THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

Are people happiest when left to their own devices?  A survey recently carried out on a new housing development, of a rather soulless kind and without notable community activity, revealed that people were happy precisely because there was not much ‘community’.

The place in question is called New Earswick, which is a northern suburb of York, and it is run by a housing association on a mixed owner-occupier/rental basis.   It has a village hall, but 77% of the residents never join in activities there; there are village council meetings, but only 9% of residents attend.  88% of residents said that they did not wish to be ‘more active’ in the community than they already were.  Yet no fewer than 87% of residents said they thought New Earswick was a good place to live.  And in case one feels this is just a middle-class oasis where the people are spared the troubles of the real world, in New Earswick unemployment is high and there are complaints about young tearaways causing trouble.  But crime is lower because the estates are better managed than elsewhere – managed, that is, by the small percentage of residents who really like doing that sort of thing and in this case do it rather well.

This is interesting for the light which it casts on our churches.  “Day after day we are being bombarded in our churches with the word ‘community’,” a parishioner said to me.  One knows what they mean.  Maybe we try too hard.  We advertise umpteen diocesan and local events which very few parishioners attend.  Most of our parish ‘works’ are carried out – rather well, be it said – by only a small number of parishioners.  Some worshippers have said – with due respect to our welcomers – that they actually prefer to be able to slip quietly into a pew and get on with their praying.  Are they being loners, or what?  Or is it that they have so much of noisy community elsewhere they want something else when they meet Jesus at Mass?

Nor must we overlook the cohesive effect of our actual worship (or the opposite).  It is possible to celebrate Mass together with a gathering which is gregarious in a conventional sense but isolationist in a liturgical sense, and vice versa.  It could be off-putting for visitors if we were strongly united in worship but not very obviously welcoming in an outward way.

No final conclusions to draw here, but maybe just an awareness that the issue is more subtle than we may sometimes make it.  One thing is clear: constant use of the c-word does not, in itself, make a community, religious or otherwise.

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A little more on the mystery of Alan Clark, referred to last week.  Was he a Catholic or not?  As a famous magazine says:  We think we should be told.  He apparently received anointing from both a Catholic and an Anglican priest (not simultaneously) and his funeral rites were of the Church of England.  Father Michael Seed maintains he had received him into the Church, but his widow says Father Seed was just getting over-excited.  At the same time, a bewildered newspaper reported that there was allegedly a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary during Cardinal Hume’s funeral in Westminster Abbey.  This is getting very confusing.