41: To celebrate the fullness of humanity

Episode 41: Brid and Lorna (a mother and daughter) share their experiences of Catholic People's Weeks and the community they find there. They explain how taking seriously Jesus' words, 'I was in prison and you visited me,' has led them to witness, and be humbled by, the humanity of people on death row in America - and in Lorna's case, to work for change.

Find out more

Catholic People's Weeks

Lifelines

A new episode, a different conversation, every Wednesday!
Email me: theresa@KindsofCatholic.co.uk
Facebook, Instagram and X/Twitter Give me a follow @KindsofCatholic
Find the transcript: https://kindsofcatholic.buzzsprout.com

Music: Greenleaves from Audionautix.com

Transcript

You're listening to All Kinds of Catholic with me, Theresa Alessandro. My conversations with different Catholics will give you glimpses into some of the ways we're living our faith today. Pope Francis has used the image of a caravan. A diverse group of people travelling together, on a sometimes chaotic journey together. That's an image that has helped to shape this podcast. I hope you'll feel encouraged and affirmed, and maybe challenged at times. I am too in these conversations. 

Listeners, thank you for joining me today. We're gonna have a great conversation. I have two guests today, less commonly for the podcast. So I'm joined today by Brid and Lorna; you’re mother and daughter. 

Yep. 

That's true. 

Welcome to the podcast then, both of you. 

Thank you.

Lovely to be here. 

And for listeners, Lorna's joining us from America, and we'll talk a bit about why Lorna's in America in due course. But where I thought we might start today is with Catholic People's Weeks because Brid and Lorna have some history with Catholic People's Weeks. And so for people who don't know, let's hear a bit about what that is, and let's hear about how that has been part of their lives. Brid, would you tell us a bit about what Catholic People's Weeks are?

Yes. So Catholic People's Weeks, we're celebrating our eightieth anniversary this year. It's a lay led organization. It began with a strong focus on Catholic education. Still has that, but for me, what's the unique thing about Catholic People's Weeks is that over the course of the week, we build a community together, and that's a very real lived experience, and it's hugely powerful. And I first came to Catholic People's Weeks because my husband, who wasn't a Christian, died very suddenly when the children were young. Lorna was two and a half, and Eben was not quite five. I was looking for something we could do as a holiday that would work for me as a single parent. We had had a couple of holidays with my family. I'm part of a big family, and they had been lovely, but I thought I have to find something else because I can't let every year be an obligation of somebody has to go on holiday with Brid and with the children. I remembered a friend of mine talking about these Weeks. And at the time I thought, oh, they sound really good, but, you know, Campbell is very tolerant and very accepting. And we got married in the Catholic church and his children are baptised as Catholics. But I don't think it'd be fair to ask him to give up a week's summer holiday and go on some Catholic thing, so I just set it to one side. Having been on Catholic People's Weeks now, I think he'd have loved them because he would have loved the conversations that we have and the exchange of views and the challenge and so on. So, anyway, the first one we went to was a long weekend, and Lorna turned four on the weekend because I thought, if I don't like these, it's only four days. But I loved them. It was a chance to get together with other grown ups and have proper grown up conversations while the children, you know, had other kids to play with. In the afternoons, we could go off and do things with other families. In the evening, there'd be more discussions, talks, whatever, and then some entertainment afterwards. Being in a place where everybody likes children was lovely because particularly when your children are younger and possibly a bit noisy, whatever, you'll be in a space and you can just see somebody glaring. And you're thinking, oh, I need to get my children to be quiet. You know? So going somewhere where everybody is there because they're part of a family is just lovely. It's such a warm and accepting space. I love the informality of the Masses. I mean, there are proper Masses, full celebrations, but they'll often be more informal. Possibly, the children are sitting on the floor at the front. They're often very involved in doing a dramatisation of the gospel or, you know, a more active offertory procession or whatever. I mean, once we'd been once, that was it. We were hooked. We went pretty much every year. There was a year we didn't go because we went on a big family holiday instead. We just felt like something's missing. We haven't done CPW this year.

Well, that sounds fabulous. Lorna, maybe we'll hear from you. Do you remember being four at your first CPW weekend? 

Yeah. I remember it being my birthday and everyone making a really big deal of it. Every person coming up to me being like, Happy Birthday and everyone singing me Happy Birthday at dinner time. It's like a badge of honour. We loved them from the first. We would give up time at home with our friends to go and spend a week on CPW and the really cool thing is that the children's program is provided by people in their teens, early 20s, who volunteer a week of their time to come and run the children's program at CPW. And often at home in your parish there aren't cool people in their teens and early 20s who believe in God and will talk to you about that. CPW is filled with people like that and in fact every year my mum would pray for the helpers, that's what we're called. The people who are running the children's program are called helpers - and how lovely it was to have role models for her kids, and cry. 

I was thinking that you maybe graduated from being a child yourself to being one of those helpers. So you've been on that journey too along the way, and I guess you've made some really good friends out of those experiences? 

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And then those friends becoming friends with my real life friends. They're often cohorts of people around the same age and then we all grew up together and then, you know, we all become helpers together and then we all become adults together, all that kind of age. Not all of us went to university, but we're moving out of our parents' homes and stuff, and we're all going around the country and visiting and staying with so and so and meeting their friends. And there's lots of marriages, friends for life. 

There's just a big CPW family all over the country. And there was one weekend where Lorna and Eben, my son, were travelling in different directions up and down the country. And there was a rail strike and something else had happened and things were going wrong, and it looked like they were both just gonna get stuck in Sheffield. So I rang CPW friends in Sheffield going, can you have Eben and Lorna to stay overnight? I think as it happened, Lorna's train finally started moving, so she carried on to Birmingham, but they did put Eben up overnight and then stuck him on his train to Newcastle the next day. So there's just a feeling of a group of really good solid friends all over the place that you could call on, and if they could help, they would just do it at the drop of hat.

That's a wonderful thing. So you both have given a sense of community and, I guess, shared values. Does it support your faith to have friends who have faith? Has that been an important part of keeping you in the practice of your faith? Do you think it would have been different if you hadn't been involved in CPW?

I do. On my mum's side, there are 26 grandchildren. I don't wanna speak for everyone's beliefs, but I am the only one who is still making a conscious choice to go to church. I'm like, for sure, that CPW has helped with that. Every summer you come home and I'm fired up for three or four weeks after it and then that wears off obviously because normal life seeps back in but there's something so special about being in a group of people who believe what you believe and are challenging you and helping you and the community like Brid said being built and that worshipping together, the informality of the Mass, in that we all are involved in deciding what's going to happen that day. We might even do the consecration in a different way. Parts of the Mass, I often feel like excluded from sometimes in a parish church. That's the priest's job, that's not me. Everyone is just included in every part of the Mass at CPW in a way that is so moving? To answer the question in a really long winded way I guess, yeah for sure CPW has been instrumental in helping me figure out what I believe and then hold on to that faith.

My local parish is a lovely parish but I'm often away at weekends or working. I quite often work Sundays, so I'm not at Mass there on a very regular basis. So although I've got friends there, I'm not hugely rooted in it. So the CPW then gives me that depth of experience when I go there. Like Lorna says, we do sometimes, we celebrate Mass in a wider, more open kind of way, but it I'd like to say it is always the really key bits are still liturgically correct. And, you know, when you go through times when some of the really not great stuff that happens in the wider institutional church and you feel like you're just hanging on in there by your fingertips, and then CPW is a real boost to know this is actually what church should be about, what it should be all the time, and it's enormously important. 

Yeah. I think that's great. And I think that echoes what I think about the podcast. I'm very privileged to have these conversations, to be in all of them, because I'm hosting it. But, you know, there's something very powerful about talking to other Catholic people, even when we're not necessarily on exactly the same wavelength. Just sharing our faith together and talking it over, I think is very grounding and I think it really does help when you could just read headlines somewhere and feel disconnected from the church. It is us, the people, talking about our faith together, you know, that support each other and we are the church. And, you know, just sharing those values I think is very nurturing, and that sounds like that's the environment that Catholic People's Week is serving up for people who go. And are there people, I'm just wondering now with your long experience, are there new people coming all the time and joining? Will there be people at a week that you go to this summer who you've not met before and who will be made welcome and settle in quickly? 

One of the tricky things is that it's very hard to explain briefly what Catholic People's Weeks are about, what they're like. They're quite a hard sell even though we think they're fantastic. So almost everybody who comes for the first time comes because somebody they know and trust has said, look, this is brilliant. Honestly, you will like it. Please come and try it. It can be hard to get new members. That is a challenge. 

But, yes, there are always new people on a week who don't know very many people. And by the end of the week, they're always like, Okay. See you next summer. So nice. 

Yeah. That's true. There are fewer new people on weeks than there would have been, you know, maybe ten, twenty years ago. But, yes, Lorna's right. I don't think I've ever been on a week where there wasn't at least one new family, and almost always, once they've come once, they've come back. 

Not new for long. 

So you mentioned this is your eightieth jubilee year, or eightieth year. I was gonna then make a link to this is a Jubilee year. And have you got some celebrations planned?

We have because we planned a big one for the seventy fifth, which coincided with, COVID. So we have, we have a number of events this year. The anniversary celebration is at Boars Hill in Oxford, which is where we've had a number of events over the years. John Bell from the Iona community is our guest speaker, which we're very excited about. We are actively trying to look to build more links ecumenically. We have done a couple of events alongside an Anglican church - walking events. We're looking to see if we can build links with other groups to widen the people coming along, the membership, and also learn from what they're doing. We have a family week in Scotland in a outdoor education centre just in the Scottish Borders. I was up there last week, and it's a beautiful place. Really lovely centre. We have an adult-only event, which is looking at church music and a walking event, which is based in Minster Acres up here in the North of England, and then another all-age event in autumn in Alton Castle. So quite a full program. 

In the episode notes, I'll put a link to the website where people can find out more if you've sold it to them in this conversation. I hope you have. Now before we started recording, you mentioned a speaker who had particularly made an impact on you years ago. And through hearing them speak, you built a relationship with someone over there in America. So tell us a bit about what that's all about. 

We had a Catholic People's Week, which was on social justice, various aspects of social justice. And somebody came and did a talk about prison visiting, and I suddenly thought, I have heard that reading: I was hungry and you gave me food. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick, in a prison and you visited me, so many times, and I've always heard I was sick and unjustly in prison. I'd always put that in it, and it's only now that that's not actually what it says. It just says I was in prison. So is this something that as a Christian, I am called to do in the same way that we're all called to do all those things? And how would I do that with the two young children? So I just thought about it. I thought, I'm not sure. I'm just putting that one on one side. And then we had - youth mission team in Hexham and Newcastle had a conference where Sister Helen Prejean talked about the death penalty and also mentioned Lifelines, which is an organization that puts you in touch with people on death row who went a pen pal. So I joined Lifelines, and our pen pal, Bobby, has been on death row in Louisiana since he was 26, and he's now 55. So what's that? 29 years?

Today is his birthday. He turns 55 today. 

I started writing to Bobby, and then Lorna asked if she could write. And I thought, I don't know if you can or not. So I asked Lifeline, and they said, under 18s can't be members, but they can write to pen pals if their parents are happy with that. So, yeah, Lorna did start writing to Bobby and actually wrote more often than I did. About three years later, we were going to America for quite a long holiday, one summer, and Lorna said, Can we go and visit Bobby? And I thought, well, I have no idea because I just didn't know maybe you had to be a relative. But when I looked into it, no, we could. So we went to visit, and I still remember the number of friends who were going, You are taking your children? They were 14 and 16 then. You are taking your children to visit somebody on death row? You can tell what people are thinking. And I'm going, yes. I am. That's their choice and they want to go. Lorna, you can take over. It was amazing. 

In 2012, there were two kinds of prison visits. You could have a non-contact visit, which is like the one that you'll be familiar with seeing in the films of two people behind glass with a phone. And I guess because we were out of country visitors and not family members, we were just granted non-contact visits that first time. So there were only two phones but three of us. So for three days we arrived to the prison and we sat on the other side of glass and two of us could hear what was going on and the third one was just sat there trying to figure out from half of the conversation what was being said. That was clumsy at first but immediately forgotten about by how amazing it was to actually be able to see Bob. We'd seen photographs of Bobby and he'd seen photographs of us. To see him, he's moving and you can see him smiling. He'd brought cards in and he was showing us card tricks through the glass. Really recently, Bobby had made a bid for clemency, and so me and Brid and my brother, Eben, all wrote letters as part of that clemency packet. And Eben remembered that  - you can buy food and stuff on a visit. And me and Bobby could blow bubbles with bubblegum, but Eben couldn't. Bobby kept blowing them and winking at Eben. Eben remembers it as this moment of great joy just being so struck by the fact we're on death row - . And actually getting to death row in Louisiana State Penitentiary is an ordeal. There's a lot of prison security. Angola is the nickname of Louisiana State Penitentiary because it used to be a plantation. So it's basically a huge massive farm and Angola is the country in Africa where the slaves who worked the plantation were stolen from. And so you're driving through the prison, takes about half an hour on the bus to get from prison gate to death row. You're driving past largely black men in shackles working the land on the ex-plantation. You drive past the prison cemetery where people's names are not on gravestones, just their prison numbers. It's like really intensely dehumanising. It's an unpleasant experience that first bit and then we're the only people to get off at death row. You know, everyone on that prison bus is going to visit an offender or family member but you can feel the fact that you're being judged because you're getting off at death row and everyone knows the kind of people who are housed at death row. That bit was not pleasant at all, but then we're in this room and I had totally forgotten until Eben wrote that letter last year, that really profound moment of connection and friendship and joy of a piece of bubble gum. 

And as Lorna says, you're allowed to buy food while you're there, and you're allowed to order food for your friend to have in their cell that evening. I mean, it's not brilliant. It's American snack food. It's, you know, pizzas. 

I quite like it! 

It's a lot, lot better than they get normally. So the first day, we'd ordered chicken wings, pizza for Bobby to have that night. And when we came in the next day, he said, Oh, the guys on the row say Thank you. And I said, What? And he said, Oh, he said, some of them don't have any visitors ever, so they never get to eat that food. So I shared it out. And I thought, the idea that somebody who has really not very much and yet shares that, really humbling. We did order a lot more food the next night.

We did!

I was gonna say that's really fantastic for listeners to hear about. I hope that gives people something to think about. What you might think of as the symbolism of driving through the prison with black men in shackles working, but it's not a symbol. It's a reality, even now, it is horrific. I myself worked with the prison charity Pact in the last couple of years. I know I too have found great humanity amongst people in prison when it's so easy for us among the general public in our everyday lives to distance ourselves from people who have apparently committed terrible crimes and are nothing to do with us. Then actually there's great humanity and humour and dignity amongst those people. So I'm glad we've had an opportunity to talk about that. I think I interrupted. Lorna, I think you're gonna say something more. 

We went back to visit Bobby again about two and a half years after that. Because we'd been before, we got to have a contact visit, which is being in the same room as someone. You get to hug at the beginning and the end of the visit. That was amazing for all sorts of reasons, just being able to spend time with someone in the same room, actually to be able to give Bobby a hug after knowing him for, like, five years or four years. I can't remember. We could take photos on contact visits too. So those are the first photos that we have of us with Bobby. And one of Bobby's really good friends on the row, his name is Michael, and he's since had his sentence commuted to life. So he's not on death row anymore. He's still in the prison, but in the general population block. And then, like you said earlier, I live in the US now. I live in Tennessee. And so I took a weekend and drove to Louisiana and back, which is about a nine hour drive to have six hours with Bobby in the contact visit room. Every time that we've been, there have been other families visiting. This most recent time when I went, I don't know what Bobby was doing, but he wasn't ready. So I was waiting in the room for thirty five minutes. But there was another family in the room who were being really nice to me and making sure I felt included. And there is such profound joy on visit days. You know, everyone sharing food together, and I always feel so privileged to be there and witness that. Just like you're saying, this undeniable humanness that exists there is, like, so powerful. So maybe it's a good way to segue into why I moved to the States. So I graduated from university with a degree in computer science which I had hated. Didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life. So I spent about a year doing random jobs that I was enjoying but wasn't finding to be super fulfilling. I was looking on charity jobs and this job came up to work in a charity that did prison work. So I applied and I was like deeply underqualified, but I got the job. Day one was reminded I absolutely know nothing about prisons in the UK. I just loved it from the first day of doing it. Okay. This is what I'm supposed to do. So I worked in offender rehabilitation with people in prison and then moving out to be released, helping them figure out how they were gonna live and what they were gonna do for work and small things -  like people who'd been in prison for seven or eight years, so when they went into prison contactless payments didn't exist and now when they're coming out of prison they don't know how to get on the bus because the buses don't accept cash anymore. And then I was just becoming increasingly frustrated with a system that just sets people up to fail. People are released often with no  accommodation in place and then will be recalled to prison because they don't have anywhere to live. The individuals who work in the system are trying really hard. It's just it is a broken system. What was so frustrating about that is we know what we need to do to make it better. There is the research. It's just like consistent support. The reoffending and recall rate within two years in the UK, that's about 68%. And for the people who did the program that I worked in, it's 1.8%. You know what works. It's not being funded. I applied in July of 2023 to do a Master's degree here in Tennessee in Community Development and Action, and I was hoping that I was gonna learn the skills I needed to make the change that was gonna help with some of those things that had been really frustrating to me. And they let me in and offered me a really generous scholarship.

Wow. 

Right now, I'm working with the Public Defender's Office here in Tennessee. There are 13 people on Tennessee death row and we represent them all in their State appeals. Some of them have exhausted those appeals so we will represent them at clemency if they choose to go that route. I work as a community investigator. It felt like a really full circle moment for me when I had my interview for that and got it. 

Well, that's really interesting, Lorna, because while you were talking about your experience with meeting Bobby and spending time with him and things, I was thinking to myself, well, I must ask you about where you find hope in this situation where somebody is on death row and, you know, you're doing your best to be friends, but where is that going? But actually you've answered that yourself by finding your way into a role where you can try and make the world better around criminal justice or make some contribution to that. So I guess that's one way of responding to a situation that feels unjust and hopeless. 

It is bleak right now to be working with people on death row in America. I mean I've been crying a lot. I'm really worried about some of the people I work with and I care about are probably going to be executed this year and that wasn't a reality last year. That was really hard. Also, you're right, sometimes there are just these sparks of joy or humanity with one of the guys that reminds you okay that yeah this is why I'm getting up and dealing with all of this nonsense is because these people are people who the public has heard one thing about, and that's all they care about. But I know the fullness of you, and now that's what I feel called to do is to, like, celebrate the fullness of humanity in each person and the real intrinsic value that exists, I believe, in everyone. 

That's fantastic. Thank you, Lorna. Well, Brid, you set something off there when you took your young children to visit someone on death row, didn't you? As a parent, how does it feel to see your child grown up and doing something amazing? 

Enormously proud.  I am crying. Yes. It is wonderful.

I often speak to guests about how one person has made such a an impact on lots of other people by speaking about something or just by the way they've lived their lives. Sometimes right back to people like Saint Francis, we've talked about on the podcast sometimes, or I had a guest who had ancestors going back to English martyrs in the North of England hundreds of years ago. But also I think Sister Helen Prejean is this one person who has made a huge impact on people that she speaks with and has made an effort to make sure she speaks to lots of people as well in order to get that message out. You know, it's incredible, isn't it? To see the ripples from her work stretching all the way into people who go to Catholic People's Weeks and how it changes lives. That's really beautiful. Listen, thanks ever so much, Brid and Lorna. It's been really lovely talking to you both today. I think you've given listeners a really good insight into what they might find at a Catholic People's Week if they didn't know already, and it's a real bonus to be able to talk about the experience of people in prison and what we can do and how we can think about people inside, how we can support them in different ways, even if it's only by remembering them in prayer. But there's also many active things we can do and many ways in which we can speak about them with others that can help also. So, I'm really glad we had an opportunity to hear about that first hand from both of you. So thanks ever so much for making some time and I think people will find lots to reflect on during this season of Lent from today's episode. Thanks. 

Thank you. 

Thank you, Theresa.

Thanks so much for joining me on All Kinds of Catholic this time. I hope today's conversation has resonated with you. A new episode is released each Wednesday. Follow all kinds of Catholic on the usual podcast platforms. Rate and review to help others find it. And follow our X, Twitter, and Facebook accounts @kindsofCatholic. You can comment on episodes and be part of the dialogue there. You can also text me if you're listening to the podcast on your phone, although I won't be able to reply to those texts. Until the next time.