(Photo from 'Art and the Afterlife' with Baroness Sheila Hollins, Lynne Hanley, Shelagh Fogarty, Fr Patrick van der Vorst, Maggie Doherty and Archbishop Bernard Longley.)
The Art of Dying Well was founded as an initiative of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales in 2016, the Centre has been based at St Mary’s University since 2018.
The mission of the Centre is to help people to live and die well and be supported in grief. While we draw extensively on the riches of Catholic tradition and, through activities such as training for seminarians, place ourselves at the service of the Church, our work is open to people of all faiths and none. The Art of Living and Dying Well is committed to fostering a culture of care and compassion at the end of life, one that affirms the intrinsic dignity and worth of every human being, regardless of their condition or circumstances. We believe that the proper response to suffering is not to hasten death, but to offer loving presence, holistic support, and a reminder of the eternal hope we have in Christ.
We pursue our mission in a variety of ways: training the frontline to be better prepared to deal with death and loss; engaging the public and professionals through live events and podcasts; impactful, cutting-edge, inter-disciplinary research; influencing thought and policy through roundtables, conferences and seminars; and media work aimed at influencing the public conversation around living and dying well.
Through our website, people can find us for the first time. In their hour of need, they can access information, ideas and resources, including our podcast series, which opens up ways of understanding the end of life that differ greatly from the dominant, societal model, which treats death and dying as primarily medical events.
Thanks to the Guild’s support, we have been able to invest in the Art of Dying Well podcast and host and create more content for the Art of Dying Well website. Without this support, we would find it difficult to be able to offer this consolation and hope to the thousands of people who come looking for our resources online. With an average of 2,000+ listeners per episode from the UK and across the world, the podcast is making a real difference in people's lives. It has received excellent ratings, averaging five stars on Spotify and according to Global Rank, it is one of the top 10% most popular shows out of 3,163,769 podcasts globally.
The ‘prayers for the dying’ pages of the Art of Dying Well website are one of the most visited pages averaging over 20,000 users (unique visitors) and are very often being accessed via mobile phones, which could indicate that individuals and families are praying these prayers around the bedside.
In our work at the Centre, we aim to address the taboo around death and dying which, if left unaddressed, very often leads to unmet emotional, spiritual, and practical needs among the dying, their loved ones, and bereaved communities. An increasing demand for our resources and the growing engagement with our podcast and live events highlight that we are helping to address that taboo.
There seems to be a growing recognition that death is not just a medical event. The confrontation with mortality that the pandemic forced upon society also seems to have awakened for many the need to grapple with ultimate questions and to find a supportive community in doing so.
Looking to the future, we have great hopes and ambitious plans for the continued growth and impact of the Centre’s digital and other work. We aim to further expand our reach and engagement through new partnerships, training initiatives and public engagement campaigns.
For instance, in collaboration with a social enterprise that supports care worker wellbeing, we hope to develop an end-of-life and bereavement care training course specifically for carers who are very often time-poor and under pressure with little knowledge or experience of how to care for clients who are terminally ill.
Alongside these ambitions, and with secure, sustainable funding, we also aim to conduct a full programme of urgently needed research to advance knowledge, transform societal attitudes, and stimulate policy and systems change around living and dying well and being supported in grief.
Our podcast and website are fundamental to these ambitions. We believe that by changing the conversation, we can change the experience - helping Catholics to rediscover and make use of the great riches of our tradition, while also allowing many other people, regardless of their faith background, to find peace, meaning, solace and connection at the end of life.
To learn more about the mission and work of The Centre for the Art of Living and Dying Well, explore their website.
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