plus some 6,000 dependants, with only 25 per cent granted leave to remain. Has the world really become twice as safe for these people?'
'It's been heartbreaking,' says Fr Peter, 'but an extraordinary experience which has made me a more committed person than I was five years ago. There is this shattering certainty: where else are we to find Jesus if not with the outcast and oppressed? He was, after all, the first asylum seeker. It began to feel different when I opened my home to share it, in close proximity with these people, every day.'
Fr Peter's initial mentor in Liverpool was a man ordained into the Catholic Passionist congregation, better known than any community leader in Toxteth and held in awe even by the rioters of 1981, with whom he entreated while Princes Avenue burned. Fr Austin Smith, from this city and assigned by Rome to work here in 1968, is elderly now and, surrounded by books on Wittgenstein and Marxism, gathers his thoughts carefully with the help of a strong cigar. What he says puts all I have heard in the context of the institution of the church, with its awesome history and formidable durability, hierarchy and power. And comes so much more cogently from an ordained Catholic than it would from an aetheist or agnostic.
'Oh, you can be as radical as you want, so long as it's all under control.' Under whose control, the Catholic or secular hierarchy? 'Well, both really. Yes, secular people can pat Fr Peter on the head, say he's wonderful then send those poor people back! But I was thinking mainly of the church. They can praise what Fr Peter does, so long as it doesn't become too central, doesn't challenge too far, or get out of control. With the likes of asylum seekers, we're asking probing questions about poverty and justice. Same with Iraq and nuclear weapons - you can say it, but don't make it too central. It was the same with St Francis of Assisi - if it sounds like trouble, incorporate it,' he says.
'I've always thought of Catholicism as a movement. But it is also an institution, which still has this terrible fear of facing up to the signs of the times and cannot face that uneasiness, that undercurrent. It addresses these issues in theological terms but has never really taken in the discomfort which is the essence of Christianity as a movement.'
Reflecting on four decades in Toxteth, and recalling a recent exchange, Fr Austin says: 'You know, the inner city has changed my idea of God. I saw some boys I knew, smoking drugs, crack I think, behind Kwik Save . I said to them: "Lads, why don't you just cut it out!"
'"What do you mean?" they replied.
'"Look," I said, "let's just change this place, shall we?"'