Paul Nicholson SJ

During tertianship in the Philippines I stayed as a guest of a Colonel Balderas, who boasted to me how astute his lawyers had been in managing to help him avoid the land redistribution programme which the government had implemented to help the landless poor.  The colonel was one of the most active members of the parish I was serving.

In the East End of Sunderland during the 1980s the shipyards and the coalmines, industries which had shaped the local community for two centuries, closed almost overnight.  In that same decade Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, and a number of smaller denominations all closed down church buildings in the area and moved the clergy to the suburbs.  Our own community there closed in 2002.