THE P RTAL
January 2015
Page 20
The Cost of Faith
The Jackie Ottaway Interview this month is with the National
Director of Aid to the Church in Need UK, Neville Kyrke-Smith
N
eville is
tall, with a pleasant bearing. His office at Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) reflects his
quiet efficiency. He is friendly and helpful, but business-like and obviously very much a round peg in a
round hole.
He told me a bit about the history of ACN. Now
a Pontifical Foundation, it was set up in 1947 by a
young Dutch Norbertine priest, Father Werenfried
van Straaten. He resolved to help the material and
spiritual needs of the suffering German people in
those bitter years after World War II. Because of the
amount of bacon he distributed, he was known as
“the bacon priest”.
He recruited fellow priests who, riding on
motorcycles and carrying rucksacks on their backs,
travelled anywhere and everywhere to assist the
persecuted and oppressed.
ACN is now in one hundred and thirty countries
and the UK is one of seventeen National offices, soon
to expand to twenty. Their help and work is very much
in demand.
and comfortable as it was. Years later, I discovered that
two of my trips had been paid for by ACN.
“Eventually I knew I had to become a Catholic, but
how? I was a C of E clergyman, married with three
A former Anglican clergyman, Neville was at Stony young children. What was I to do? There was no
Stratford, Littlemore and then Willesden, all churches Ordinariate then. The Sisters of Das Werk in Littlemore
with an affiliation to Our Lady. “She followed me and Austria offered a Novena to JHN. It seemed ACN
around,” he said. “Being in Littlemore had a profound required a new Director in the UK.
effect on me. John Henry Newman spent four years
there. He walked down Rose Hill and into Oxford. It
“After reading Theology at Oxford, I had worked
is a long way.
for a brewery – following a slightly different spiritual
direction, as it were – and so had some business
“I was able to get to know the Sisters who arrived background. Miraculously, the board of ACN took
at the College in 1980. I have so much to thank JHN me on. I was received into the Catholic Church on
for. He brought together a former stable, a crib and November 4th 1990 and began work with ACN in
the college. He led me to realise that conversion was January 1991.
not a once-for-all event but ought to happen daily. All
Catholics are converts. No one is born a Catholic. We Truth and the fullness of grace
“It is a privilege to work for ACN. Your readers will
all need this daily conversion.
have been asked, ‘Why did you become a Catholic?’ I
Heroes of the Faith
used to answer ‘Truth and Authority‘, but now I say,
“I visited Eastern Europe taking such dangerous items ‘Truth and the fullness of grace‘. It is the vocation
as bibles, and books written by a man called Ratzinger! to that daily conversion. I could not cope with the
I met people imprisoned by the KGB for their faith and selective nature shown by some in the C of E. People
saying it was the “Soviet Orthodox Church” rather than would say to me, ‘You think that, but I think…’ about
the Russian Orthodox Church. Some of these encounters subjects such as embryo research, abortion and many
were a bit like a chapter from John le Carré, but they other subjects. I have found the fullness of faith and
were also encounters with real Heroes of the Faith. They the fullness of grace in the Catholic Church. Now I
challenged my understanding of the faith, rationalistic have the privilege to work with and meet some real
conversion ought to happen daily
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