English Catholics: a singular history & an uncertain future

Commonweal, June 18, 2004 by Bernard Bergonzi

Once, England was a Catholic country. The evidence lies all around, in the medieval cathedrals and churches now given over to Anglican worship, the ruins of abbeys despoiled by Henry VIII, and the names of older Oxford colleges, such as Corpus Christi, All Souls, Magdalen. After the Reformation, Catholicism declined with strange rapidity, though it was never extinguished. The persecution of Catholics is recalled in a particularly English devotion to the martyrs who died in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were later canonized or beatified. In the universal church it is easier to become a saint if you have an Italian or Spanish name, but these martyrs sound very English: Saints Robert Lawrence, Richard Reynolds, John Rigby, Margaret Ward, to name but a few. After active persecution ended, the small Catholic community was still subject to legal disabilities. Catholics also had to endure the hatred of "papistry" that dominated a culture where Englishness and Protestantism were two sides of a single coin. The Catholic faith was kept alive by country gentlemen who lived quiet lives and stayed out of national life, and by the ordinary people in areas remote from London where enclaves of popular Catholicism survived, such as Lancashire.

Catholicism revived after the Emancipation Act early in the nineteenth century. Its numbers were greatly increased by large-scale Irish immigration following the famine of the 1840s. Many of the Sunday congregation in an English church are still likely to be of Irish origin, whether first or second generation. Irish papers as well as English Catholic ones will be on sale after Mass. Catholicism was given intellectual leadership by the stream of distinguished converts who followed Newman into the church. These events provided the basic structure of English Catholicism as it has existed for the past 150 years. Almost all the Catholics who have contributed to English literary, intellectual, and artistic life were converts: Newman, Hopkins, Chesterton, Ronald Knox, Eric Gill, David Jones, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh. The only notable cradle Catholic was Hilaire Belloc and he was half-French.

Once Catholics stood out as conspicuously different, in ways that generated either suspicion or respect. They were at odds with the dominant culture, which had been Protestant and was becoming secularist. They were encouraged to display their faith and be proud of it. The Catholic Church in England may have been small and insignificant, but it was part of the great body centered on Rome which extended throughout the globe; it was Protestantism that was provincial. This was the Chesterbelloc mythology, which strongly influenced educated English Catholics in the twentieth century. Nowadays it is not so easy to know who is a Catholic, or what one understands by Catholicism. There is a wide spectrum of people who were baptized as Catholics and regard themselves variously as "nonpracticing," "lapsed," "ex," or "former" Catholics. Once attendance at Sunday Mass was the touchstone; those who didn't go were putting their souls in danger. Now, even practicing Catholics are more relaxed about this obligation, like those in Mediterranean countries. English society is said to be the most secularized in the Western world and Catholics are inevitably affected by the dominant ethos, in which religion is a private pursuit, and there are no opportunities for martyrdom. I am, by the way, focusing on England rather than Britain as a whole. In Scotland, religion is more noticeable, whether Catholic or Presbyterian (this has its downside in tribal sectarian feuding, like the often violent clashes between supporters of the Celtic and Rangers soccer teams). Northern Ireland is a different planet as far as religion is concerned.

In England, people don't go to church very much. According to some recent figures, only about 3 percent of people in London attend Sunday worship (and, in a fascinating demographic twist, half of those who do are black). The notion of dominant English secularism has been questioned by some sociologists of religion and probably needs qualification. English people still claim to believe in God. They may not be much interested in religion but they are rather keen on what they call "spirituality," and New Age practices are popular. As Chesterton was supposed to have said (though no one has been able to find the source of the quotation), when people cease to believe in God they don't believe in nothing but in anything. Human beings are, after all, religious animals. Outside the mindset of gentle, tolerant skepticism there are manifestations of religion that ought to be taken very seriously, notably the growth of Islamic fervor among brown-skinned Britons in large industrial cities. It is significant that the Economist, the magazine for thoughtful businessmen, has recently appointed a religious-affairs correspondent.

Anti-Catholicism is still apparent, though it now has an ideological rather than a religious basis. The church is attacked, particularly by aggressive, youngish female journalists, for a number of reasons (some of them valid): for having supported fascist regimes, for opposing contraception and abortion, for not having women priests, and for the scandal of priestly pedophilia. But there is no general hostility, and Catholics in public life are treated with respect and mild curiosity. One of the most prominent is Cherie Booth, Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife and a leading lawyer in her own right. She is a Catholic from a tribal Liverpool background (her father, Tony Booth, is a former comic-film and television actor, who is much further to the left than his son-in-law, as he likes to proclaim). Blair himself is an Anglican with communitarian leanings and Catholic sympathies--he has in the past presented himself for Communion when at Mass with his wife, until he was tactfully told that Christian unity had not yet reached the stage to permit this. The Blairs' children go to Catholic schools, though Cherie Booth has attracted unfavorable publicity for dabbling in New Age practices and having a female guru, now discarded. Iain Duncan Smith, who was briefly leader of the Conservatives until he was defenestrated by his colleagues last year for not being up to the job, is Catholic, though he sends his sons to Eton rather than to a Catholic school. Charles Kennedy, leader of the third major party, the Liberal Democrats, comes from a Catholic area of the Highlands and has cautiously described himself as "a Christian in the Catholic tradition"; his voting record is said to be vulnerable to orthodox scrutiny in the way that Senator John Kerry's is. In the younger generation Ruth Kelly is a senior Treasury minister in her mid-thirties, with a reputation as a brilliant economist and an all-round high achiever. She is also a very committed Catholic who has had four children since she entered Parliament in 1997.