At this time in the Church’s life there is an increased concern for its mission among the poor, yet the needs of the poor in Western Europe still seem to be a very secondary issue for the Church there. When the question of ‘of the option for the poor’ is broached it is too often in the context of another part of the world. I believe that many factors, theological and sociological, have contributed to this—too many and too vast to analyse in a brief article. However, I think that two issues demand some attention before one can propose positive direction.

It is a well-known fact that the church in Latin America has been the strongest voice calling for an option for the poor. The now historic conference of bishops at Medellin in 1968, which formally called the church into the struggle for reasonable dignity for the people of Latin America, set a tone for all later deliberations. The theology of liberation has brought non-European theology at last into the centre of theological debate. Yet too many still think of this development as the product of the wretched poverty of a particular people.

In the industrial world, which has a large middle class, it is easy to dismiss this theological development as if the option for the poor were only the need of a particular local church. This however is not the case.

So concluded Fergus Kerr in an editorial comment published by New Blackfriars last year. His remark leads us to consider what form a British liberation theology might take, and what obstacles lie in the way of its progress.

The question of a British version of the theology of liberation has received some attention in recent years. Two important public lectures considered it, Charles Elliott’s Heslington Lecture of January 1985, and the more well-known Hibbert lecture given by the Anglican Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, in April of that year. David Jenkins’ lecture pointed out that the task would not be an easy one—certainly not a simple matter of translation from a third-world context to a first-world one:

As we shall see, there are some questions to be asked concerning Jenkins’ reluctance to envisage too close a parallel between a third-world and a first-world version of liberation theology.

At the Belfast Harpers’ Festival in 1792 the official observers found themselves unable to note down the tunes in the established musical forms. The complex scales fell outside the accepted tonic range. As one observer put it

White notes I found were wrong, so were the black

For you had pitched the song right in the crack.

That the peasant people’s music could be more subtle and sophisticated than the establishment could anticipate is itself a liberating sign of hope.

Faced with the question of whether it is possible to develop a ‘liberation theology’ from within the modern British context, Enoch Powell provides a useful point of metaphorical contact. He once suggested that ‘politicians have to give the people a tune to hum’. It does seem that there is a dominant political tune buzzing round Britain today. It has caught on and is commonly hummed in public. In the past those who have stressed the need for change have turned to the notion of ‘blueprints’—despite the fact that this kind of future plan is usually two-dimensional and static, and that sometimes the dreams of architects and planners present land and property proposals but block out the people in a kind of ‘neutron bomb’ model of development. But concentrating on the tune opens up a more dynamic metaphor of process. It is certainly not a question of static futuristic modelling. Neither conforming to the dominating set tune nor simply countering it, but creatively developing new music from ‘within the crack’, could provide a resilient model.

Let us not forget that the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head: that Jesus, the Father of the Poor, had less than the foxes with their holes; and always remember that Jesus worked among the lepers, the prostitutes, the sinners, the outcasts. Yes, Jesus caused scandal by his work among those marginalised by society.

Jesus too was called ‘the Nazarene’: ‘Jesus the provincial’; He could just as easily have been Jesus from Middlesbrough, or Jesus from Hull. If Jesus walked the face of the earth today, would He weep again over the city? Over Hull or Middlesbrough? How would He react to such contemporary problems as Aids, the apparent breakdown of family life, the scourge of unemployment, the plight of the homeless, and the tragedy of young drug addicts? Of one thing we can be sure, if he was to visit Hull, he would be on our outer estates of Bransholme, Orchard Park and North Hull—and he would react. But this, of course, begs the question.

Jesus is still with us; by his own promise he is with the Church, and in his own words he is in our fellow men and women. ‘Whenever you do it to the least of my brethren you do it to me.’

In 1971 a Joint Working Party was set up by the Bishops’ Conference, at the request of the National Conference of Priests, to study the question of a Pastoral Strategy for the Catholic Church in England and Wales. It was the result of much heart searching and uneasiness expressed by the priests of the Conference about their own service in the mission of the Church.

In The Church 2000 (the first paper issued by the Working Party) the question was asked: ‘What did Christ establish the Church to do?’ We then went on to ask ourselves what the Church in England and Wales should be doing in the years ahead. We tried to answer both in the light of Vatican II applied to our own situation.

In his inspiring and moving reflections on the church in Latin America Jon Sobrino can speak of that church as an identifiable and representative community; identifiable in the struggle against poverty and injustice, representative of many different sections of society:

In England there are obviously Catholics who are living an option for the poor, without necessarily appealing to the example of Latin America. During the last few years I have witnessed the commitment to the homeless at Mary and Joseph House in Central Manchester; kept in touch with efforts to improve race relations in Leicester; seen the diversification of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society’s work for the poor at the east end of Newcastle; and been drawn into what seems to be an unceasing quest on behalf of the third world by Justice and Peace groups in Nantwich and Surrey. But, despite such options for the poor in different parts of the country, I do not believe that the Roman Catholic Church as ‘an identifiable and representative community’ will take an option for England’s poor.