Freelance Report: Autumn 2024
On Friday 20 September I visited one of my favourite schools, Corpus Christi Catholic primary school in Bournemouth. It was a beautiful sunny autumn day when I arrived on the south coast for the Year 6 Social Justice conference, the second such conference organised by the school, which I’ve helped to facilitate. Groups of pupils and their teachers from 14 local primary schools gathered in the hall.
After a beautiful morning prayer led by the Corpus Christi Faith in Action group, Mr Simon Lennon, the Headteacher, set the scene by welcoming all the participants to Corpus Christi and reminding us that a good Christian education was about developing critical thinkers through the lens of the Gospel. The Catholic school is committed to the common good, the flourishing of all our brothers and sisters. We need to feel injustice as well as see it, in other words what moves us, what is our emotional reaction to what we see around us. The pupils are called to be agents of change, agents of Jesus in the building up of the Kingdom of God.
Then it was over to me. I set the scene with some memories from my own childhood in the east end of Greenock and my first awareness of injustice, that some children seemed to have what they needed for a decent life, but others did not. The definition of justice I shared with the pupils was adapted from paragraph 1807 of the Catechism: justice is being determined to give to our neighbour what they need for a truly human life.
This led to our first discussion in groups: what do you think we need to live a truly human life? The pupils engaged in lively conversation and were soon ready to offer their feedback. To begin with we heard about what you might call the basics: food, shelter, clothes, being safe. Then the list got even more interesting: being valued and loved, empathy, self-control. One boy said, “Equity” and then went on to give us a very helpful definition of what meant. Not that everybody gets the same, but that everybody gets the resources they need to flourish. You’ll see the full list in the photograph.
After we’d looked at the permanent principles of Catholic Social Teaching and their roots in the Gospel, we considered the See-Judge-Act method which the Church asks us to use to apply Catholic Social Teaching to the life of our communities. It was Pope John XXIII who taught that young people in particular should get to know this method:
“There are three stages which should normally be followed in the reduction of social principles into practice. First, one reviews the concrete situation; secondly, one forms a judgment on it in the light of these same principles; thirdly, one decides what in the circumstances can and should be done to implement these principles. These are the three stages that are usually expressed in the three terms: look, judge, act. It is important for our young people to grasp this method and to practice it. Knowledge acquired in this way does not remain merely abstract, but is seen as something that must be translated into action.” (1)
After my session with the pupils, they got back into school groups and began to work on their action plans for what they might do in their own communities to bring about justice. Every school had an opportunity to share their ideas, which ranged from inviting elderly people into the school, inviting them to teach the pupils; improving the local environment through litter-picking or re-cycling; building solidarity in the school by developing a buddy system to look after the younger ones; making contact with people seeking asylum who were living in a hotel near one of the schools.
Since the conference, we were delighted to hear that Corpus Christi is the first school in England to be awarded the Innovator Level of the Oscar Romero Award. This is such a well-deserved recognition for this Gospel-Inspired school.
For more information about the Oscar Romero Award, please vsit:
https://www.romeroaward.co.uk/about-us
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(1) Pope John XXIII, Mater et Magistra (1961), 236-237