Monday, August 17, 2009

St Mary Magdalen's Featured in Catholic Herald

Malcolm Gregory: Homeless, suffering paranoid schizophrenia and begging to survive

"I know homeless people who've taken a beating. Sometimes it's from other homeless people and sometimes it's from people just on their way home. It's scandalous that poverty is seen as something only in developing nations; it's true, Africa does have problems, but there's a lot of poverty here in Britain."

The Catholic Herald report this week on St Mary Magdalen's Church, Brighton and poverty.

I had thought that this quote at the beginning of the Catholic Herald article on poverty and the Catholic Faith was a bit over the top. Then after I read it, I walked out and met a man called William who used to beg outside the Council Offices where I had worked a year ago. He had a week ago been beaten severely by two men in George Street, Hove, suffering profuse bleeding above his eye and two broken ribs. His crime? Begging. It is notable that nearly every police force in the country has special classification for homophobic or transphobic attacks but not for attacks on defenseless beggars. What should it be called? Homelessphobia? Local authorities are quick to leap to the defense of some, but not, it seems, others.

Anyway, St Mary Magdalen's Church is featured in the Catholic Herald this week. To read the article click here. Ed West came down to Brighton to interview me having heard I had been living the dream in a Fiat Panda for a month while blogging. Long before the interview I explained to him that I was no poor man, that I had commitments in Brighton and that it was more convenient to do that than keep driving back and forth from Brighton to my parents down the coast every day. I am sure Lady Poverty thinks I am a terrible flirt. God knows, I'm not brave enough to renounce the World and live as St Francis chose to live, and, more importantly perhaps, how Malcolm Gregory is forced to live.

An hour prior to the interview I asked God that I may find someone living in poverty who could share their experiences of real poverty with the Catholic Herald. Half an hour later, walking five minutes outside of the Church I found Malcolm walking out of the First Base Day Centre. He asked me for the time and I told him. I walked with him a while and asked him whether he was homeless. He answered that he was. I asked him if he wanted to be interviewed by the Herald on his experiences of homelessness and he replied that while wasn't religious, he would love to share his experiences with a journalist. So, the Lord provided me with someone experiencing the very real and quite brutal effects of poverty, so that his story may be shared with the Catholic world. Thanks be to God, otherwise it would have been an interview with someone who has no experience of real poverty.

Real poverty, I explained to Ed, during the interview, is not all about money, it is about stigma. Malcolm's situation, of being homeless, of living in a squat, of having to beg following a shortfall in his benefits, of suffering with paranoid schizophrenia, of not having money to have a shower and of therefore smelling not that nice, of owning only the clothes in which he stands, of being misunderstood by the authorities, of being beaten by yobs on a Saturday night because they need to take their frustrations out on someone, of being arrested for begging by the Police and spending a night every month in a cell for the crime of begging to survive, is not a singular story but a widespread circumstance in which many men and indeed women find themselves all across the country. Yet, their voices and their stories are seldom heard.

The stigma attached to being homeless, of being an outcast and of being considered worthless, of begging to survive and being viewed as someone who is 'intimidating' by society is what grinds men and women down to the dust. When men and women are considered no longer human by society then they lose their sense of dignity, something which God has given each of us, no matter what situation we may find ourselves. That is why it is important that men such as Malcolm are heard. It is important that society learns from the poorest, the most defenseless, the most vulnerable, the outcasts, because the very poor have something to say and something valuable to tell us about what kind of a society we are. Are we a society that really include everyone, or are we a society which views the outcast as a great threat. 

I reflected recently that St Francis of Assisi, the man who exchanged clothes with a beggar and took his place, a man who was the son of a wealthy merchant, who traded places with the beggar and started to beg for alms in order to know the poverty of spirit of his Lord and Master, would doubtless, today, be sectioned under the Mental Health Act, for having made himself intentionally homeless and for being a 'danger to himself and to others'. Yet here, in Malcolm, stood a man who, even though he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, even though he is getting food from the skips outside the Co-Op, even though he is destitute, has not been given shelter by the local authority or given residential care by social services, but is left alone to beg, to wander the streets and to be arrested for trying to survive, yet little state help comes his way.

Malcolm is doing remarkably well, given his circumstances, having given up drink, drugs and gambling, admitting he was a 'compulsive and obsessive' user of these things, for well over 6 months. Yet, these are things he has achieved without state support. Brighton local authority has done next to nothing for him.

In other words, if you want to know what 'care in the community' means in 21st century Britain, then talk to Malcolm for five minutes and you will soon find out. His level of poverty is degrading. He was thrilled to be given some money saying, "Now I can get a shower." Society's poverty is a poverty of understanding of people in his situation. My one and only disappointment with what was a very well written article is that I was quoted a great deal more than was Malcolm. Stephen, a new parishioner at St Mary Magdalen's saw the article and told me he had seen Malcolm on the Western Road very recently begging. 

As Fr Ray Blake points out in his blog, supporting the Soup Run, a lifeline to the homeless of Brighton, and supporting Voices in Exile, the charity which supports destitute asylum seekers in the south-east, which runs on a shoe-string, is a big focus of the expenditure of St Mary Magdalen's Church. At the same time, Fr Ray wants to rebuild the parish Church, which has been left to fall into ruin for a long time. Hopefully, having read of the work of St Mary Magdalen with regard to the Soup Run and Voices in Exile, Catholic Herald readers will give generously to the parish. St Mary Magdalen's Church now has a Pay Pal function on the parish magazine website, so that people can donate to the Building Restoration Fund of the Church. Click here to donate.

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