(as long as they keep quiet and don't complain)

I note, with some curiosity, that the Diocese of Middlesbrough is recruiting for a 'Celebrating Family' Project Worker.

The Diocese of Middlesbrough wishes to appoint a 'Celebrating Family' Project Worker to promote awareness of the marriage and Family Life initiative 'Celebrating Family' throught the Diocese, and to facilitate workshops with parishes and groups based upon 'Everybody's Welcome' and 'home is a Holy Place'.

The post is part-time, 21 hours per week, subject to a 3-year contract. Some evening and weekend work required. Essential car user allowance.

£23,330 pro rata per annum, actual salary £14,000.

Closing date: 1st September 2008

Most readers of this blog won't have heard of 'Listening 2004' or the subsequent 'Celebrating Family' initiative which is a real shame. Many of our bishops live in little bubbles (I think our Bishop is a happy exception to this rule), if the small group of priests you trust to help you lead the diocese tell you that young people want discos and football, you're going to believe them. Listening 2004 was a real opportunity to break through that bubble and let the Bishops know how things really are.

Listening 2004

It started with a survey. There are two kinds of survey questions, quantitative and qualitative. A quantitative question is one that goes "Do you believe in God? Yes/No/Maybe" and at the end we can state quantities like "30% of Catholics said they believe in God". Combine it with other questions like "How old are you?" and we can put together interesting graphs showing what percentages of people believe in God by age. Quantitative survey questions are, naturally, favoured by scientific types such as my self because they are the best. You know this, of course, because they told you in GCSE maths.

A qualitative question on the other hand, is one that goes like this: "What do you think the Church can do to help families?". Get a few thousand people to answer that and you get a few thousand answers. It's real hard to figure out which answers are the most popular and impossible to figure out which answers are most popular with which kind of people. Qualitative survey questions are crap. So. Have a guess what kind of questions the Listening 2004 survey mostly contained...

The survey didn't stand alone though. The main event of Listening 2004 in our diocese at least was an open forum in York. On September 11th 2004 nearly 100 people gathered for what turned out to be a "lively and free-flowing conversation". Peter and Gwen O'Reilly gave a great presentation about the experience of familes in parish life. Sadly, the Church is turned upside down regarding families at the moment, the dominant community in most parishes is retired old people with no children. Families are often talked about like people walking in to a shop, as if the parish is a service that families make use of. If we view families in that way then we do ourselves and the wider church a great disservice. "The Christian family constitutes a specific revelation and realization of ecclesial communion, and for this reason it can and should be called a domestic church. It is a community of faith, hope, and charity; it assumes singular importance in the Church, as is evident in the New Testament.". We should be inviting families to fulfill their role as the basic building blocks of the Church, not trying to find ways to 'welcome' them... 'welcome' is often a code word for 'find ways for them to come to mass without getting in our way'.

Part two of the Listening 2004 meeting was a discussion about young people. Fr John Paul Leonard the Diocesan Youth Officer had prepared a presentation about what young people want but pleasantly suprised to find a couple of young people had actually turned up in person he invited them to present their thoughts for themselves. That's a bit frightening that, turning up to a meeting of nearly 100 people and then being asked if you would like to give a presentation about what young people want with about five minutes notice...

The second stage of the conversation turned to the question of young people in the parish. This was animated by Ella Haswell and James Preece from Holy Cross Parish, Cottingham, who spoke of their own experience and that of other young people in their local church. They mentioned the gap between confirmation and marriage when very little seemed to exist for young people. When it was provided they often felt it was more of an effort to entertain, to attract and retain the young, rather than to simply help them face the real challenges of living lives fully integrated with faith in God. As young people in church they sometimes had a sense of almost being a curiosity. They suggested that adults were possibly afraid to present young people with the full facts of the Catholic faith in case it was rejected.

You can read the full report of what happened here. It was at that meeting that we met Fr Massie and Fr John Paul Leonard for the first time. After meetings had been held in diocese across the country the results of the surveys and meetings were collated in to one big report which was published in 2005 under the title Not Easy But Full of Meaning. A big dose of respect to the unsung heroes that put that report together (Elizabeth Davies in particular comes to mind), it must have been an arduous task going through a few thousand qualitative survey answers and coming up with something meaningful.

You can read the finished report here. It's 93 pages long, so you probably don't have time to read it all, but it paints a vivid picture of the Catholic Church in England. It's half full of people saying infuriatingly short sighted things, but then so is the Church. It's also got a lot of good. Our contribution is on page 44...

In Middlesbrough two young adults addressed the diocesan gathering. These young people were university age and very involved in parish life; one of them was a catechist working with confirmation groups. They expressed a sense of frustration that the church sometimes tried too hard to engage young people and to be 'cool'. They preferred that the church be a place of teaching and learning, where the difficult moral questions they faced could be answered. There was too much segregation of young people from the rest of the congregation and too much of a gap between confirmation and adulthood.

But the response of teenagers in Shrewsbury diocese seemed to echo the experiences of their parents. A large number said they didn't go to church, that it was boring and they didn't know why they had to go to Mass in order to believe in God:
"It's a waste of time; I could be doing more useful things."

Somebody else from Middlesbrough (not us) said on page 76... "If nothing comes back from all this then it will harm the Church, though we know that to some extent we have to do our part."

You can't hold an event like Listening 2004 and then ignore it. That would be Not Listening 2004. If two young people stand up and say there is too much segregation of young people from the rest of the congregation then don't be surprised if they are a tad upset two years later when you pitch up in Hull and announce that "Youth" means people up to age thirty (that's a fair gap between confirmation and adulthood) and you are going to organise some events for them to meet, um, segregated from the rest of the congregation.

Fortunately on a national level things were different. The Bishops Conference took action to put the findings of Listening 2004 in to practice with the 'Celebrating Family' initiative.

Celebrating Family

'Celebrating Family' was set up to run in three parts over three years.

This leads to two interesting questions...

Firstly, given that 'Celebrating Family' consists of 'Everybody's Welcome', 'Home is a Holy Place' and 'Passing on the Faith'. Why is the Middlesbrough Diocese project worker only going to facilitate workshops with parishes and groups based upon 'Everybody's Welcome' and 'home is a Holy Place'. Why not Passing on the Faith?

Secondly, the project was from 2006 to 2008 meaning it is practically over. Why is the diocese recruiting for a project worker on a project that has nearly finished? The closing date for applications is September 2008. That gives them three months at best. Also, why is it subject to a 3-year contract? It's going to seem a bit absurd to have a project worker in September 2011 for a project that ended in 2008.

We attended the 'Everybody's Welcome' conference in 2006. It cost a lot of money to get to it (a few hundred pounds for the weekend) and we were only able to do it because of generous financial assistance from three priests in Hull. Sadly, one of those priests would later use the fact that they paid towards us getting to the conference to pressure us in to speaking during a homily even though we felt it was wrong. Frankly, that sort of thing really hacks me off. When the 'Home is a Holy Place' conference rolled around in 2007 we simply couldn't afford to go and we didn't feel we could justify asking the parish to cover the cost. These conferences are good, but they arn't that good. So, like the housing market, we're priced out. If the Church is genuinely interested in including young families it needs to hold these conferences on the cheap and not in posh conference centres.

Beyond Parody

Listening 2004 was set up so that laypeople could express their needs and clergy could listen (hence the name). Often, if somebody is listening, they do something. For instance, if I am listening to my baby crying, I go and feed her. What I don't do is hear that she is crying, listen to her crying, and then employ somebody to do a workshop with her in which they explain to her what I heard when she was crying.

We've have had several years now of 'listening' and 'projects'. It is done. It has all recorded and documented and bundled together in to hundreds of pages of booklets and leaflets. It is ludicrous to have a project in which you listen to laypeople followed by three years of projects in which you listen to laypeople and then employ a layperson to do workshops with laypeople to explain what the laypeople said. The laypeople know what they said.

When somebody talks, if you are listening, you respond. That's how it works, it's called a "conversation". The laypeople have said their piece, what happens next is that Church responds. Or not.

There are only really three possible responses...

Change - They say something like "that's a good point" and they act on it. They do things differently. For instance, if it is pointed out to you that young people feel there is too much segregation between young people and the wider Church they don't call thirty year olds youth and organise separate events for them.

Explain - If they can't change (people are asking for women priests) or there are multiple contradicting requests (some people want funky music, some people don't) then they explain their reasons. They explain why they are doing whatever they are doing. The laity provided 93 pages of information in 'Not Easy but Full of Meaning'. The clergy could respect that contribution by putting together a response document explaining what they plan to change, what they don't and why. An explanation is the least we deserve.

Ignore - There's always the option where they don't change and they don't explain why. They just tell people to have more trust in their parish priest. Who do these lay people think they are anyway? Screw 'em.

So what's the plan?

In our diocese? My guess is Ignore. I highly doubt the Bishop or anybody in the curial office is going to respond to this project in any meaningful way. They will employ the project worker and instead of causing actual recognisable change, the project worker will run workshops with laypeople and assure them that the Church is "listening". The 'Celebrating Family' project box will be ticked, if anybody asks they will say "look, we have a project worker..." and the poor project worker who wants to hold on to their job will say "everything is wonderful".

Personally, I'm a bit peeved by the whole thing. We went to the listening day, attended the conference, subscribed to the newsletter. We also took part in the consultation process before the diocese employed an Adult Formation Advisor (which involved trips to York as well as meetings in Hull), went to several meetings about the "Pastoral Plan" and have written letters to the Department for Adult Formation and the Youth Department (including a seven page document to the Youth Department to which we received no response).

We're a young family doing the best we can to follow the teachings of the Catholic Church. We're not malicious and we haven't set out to cause problems. We just want the Church to do what they said they would and what the documents of the Church say they should. This is the equivalent of walking in to McDonald's and asking for a burger. We're not being unreasonable.