The Church in the UK

Great column in the UK Telegraph by Damien Thompson, editor of the Catholic Herald.

His point? There is great potential for revitalization of Catholic life in England, but the bishops are holding it back:

There are about half a million more Roman Catholics in this country than there were five years ago, and an awful lot of them are plumbers and nannies. The influx of Poles and other east Europeans into Britain has come as a shock to the Catholic hierarchy of England and Wales, which had resigned itself to ever-shrinking Mass attendance. The question is: will these new worshippers help to revive the Church, just as they have revived struggling service industries?

Alas, the omens are not good. From 1978 to 2005, the English Church drew inspiration from the most charismatic Pole in history; yet during those years it turned into a moribund and narrow-minded institution. For most of this period, Catholics were unaware that anything was wrong, because their attention was distracted by the formidable presence of Basil Hume. It was only when he was succeeded by the less sure-footed Cormac Murphy-O’Connor that the scale of the crisis became apparent.

Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor, who retires next year, was unlucky in that his elevation coincided with a bout of anti-clericalism caused by the scandal of priestly paedophilia. But, however dreadful the incidence of abuse, the English Church is suffering from a deeper malaise. And, unlike John Paul II, Benedict XVI is well aware of it.

Basil Hume is partly to blame. At a time when the Church of England was dismembering itself, he was so busy acting as Britain’s de facto spiritual leader that he allowed a "magic circle" of Leftist clergy to tighten its grip on the Bishops’ Conference (the nearest thing Catholics have to a General Synod).

For years, it has been possible to draw a picture of a typical bishop. He is a graduate of the English College in Rome who is moderately bright but intellectually lazy. If his political allegiance has shifted since the 1960s, it will only have been from Labour to the Lib Dems (because they are more reliably anti-American). There is a good chance that he will have worked in Eccleston Square, the bishops’ HQ, where lay ideologues promote naïve multiculturalism. Once he has become a bishop, he will form his own mini-curia, issuing hand-wringing press releases about being nice to Muslims.

No wonder the Poles are not impressed by their new spiritual home. They have petitioned the bishops to provide them with more Masses in their own language. The answer, as often as not, has been no: you must "integrate". Nothing illustrates more clearly the bishops’ ignorance of the secrets of church growth. London’s mushrooming Pentecostal congregations are falling over themselves to provide immigrants with tailored services.

Meanwhile, in a sadly muddle-headed decision, Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor has announced that three of the most evocative weekday feasts of the calendar – Epiphany, Ascension and Corpus Christi – will be absorbed into ordinary Sunday worship "in order to foster the celebration of the rhythm of the liturgical year", whatever that means. Loyal priests and lay people, by no means all traditionalists, are furious at this impoverishment of the liturgy. It is finally dawning on them that it is time for root-and-branch reform.

Only one man can set that process in motion: Benedict XVI, the greatest theologian to hold the papal office for centuries. We must hope that the special quality of Benedict’s thought – its emphasis on the role of beauty in the purification of worship – colours his choice of a successor to Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor; for he would then have to look outside the magic circle.

One is hard put to think of a single bishop of England and Wales who shares Benedict’s vision of the Church. Most of them were angered by his election, and his opinion of them is not high. "The English bishops," he told a visiting priest a few years ago, "are the problem." Well, Your Holiness, they are your problem now. England could become a showcase for a Catholic revival based on charismatic preaching and glorious liturgy. But, to achieve that, Pope Benedict may have to set aside his new benevolence and display some of his old ferocity.

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