83: Maybe there are better ways. World Peace Day episode.

Episode 83 In this episode, Jenny describes being involved in the work of building peace, after years of conflict in a Pacific island country. She reflects on the culture she found there, in which listening, not speaking, was fundamental. She contrasts this experience with the learning we need to do in the West, to try to become a synodal Church. While ‘Prayer and openly talking about God all the time was part of the culture,’ and ‘People in the Pacific make no contribution to the climate crisis,’ Jenny shares honestly about the time and hard work it takes to heal and rebuild structures and relationships after conflict.

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Pope Leo's World Peace Day message

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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 Leo, quoting St Augustine, reminds us, Let us live well and the times will be good.  We are the times.  I hope you feel encouraged and affirmed and sometimes challenged as I am in these conversations.  Join our podcast community, get news and background information about the conversations and share your thoughts if you want to. You can get the newsletter and each episode straight to your inbox by going to allkindsofcatholic.substack.com and clicking on subscribe. It's free.  That web address is in the episode notes too and I'd love you to draw closer to our community. Thank you.

Listeners, thanks for joining this episode just after Christmas, going into our calendar New Year. I thought it'd be good to do an episode about World Peace Day, which is the 1st January every year. Pope Leo has released a message around World Peace Day. He talks about an unarmed and disarming peace and inviting humanity to reject the logic of violence and war. There is a link in the episode notes to the whole of Pope Leo's World Peace day message. And as regular listeners will know, I really care about peace. So I'm really glad that our guest today is somebody who has done some work for peace and been involved in peace talks in a particular part of the world at a particular time. So we're going to talk to Jenny who was here before on Episode 72, you might remember with Sister Marie-Kolbe Zamora. So Jenny works for CAFOD now - for people who haven't got back to listening to that episode yet. It's really good to talk to you again, Jenny. 

Thank you. 

So Jenny, you were involved in these peace talks in a particular time and place in the world. Maybe you just take us back to then and give us a flavour of what was the context there that we should be thinking about.

Okay, so I'm going to take you back to 1998, so quite some time ago in a country called Solomon Islands in the South Pacific.  Not a really well-known country  for those of us in the UK, quite far away, but it used to be a colony of the United Kingdom, hopefully familiar to some of your listeners. The issue in Solomon Islands at the time was ethnic tensions that grew out of problems that were caused by a disagreement over land, essentially. The main island of Solomon Islands was called Guadalcanal. That's where the capital Honiara is, so where the government is, where much of the business of the country took place. Obviously an island where people from other parts of the Solomon Islands migrated to for work, to work for the government or to come for education, training, many of the schools, business. Over time, the population of a nearby island called Malaita, which was a very densely populated island, not really enough space in Malaita for everyone, the people of Malaita largely came to Guadalcanal for work. The more sparsely populated Guadalcanal Island then accommodated a lot of people from Malaita. Now the main industries in Solomon Islands, most people live on subsistence farming. So that land is culturally owned and passed down through your family line. The people live primarily in villages and rely on subsistence farming, which works for the majority of the population. But in Guadalcanal, when they welcome people mainly from Malaita to come in and work, they had to, of course, find places to live where they didn't own the land. So as more came in and took over living spaces  on the islands, there was a bit of tension there. There was also tension that grew out of logging. So Solomon Islands has very pristine forests or had. Of course, they were very popular for other countries, businesses in other countries. And eventually there was tension over that about some communities benefitting from that and not others.  Other mining operations  were present. Solomons is a big source of gold as well. And as is the case in many countries, mining does tend to create problems in communities. So that was another cause for tension. Two disparate groups, one from Guadalcanal called the Isatabu Freedom Movement, one from Malaita called the Malaita Eagle Force, mostly young men took up weapons and started to fight, then started the period that became known as the ethnic tensions. There were kidnappings, murders, rapes, the worst of things that could happen that mostly fell under the radar of the international community because Solomons is quite remote from the rest of the world.  

I feel like I could see that violence coming, you know, when you were explaining about - it's not a conflict that I really feel I've known anything about. So I'm grateful to hear about it from you. Some listeners may already be aware, but I'm sure other people will be interested to hear about it now. But I think we can see the pattern there. Already I can see that having that really good understanding of the context of where this tension came from, where this conflict came from, is going to be helpful for finding some sort of resolution. And I can see that you had that understanding or developed it ready to be involved in this work. And then I was thinking to myself, yep, tension and then what you don't want is violence. But of course, that seems to be what we human beings turn to in these tense situations. I'm wondering where the weapons came from. I'm guessing there were weapons. Maybe you can tell us a bit about that. So we now have violence taking place, people polarised into different factions. 

Yes, the weapons very unfortunately came from the Solomon's police. The police force in the Solomon Islands, as in many other countries, had a paramilitary wing. They weren't a big enough country to have a military, have an army in the way that the UK does, for example. There's a small number of police officers who were trained effectively as army officers are trained. They were trying to use high powered weapons so there was a stock of high-powered weapons that unfortunately got out of the control of the paramilitary and got into the hands of these two warring groups.  Very unfortunately, again, some of the paramilitary did supply them and were then involved with these two groups. There was also a fair bit of trade in weapons from nearby island of Bougainville, which is in another country, in Papua New Guinea. So cross island trade going on there because if you can imagine these are islands separated only by a body of water. All of this tension created really a loss in control by the state. So the government was really under siege. So all sorts of blackmail and extortion going on. The finance department of the government was in real trouble and public servants were under huge amount of pressure. Government ministers were under pressure, kidnappings of government ministers' children in order to extort money. It was dire. And then of course, the nascent tourism industry in Solomon Islands fell over because no one wanted to go.  It was very difficult, particularly difficult for women who were really at risk from the violence.  And for children. In the year 2000, there was a coup. So one of the rebel forces, one of the warring groups basically took over government and installed their own prime minister. There was always still a government in place but really struggling and basically the government couldn't pay public servants, couldn't pay teachers. Teachers in Solomon Islands, they kept teaching. It was amazing to see how many public servants kept working, nurses, doctors, without any supplies, without being paid themselves, without being able to get medicines or get books to teach.  Just astonishing perseverance and resilience.  The Catholic Church and other Christian churches in Solomon Islands played a really important role through that. They kept a lot of systems going.  Catholic Church itself, as well as the Church of England there, had a big presence in the education sector and in the health sector. That respected authority there and pastoral care throughout the islands was important. The Church of England equivalent there called the Church of Melanesia, 7 of their brothers, called the Melanesian Brothers, essentially Anglican priests there, were kidnapped and later killed. It touched the church very closely. Throughout all this time, I worked for the Australian government at the time, Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and I was working on Pacific issues at the time. I was actually in Vanuatu in another mainland country at the time that all these tensions were building, so we were quite close to them as well. So the Solomons government had asked numerous times for Australian government assistance.  They really wanted an intervention, almost like they were asking for military help to reestablish order, for a peacekeeping force to come in. They asked the UN as well. We need help. We can't reestablish order ourselves. This kind of request kept coming for several years. Australian government didn't think it was appropriate at the time to intervene. There was a lot of aid going in and targeted support, particularly the churches, to try and help with peacekeeping efforts.  And there were very sort of small forces, small groups of armies, sort of targeted just to provide support to the Solomons government. It wasn't changing very much, so eventually, after another plea from the Solomons Prime Minister, the Australian government worked with other governments in the Pacific region and with New Zealand to establish a regional assistance mission. So it was negotiated at the time that they would send in military forces, but also public servants to help with reestablishing the finance ministry, for example, so could get the government finances back together, start paying teachers and hospitals, getting hospitals back working. The country could start to recover.  So I was then part of that regional assistance mission. 

I'm noticing that at the level of government, it was about, like you say, re-establishing law and order, government structures, getting those back functioning. I can see that that's really important. But at the level of people, it's slightly removed from the people and the violence and suffering that people were going through. And yet I understand that those structures of basic law and order and being able to pay people who are teachers and healthcare workers, those are the things that relieve suffering and that lift people out of poverty over the longer term and so on. it's just interesting to hear - my heart immediately goes to people being, you know, having their children kidnapped, people being killed, young men with guns killing each other over these disputes about land. But I suppose there's a dispassionate approach needed to just get stuff back in place before you can begin to straighten out the people and relationships, in this approach anyway. So tell us a bit more about how that worked then and what your role was.

Yeah, so that's a really good question. So it was exactly that. It was a very large scale intervention with multiple military from across the region. It really was a Pacific force that went in along with the government assistance. But you're right, it was very much targeted at that, like, let's stop the violence. So bring an end to that. So that was kind of almost a peace enforcement. We're going to send military so that all of you stop fighting. I remember at the time it was a bit of like shock and awe, you know, so seeing that coming like, right, OK, it's serious now. 

That's right. And yet there's something in me, I really believe in nonviolence, that I hear we’ll step up the weapons, the military… 

Yes, yeah. 

I could see why governments are hesitant to do that at first and why it took a few pleas because you can see how that also could spiral out of control. You know, violence begets more violence. It's good for me to hear, though, that this is the first step that helped in this situation. So let me stop interrupting.

Well, interestingly, the intervention at the time, the Regional Assistance Mission in 2003, if you'll recall, that was back when everything was happening in Iraq as well. At the same time that Australia and Pacific partners were in Solomon Islands, the US and partners were in Iraq. So we were almost daily contrasting what was going on. And we were very lucky in Solomon's that the approach that we'd taken did work and that there wasn't war, basically, wasn't more war, you know, that we saw happen in Iraq and the tremendous conflict that happened there. And I think that was largely due to the people of Solomon Islands who said, We've got some help now and let's get back on track. I think, you know, certainly many of the churches and women's groups in the country took that moment really seriously and said, Well, now that we're in this space, let's all work together and make things better. The shock and awe of the Australian military establishment arriving, I think, for the warring groups saying, We're not going to be able to fight this. We have to work out what we're going to do. So I'm not saying it was easy. It was still, we had to work really hard on negotiating and meeting the right people, bringing the right people together and starting the talks.  It was really important in particular to find this one  person whose name is Harold Keke who'd been a very prominent militant and  the person that was believed to have killed the Melanesian brothers and some others. So in order for the society to move forward and to see that there was some peace, that a higher priority was attached to finding him because he was at large. There a lot of effort finding him and then negotiating to bring him to agree to be arrested basically and then brought to the Capital for trial. At the same time we knew we really had to get weapons out of circulation because while there were still weapons all over the country the violence could restart. I was involved in the early stages in coordinating a nationwide gun amnesty. So we had to negotiate that with the cabinet of Solomon Islands, because it had to be legal, basically, an act passed by parliament to enable that amnesty to take place because they had to basically allow Australian and other forces and police to take weapons off people. And the population had to be compelled by law to give them up. 

When you said amnesty, I was thinking this is people being invited to bring their weapons. No, people are being made to give up their weapons.

Yeah, and then of course you have to operationalise that because it's such a far-flung country and archipelago that is spread over many kilometres and hard to get to. There are airfields on some of the islands, not all. Some you take a boat to, there weren't enough boats to get around. Many airfields had fallen into disrepair, so it was very difficult to even get them. Of course only very small planes could land on some of them. So we were reliant on the Australian Navy's and New Zealand Navy's vessels to do some of that. We worked with the Solomon Islands government as much as it could help, in traveling around on every island, village by village, asking people to give up their weapons. Now, when I say that, there weren't weapons throughout the islands. They were concentrated in certain parts, so we knew where to go. But something strange happened there because something we hadn't anticipated is that many people had shotguns. They kept in their homes to shoot crocodiles that were threatening their children. Families have shotguns because crocodiles do come and take small children. People had shotguns and were very unwilling to give them up because how would they protect their small children from the crocodile?  So that was a whole other exercise in working through how we deal with that. 

I was imagining these groups of people going into these more isolated communities and asking them to give up their weapons. There's a lot of personal skill needed in having those conversations with people and bringing them around without violence erupting, because they've got weapons. There's a lot of bravery, I think, on the part of people going in there and opening those conversations and then negotiating and talking through and understanding what the difficulties are is hard work too, isn't it?

And it does take time and although there was a law passed that compelled people, of course we couldn't compel, I we weren't going to fire on people, that was never part of the arrangement. We would go around and talk to communities and invite them to submit their weapons. We had, I think, a month in order to complete the amnesty. The government wanted us to do it in the month. And I worked out quickly we'd need to have a communications strategy for this beyond just announcing it on the radio. Bearing in mind this country doesn't have television. And back in that time, there were no mobile phones. There was no Facebook. It is going on now, of course, but that was not going on. The only thing we had was the radio. National Radio. We had a communications team, a couple of people working with us in the assistance mission. So we were working on communicating and doing things like letter drops from planes and things, all sorts of strange things that we tried. And I realised I was the only Catholic on the team. And I said, Hang on a minute, we've got the Catholic Church here. And they've got a good network. I'd started to go to Mass as soon as I arrived, of course, so I went along. They had an archbishop there at the time. Archbishop Adrian Smith. He was originally from Ireland, but he'd been in Solomon Islands for decades. I went to see him. We need your help Archbishop. Of course the church had been working for peace for years so they were really keen to do what they could to help and basically they explained to me, so this is how you do it, communicate with villagers. So it was really good to have them. The Archbishop suggested get all the churches together on this. That's something I'm pleased I had the foresight to go and see him and he really helped out, bringing all the churches together and they said, Okay well how are we going to encourage and have these conversations together. Really wanted to make it something that the population and the people in every village that we visited to invite them to give up their weapons were involved in. People who were not part of the conflict at all, hadn’t done anything to contribute to the problem, were basically being asked to give up things that they wouldn't have thought were a problem. It was really, really valuable to have that church and civil society network set up. They did see the value in doing this as a step towards peace for the entire country. They did use their networks. I never cease to be amazed at networks the Catholic Church has throughout the world. 

Yeah, and good to harness them for something that is important to Catholic people and Christian people. Now, while we're on the subject of faith, Jenny, I'm just going to interrupt your flow again. I'm interested in, while you were there in that situation, were you praying about peace and what you could do alongside? You mentioned that you began going to Mass, but you also said you were the only Catholic in this regional team. But was it something that you brought to prayer along the way also?

Yes, absolutely. And in fact,  in the lead up before I went to Solomon Islands, I remember when I was in Vanuatu through all the ethnic tensions, every week at Mass we would pray for the neighbouring country because the people of Solomon Islands and the people of Vanuatu and the people of Papua New Guinea are all the same people, they're all Balinese. Such great empathy for them. So was very much prayers that were brought to Mass every week. Before I went to Solomon Islands, I was actually living in Kiribati with my husband. It's a Pacific Island country, but not Melanesia, in the north of the Pacific. Again, a very Catholic country. And all we felt we could do was pray because the Australian government was quite reluctant to get involved. And we really didn't see how anything was going to happen. It just seemed to be getting worse and worse, becoming more and more lawless. Because I knew so much about the conflict, I knew how many people were not involved in it at all. And indeed, many islands in Solomons had nothing to do with the conflict at all but were affected by the breakdown in government finances. So meant their clinics and their schools couldn’t get the materials they need. So it had sort of an impact on the whole country, even for people who weren't caught up in the conflict. It's something I definitely brought to prayer. I felt very -  I don't want to use privilege because I didn't feel the way. I felt very humbled. It's the opposite. I felt humbled that I did have my faith and that I knew the church was an actor here that, thinking of in Iraq, you know, another country that was going through that at the time, Iraq. I knew the church there was very small, prayed for them as well, but I knew the church there probably wouldn't be able to influence too much. I knew in Solomons that it would be a great source of help and constancy for the population. So I was really humbled that I was part of that Church as well that could support so many people. 

Okay, so tell us the next bit of the peace talk process then. So I'm guessing  - it takes us back to Pope Leo, doesn't it? An unarmed and disarming piece. Once you had moved weapons out of the situation, I'm guessing that something needed to be changed so that people who had no land were able to live without causing this tension in some way. I'm guessing some structural change was needed or some different understanding. So tell us a bit more about how these peace talks proceeded then. 

It took many years after that, so I'm presenting kind of a little picture of one year where things accelerated quite quickly, but of course, peace talks, negotiations, healing, takes a long time.  There was a lot of healing to be done as there is after every war.  At the beginning, there was interest in, Well, let's get all the world's best peace negotiators here. Desmond Tutu went at one stage and Bertie Ahearn, I think, as well.  So this all happened after I left, but we worked to set it up. Definitely Solomon Islands recognised that they needed some external help with this to help them with negotiations so that it was neutral, neutral negotiators and leaders in there. They really did respect that process. Even to start it up took a long time. It was years in the making. Started the process quickly, but certainly there were calls around reparations, for example, so villages and communities who had lost family members wanted reparations from the other side. And then land that had been stolen, which was taken over had to be returned properly. Solomon Islands is a country where there are many different cultural traditions and cultural exchanges, so different forms of currency. So in some islands they used something called shell money rather than currency.  Cash is our currency, in Solomon Islands it was shells. Their wealth was demonstrated in these beautiful, extravagantly large shell necklaces that were handed over ceremonially. There were different forms. When we think about reparations, we think about, you know, in the big world wars, how you transferred money in cash money, usually millions of pounds or millions of dollars. In Solomons, it was different. But there were also some calls from some people that lived in the modern economy and they were, Well, we need to pay for our food because we live in the town. They wanted cash money and there were all sorts of claims and counterclaims about that. That took a long time to negotiate that. And of course, at the same time, the government had to get back on its feet and start earning money, start paying for things, jobs could be created - because most of the people who perpetrated the violence were young men. And again, as we've seen in many other countries, much of that was because of unemployment. There was nothing for young men, or young women to do, but the young men unfortunately were more driven to violent options in response to that than young women were. And there still is a problem with youth unemployment and just not enough things for young people, people in their twenties to do. There weren't really enough schools, even in Solomon Islands, to get people to education level where they could start their own business. And people not wanting to live in the village anymore, course. They want the more exciting things in the town. 

Now that brings me, I was going to just take you back for a moment there because I think there's something really important about the cultural exchanges that you mentioned as reparations, besides or instead of cash. Because I think there's something about ceremonial, I think you called it a ceremonial gesture, that just restores dignity, I think, in a way that just giving people money - you can do that in a way that frees you from your feeling that you were in the wrong,  or people treating you as in the wrong, but doesn't actually transfer some dignity to the person that you've wronged in the same way that a ceremonial gesture might or a ritual. It has some meaning in the community. So I think that's really interesting that that was one of the things that was used to help rebuild relationships. When you're mentioning about these young men or young people who want to go to the cities or who haven't got employment, I think there is again a disregard of their dignity that leads to people turning to things like violence or destruction of themselves or their environment as a kind of frustration. I think there's something interesting there that even now I think you seem to be saying that these things haven't gone away and that actually this potential always isn't there for tension and violence.

Yes, definitely. And you're absolutely right about dignity. If there is nothing for you to do, if you can't find a role for yourself, then you don't feel respected and you don't feel that you have options. Something really interesting that I learned when I was working in Melanesia, I did learn this lesson in Vanuatu before I got to Solomon Islands, so I knew how to operate.  The skill of listening, again, Theresa, we've learned in our church in the last few years with our synodal process. I remember learning quite early on in Melanesia that when you go and meet with community leaders or you go meet with anyone, that your first job is not to speak. You listen. You go and introduce yourself, but then you don't go giving speeches. You listen. You sit down. You are equal.  You're not standing up. You're sitting down at table or on the floor together and you listen and you have to get comfortable listening for long periods of time without speaking, without offering a view. For us Westerners going into Melanesia, it was a lesson we all had to learn. I went in with the skill, but a number of my colleagues, you need to be quiet and listen for a bit. And these community meetings, they take a long time. You can't Western-style, just plan that meeting for an hour and we'll get the job done and then I'll go to the next one.  You just have to see what happens and you have to listen and respect everyone that you're meeting with, that they all have something to say to you, but that they're not going to rush to say it either. Kind of respecting the silence that again we learned how to do in our synodal process. Reflecting back when we were doing the synodal process globally and I was looking at what was going on in my home region, the Pacific Islands, I remember the Oceania Bishops' Conference, say, We know how to do this. We’re good at this synodal conversation. 

That's really interesting. I was thinking I might ask you about whether you could see some parallels with the synodal process, but you're ahead of me, you certainly can. And think that's really interesting about - I was just talking to somebody the other day about how it depends on people's heritage actually. For Western Catholics this might seem like news to try and work in this way, but some Catholics from other parts of the world, you know, it's second nature. That's a really good example of that. And then the same kind of vein where we're hoping that this synodal process will transform the way we are as church in some way. I'm wondering if you felt some change in yourself from being involved in that process. In some ways you're saying you already went in with some of the skills that were really helpful and we can see that. But were there ways in which you felt changed by that experience? Things that you've learned and taken into different environments or just that are just with you? 

Yeah, absolutely. And it really was. Even though I said I went in with some skills and I felt like I had the cultural appreciation before I arrived in Solomon Islands, but I still learned a huge amount. Some of the things that I was able to do, both as someone who had that sort of appreciation of needing to listen and be comfortable being, just being, you know, without having an agenda and a task to get through and an outcome to realise,  which is still very much a part of our Western working culture.  Key performance indicators, we’ve got the outcome we want to get and we've got to get there. We've got a time limit. None of that operates in Melanesian culture. You know, it's all about just being, getting to know people.  Things happen when they happen.  There aren't deadlines. I mean, there are in the working culture and government, but like in the culture as we live in society, there is none of that pressure. I really noticed that clash in that when I was sort of working alongside the police, even to interview. Because I spoke Solomon Islands pidgin I was involved in some of the interpreting work with the police at times, the Australian and New Zealand police. I noticed just such a cultural difference between the expectation of an interview process, police interview, or a negotiation with the police setting down that different culture. I could see then the Solomon Islands police operating that way too - and the local police, of course, understood their own culture, so they took time.  And the Australian police were more anxious to get things done. So that taught me that the way we do things in Western culture is maybe not always the best way. It's just for human beings. We think it might work for us, but maybe there are better ways. Maybe there are better ways to find healing, to find ways to understand each other, to get on and to work together than the way we work. And taught me lot about patience, but also like working alongside then the archbishop and priests and other Christian churches in the country taught me how the church really inculturates itself  in the country. And I think the Catholic Church is particularly good at that, being a part of society and not imposing a different way of being.  We've a saying in the church, haven't we, that change happens in centuries or millennia. And I think that that's quite true of Melanesia as well. And maybe the change that many of us are always so anxious to see, we want things to change, we want development, very much gave me a new idea about that. Do we really have to all develop at the same pace or even develop to these standards that we've set? We used to say that everyone has to earn this amount of money to be happy or have a television or have this kind of a house or have a bank account, 13 years of school education and then go to university and get a salary job, who's to say that that's development?  My time living in the Pacific really taught me that there are other ways of living. In fact, like Pope Francis, other cultures care for our common home much better than we do. People in the Pacific make no contribution to the climate crisis. They are doing the opposite. They are caring for the environment, restoring it, renewing it. Is that not good? That's good development. They're caring and sustaining the environment so that it keeps providing for future generations. We want everyone to get to the same standard, you know, ideally.  And I agree, certainly we want to bring people out of poverty, of course. But if there are other ways of living that I think are, in fact, better for God, serving God better, if we are caring for our family, caring for our sisters and brothers, caring for the environment to provide for all of us and for future generations... I think that's the lesson I drew most out of a very difficult situation working to resolve conflict. The society of Solomon Islands and of Melanesia has a very good basis and very good systems themselves of peacemaking and of serving the Lord. 

That's really, really wonderful. Thank you, Jenny. You've expressed that really well. I feel very moved. It's good when you can share what you've learned because people listening, can learn a little bit of that. And so your experience reaches more people than just you. Was there a bit of scripture that spoke to people in that environment that the church was using or that you found helpful? 

That's a really good question. I don't think I can remember a particular piece. But what I did learn is that most of my colleagues from Australia and New Zealand, let's say not the Pacific Island colleagues, because they were totally on the Christian bus, they went to church every week, but the Australians and the New Zealanders were very reluctant to, even like to pray at the beginning of a meeting, which is a quite common thing, a very common thing in the Pacific. You know, almost every meeting I went to, opened in prayer. And so that comfort level - and everyone just joined in. Just that ease of getting straight into - in Solomons in local pidgin, they would say, Papa God, to address God. Use Jesus as well and invoke the Holy Spirit. It just felt such an automatic thing that we did, just as we would say good morning, nice weather we're having, open in prayer. I think that's what I remember most, the culture held onto their Christian origins and prayed together drew strength from that ritual. The other thing that I remember very strongly from that time was the prayer of St. Francis, the prayer for peace. It was used quite frequently. We'd sing that in meetings even, sing at church very regularly. And of course, like religious music on the radio was much more common in Solomon Islands, much more common to have prayer on the radio. There was always prayer. Prayer and openly talking about God all the time was part of the culture. Something else I've benefitted from, I think. 

I think there is something, like you say, there can be a kind of reserve in people who aren't used to that just being the way we are in groups.  So it's nice when that's broken down for people and people feel comfortable to be part of that. I was looking forward to this conversation for a little while, Jenny. I thought this was going to be really fitting for the season that we're in and it has been absolutely wonderful to talk to you about this very real situation and how peace broke down and how it was rebuilt from someone who was right there and what you've brought away from that and been able to share with us. It's been a privilege to hear about it from you. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk about it today. 

Thank you.

Just a quick note listeners that next week's episode for the feast of the Epiphany will go out a day early on Tuesday, to coincide with the Feast Day. I'd like to wish all of you, and all the podcast guests who've joined us this year, a Happy New Year. And I'd like to share with you one of the Entrance Antiphons from Mass for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, 1st of January:

Today a light will shine upon us, for the Lord is born for us;
and he will be called Wondrous God,
Prince of peace, Father of future ages:
and his reign will be without end.

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 and you can follow All Kinds of Catholic on the usual podcast platforms. Rate and review to help others find it.  You can also follow us on social media @kindsofCatholic and remember if you connect with us on Substack you can comment on episodes and share your thoughts and be part of the dialogue there.  Until the next time.