English Catholics: a singular history & an uncertain future.

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.

The old generation of literary converts has now died out, except for the novelist Muriel Spark, still writing in her eighties. There are occasional later instances, like Sara Maitland, theologian, novelist, and feminist, who became a Catholic a few years ago. Conversely, there are lapsed cradle-Catholic writers, looking back with mixed feelings on their early upbringing and education (familiar figures in Irish writing, from James Joyce forward). Instances include John Braine and Anthony Burgess, both of Northern English Catholic origin, both now dead. Burgess kept up a lively interest in Catholicism, and his novel Earthly Powers gave comic expression to his disapproval of John XXIII and Vatican II. Women writers in this category are likely to have complicated emotions about their convent schooling. A distinguished exemplar is Marina Warner, novelist, cultural historian, and author of a learned book on the Virgin Mary. (She was once commemorated in a Dire Straits song, "Lady Writer.") David Lodge is a cradle Catholic, well known for his novels about Catholic problems and situations, who says of himself that he is still a Catholic, but only just, which was rather Graham Greene's position toward the end of his life.

Individual Catholics in public life can, in fact, get a very good press if their personality and achievements warrant it. Cardinal Basil Hume, who died in 1999, was one example. His combination of intelligence, sanctity, and common sense was admired far beyond the Catholic community. Hume was a hard act to follow. His successor as archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, has had the misfortune to be touched by the pedophilia scandal; when he was a bishop in Sussex, he moved an offending priest to another post, where the man offended again. Murphy-O'Connor has since apologized for what he now regards as a major error of judgment, but some sections of the media are still gunning for him. In England, the scandal of clergy abuse was real and destructive but on a much smaller scale than in the United States or Ireland, and the church has now adopted a number of strong regulatory measures. Public statements of repentance have been made and financial compensation paid, though the pain of the victims continues. Cormac Murphy-O'Connor sounds echt-Irish, but his hyphenated surname has an upper-class English ring. In fact he was born and educated in England, part of the large Irish diaspora that has produced senior English Labour politicians with names like Callaghan and Healey. He has a sense of public relations and likes to shoot from the hip with startling announcements, as when in 2001 he said that Christianity was "almost vanquished" in Britain. This was said as a challenge to Catholics rather than as an endorsement of the theory of secularization, but it hit the headlines. More recently he said that global poverty was a greater threat and offense than terrorism. This is probably true but one wonders whether the majority of Catholics believe it.

The English do not go to church very often or have clear religious beliefs, but they like the idea that some people do, and that Christian churches still have a visible presence, if only for marriages and funerals and to offer prayers at moments of national crisis. The Church of England, which is virtually part of the state, and the Catholic Church, a suspect and fugitive body until not so long ago, now seem to have equal esteem, and indeed roughly the same number of regular worshipers. When Cardinal Hume was alive he was regarded as the de facto leader of English Christianity. The situation is now reversed, with the arrival at Canterbury of Rowan Williams, theologian and poet, who is both an intellectual and a man of obvious pastoral warmth.

One gets a good sense of the current state of English Catholicism from the Tablet, that admirable Catholic paper founded in 1840 (very similar to Commonweal, though it comes out weekly). In recent years it has done a fine job of keeping intelligence and a broadly liberal spirit alive in English Catholicism, under a succession of exceptionally able editors: Tom Burns, John Wilkins, and now Catherine Pepinster. Last year Austen Ivereigh, a staff writer, set down some plausible reflections about the present state of English Catholicism. He distinguished between the now aging generation who were excited by Vatican II (into which the present writer fits), whom he calls "cons"--an unfortunate term, I think, but let it pass--and their younger successors, the "postcons." As Ivereigh put it, "As children, the cons were taught to obey and to learn. They had a good grasp of the cognitive dimension of faith, they knew that a sacrament was the outward sign of inward grace. Their concern, when the council came, was to make authority accountable; the worst the cons say about anyone is that he or she is 'authoritarian.'" The postcons, though, have grown up in a world without clear ideas of authority: "Their concern is not freedom from authority but in identifying an authority that is authentic. Postcons lack faith-knowledge because the ones who taught them were anxious not to impose rigid orthodoxies. Postcons are suspicious not of authority but of ideology. They have no automatic loyalty--as the cons had--to the church as an institution. But experience--of God, love, communion--hits them between the eyes." This is an acute account. I can recognize the postcons' stance, though I find it disconcerting. Evelyn Waugh might have dismissed them as pathetic muddlers who did not belong in the church. Though Ivereigh does not pursue the point, more people--some of them young--think like Waugh than old cons like me care to admit. I have heard it said that bishops known to be conservative now have the most students for the priesthood. Traditionalist attitudes are propagated in some Catholic publications and from some pulpits; there are parishes that provide Tridentine Masses in Latin, where Communion has to be taken in the mouth, while kneeling. Groups inculcating South European devotional practices are becoming noticeable. My response is to recall the words from Scripture that are often in my mind: "In my Father's house there are many mansions"--as long as the number is not reduced.

Before he retired from the Tablet, John Wilkins surveyed the scene. He acknowledged that the general decline in public worship and orthodox belief presented problems for all churches, but he thought they might be worse for the Church of England, which is the institutional church of the nation, with the monarch as its head. Catholics, he suggested, are more familiar with the idea of a "church whose membership rises and falls, knowing that in the eighteenth century the Catholic faith was nearly extinguished in their country." It looks unlikely that the old idea of a distinctively Catholic culture, preserved in families and Catholic schools, and producing down the generations a steadily increasing phalanx of believers, will ever recur in that form. Instead, as Wilkins puts it, "faith is reached by individual decision, which cuts down the members." I am irreverently prompted to adapt a line from Ernst Lubitsch's famous film Ninotchka, which satirized the Soviets: "we shall have fewer and better Catholics." The probably inevitable loss of that old order will, I think, be a real one. But experience, as it so often does, brings surprises. A few months ago I ran into a former colleague I have known for thirty years but see little of now. She is a senior academic and a columnist for center-left papers, once a Marxist and, I have always assumed, a typical member of the secular intelligentsia. But over lunch she told me that she attended Mass and was moving toward becoming a Catholic (and so, independently of her decision, was her fourteen-year-old son). She asked if I would act as her sponsor and I was happy to agree. The Holy Spirit stays ahead of the game.

Bernard Bergonzi writes from England. His most recent book is A Victorian Wanderer: The Life of Thomas Arnold the Younger (Oxford University Press).