ANDY HAMILTON SJ reflects on the recently released 2025-26 Social Justice Statement, whose theme is “Signs of Hope on the Edge: Serving Homeless People with Mental Ill Health.”
The Annual Catholic Social Justice Statements are an important part of our inheritance at Jesuit Social Services. This year has seen the launching of the 86th Social Justice Statement. The topics of the Statements are an index of the social issues with which in Australia we have wrestled as a society. Their topics have ranged from war, communism, wages and strikes to education, refugees and prisons. This year the focus of the Statement is on homelessness and mental ill-health, both core concerns for the people whom we accompany
The title of this year’s Statement ‘Signs of Hope on the Edge’ indicates that its first task is to encourage. It describes poignantly the hard lives of people who are homeless and are mentally ill. Often the two conditions run together. People with mental illness are often too poor to afford to own or rent places to live. The anxiety, isolation and ostracism of homelessness, too, contribute to mental illness.
The Statement encourages its primarily Catholic audience to notice people who are homeless and live with mental illness, and to reach out to them. This at the heart of Christian faith. The Church should be a house of hospitality and relief.
Though necessary, however, this personal response is not enough. In our culture the place of religion and of the churches is increasingly narrowed to our private and individual lives. They should be silent about the economy or social issues. Faith and justice are then seen to be exclusively about our individual relationship to God and to other individuals.
Catholic Social Teaching, however, attends also to the government laws and social programs about work, family, housing and taxation, assistance to people who are unemployed and otherwise disadvantaged. It insists on the responsibility of governments to attend to the needs of persons which as individuals society cannot meet.
In that spirit the Statement draws attention to the failure of our society to meet basic human rights to shelter, to health care. It fails to provide shelter for people living with disadvantage, to protect them from being driven from their homes, and to ensure effective access to mental health services. This lack of care is reflected in the moves by local governments and the wealthy residents whom they represent to exclude people who are homeless from shelter in public places.
The emphasis of the Statement on human relationships contrasts with the impersonal treatment often received by people who have mental illness and are homeless. For those whose suffering is deeply personal, healing depends in part on caring human contact. Delayed appointments, programs conducted electronically, being sent from office to office, often accentuate the loneliness of people’s conditions. Such treatment, often the consequence of inadequate funding, does not alleviate the need for personal care but intensifies it.
The personal suffering of people with living mental illness and in insecure accommodation must be met by human kindness as well as by technology. The Social Justice Statement recognises the human qualities of resilience, generosity and courage shown by so many people who live with homelessness and mental illness. It also honours the generosity of people who care for family members who are mentally ill and those who welcome homeless people into their homes. It merits an attentive reading.
