Although Mass attendance in England is declining, Britain’s Catholic heritage has given the country its legal system, literary tradition, great universities and common morality, writes Msgr. Lopez-Gallo. (CNS photo/Toby Melville, Reuters)
I have been studying the religious situation of Britain, especially after Pope Benedict XVI opened the door to so many Anglicans entering the personal ordinariate.
It is a structure that enabled Anglicans to be in full communion with the Pope, while preserving some degree of corporate identity and autonomy from the local dioceses for other Catholics of the Latin Church (also known as the Latin Rite) and “maintaining distinctive elements of their Anglican theological, spiritual and liturgical patrimony.”
The apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus was a response by the Holy See to requests coming from Continuing Anglican Churches.
The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, established in 2011, has not seen the flood of converts from Anglicanism which many hoped for, and while the initiative responds to the decline of the Church of England, no similar initiative exists to draw home those in the Welsh Methodist churches or the Presbyterian Church of Scotland.
In fact, British Catholicism is in an odd position. In terms of regular practice, it is a faith in decline. Mass attendance fell 30 per cent between 1993 and 2010, according to the Latin Mass Society. The number of Catholics peaked in 1993 and the number of priests in 1965.
The great question for the contemporary Catholic Church is how it interests a theologically illiterate population in Christ’s offer of salvation.
In Britain, part of the answer should lie in its built environment. The national inheritance which they come into at birth is one which Catholics are partly exiled from at baptism.
Britain’s Catholic heritage has given the country, among other things, its legal system, literary tradition, great universities and common morality. Despite this, Britain has never had a Catholic prime minister, and by law may never again have a Catholic king.
Britain accords Catholicism no special status under the law, and indeed Catholic charities often bear the brunt of petty officialdom enforcing equality regulations.
Moreover, there is an astonishing ignorance to the faith. Fifty three per cent of children polled in 2013 did not know what Easter was, with a quarter believing it was the birthday of the Easter Bunny. Only 13 per cent of the British attend any Christian church in Holy Week, and 24 per cent in the Christmas period.
So, is Catholic England gone for good? No. There are also good grounds for optimism.
First, as the Dominican theologian Aidan Nichols noted in his book The Realm, modern Britain is multi-racial and internationalist, both of which work to make the universal Church more sympathetic in modern society than it was in the epoch of English world power and isolationism.
While race is only a partially accurate proxy for immigration, the recent Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society report on contemporary Catholicism in England and Wales appears to support this theory.
The study shows that black Catholics make up a greater proportion of the Catholic population than the national one, and it also demonstrates strikingly high rates of Mass attendance for black and Asian Catholics.
Secondly, Christianity is still the reflexive faith of the British. As the Catholic Church comes to the head of the Christian denominations in Britain, so it gains the powerful advantage of being the bulwark against the main two alternative moral systems competing for the nation’s soul: atheist consumerism and Islam.
Atheism currently predominates, but it is inherently unstable. Man’s created need for spiritual life means that he will always be susceptible to religious appeal. No matter how strong atheism appears to be, it is incapable of putting down roots.
Nobody can feel love and devotion towards a vacuum, and every person who has tried living a life of gross materialism comes instinctively to feel the sense of desolation which it brings. Because faith is no less a part of man than smell or sight, no atheist movement will ever be secure against concerted Christian evangelization.
Islam has demography on its side. There are three million Muslims already in the UK and they have nearly double the birth rate of non-Muslims. London has a Muslim mayor, and Muslim community leaders are a far more common sight on television than Catholic priests.
Benedict XVI identified the reason for this in Without Roots, a book written on Christianity, Islam, and the West, before his election as Pope. He argued that the values of the secular West can only have a rational justification when set in the context of the Christian morality which inspired them.
As T.A. Pascoe wrote in the Catholic Herald, “What Britain needs is a re-evangelization mission based on eternal truths, on the knowledge of God lodged in our hearts, and the Christian heritage and world view lodged in the minds of those who grew up in this country we are privileged to call home. If the Church is brave enough to become a fisher of men once more in Britain, it may find its nets very full indeed.”