The triumphalism of the last 48 hours could not conceivably be more misplaced. The difference between the Catholic and Anglican figures is negligible, and even put together they do not add up to any very large section of society.
Yet seventy-two per cent of Britons profess to be Christians and are just waiting to be reached. And the only really promising way of doing this is also the only really significant alternative to Islam: the full-blooded Catholicism of structured daily prayer, of setting aside one day in seven, of fasting, of almsgiving, of pilgrimage, of the global community of faith as the primary focus of personal allegiance and locus of personal identity, of the lesser outward and greater inward struggle, of the need for a comprehensive and coherent critique both of capitalism and of Marxism, of the coherence between faith and reason, of a consequent integrated view of art and science, of Sacred Tradition, of the Petrine Office, and of mysticism and monasticism.
And the restoration of that full-blooded Catholicism to this land can be done only by both the hierarchic-charismatic ecclesial apostolates (the "new movements") either arising out of or anticipating the actual texts of the documents of Vatican II, and those attached to the Immemorial Roman Rite recently set free at last by Pope Benedict XVI.
As for the Act of Settlement, it is good for us, because it reminds us that we are different, and because it does us the courtesy of taking our beliefs seriously by identifying them as a real challenge. One really does have to question the viability of a Catholic community which devotes any great energy to the question of ascending the throne while the born sleep in cardboard boxes on the streets and the pre-born are ripped from their mothers’ wombs to be discarded as surgical waste. And far from being a term of abuse, the word "Papist" is in fact the name under which the English Martyrs gave their lives, and expresses the cause for which they did so, making it a badge of honour, to be worn with pride.
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No. David, European Christianity including its British version is a dying phenomena. That is why your churches are so empty.
ReplyDeleteThe US has real religiosity, with filled churches, synagogues, mosques and temples (e.g. Buddhist). Your part of the world could stand to learn from the US.
It seems Britain is losing her historical identity.
ReplyDeleteCatholicism has surpassed Protestantism and Germany may end up winning WW2 after all.
I need to make a trip to the United Kingdom before it is known as European District #3A.
"The US has real religiosity, with filled churches, synagogues, mosques and temples (e.g. Buddhist). Your part of the world could stand to learn from the US."
ReplyDeleteWhat, "filled mosques and temples"? No, thank you! Certain forms of religion are fundamental to Western civilisation. Others are at best irrelevant to it. And at least one is positively hostile. So American constitutional indifference on this question simply will not do. Nobody in Britain says "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas", or talks squeamishly about "the holiday season".
And "religiosity" is the word - the worship of a sort of idea of America, rather than of God. As I once heard a British Evangelical leader say of his American brethren, "They're all Mormons at heart".
But that is shifting, it seems, albeit slowly. Something more like the European tradition of Christian social and political activism is re-emerging, having once been perfectly normal in the US of course.
It's been a long time since Roe v Wade, and I think that people are beginning to wake up to the fact that the Republican Party keeps itself going by pretending to wish to reverse it in order to collect the votes of those whose economic interest, and historic home, is on the other side of the aisle.
It is interesting that you mention Germany, where the churches are the largest employers after the various levels of government, providing all manner of public services, mostly funded out of taxes that people can choose not to pay, but hardly ever do. Which is a long way from the ACLU, isn't it?
"It seems Britain is losing her historical identity."
Catholicism IS this country's historical identity. The Reformation was so unpopular, and that for so long, in England that the religious observance of the English has never recovered. What came to be called Anglicanism never took hold in Wales or Ireland at all.
And the areas that rose against the Scottish Presbyetrian Establishment as Catholics, then as Episcopalians (and Jacobites), and then as the Free Church, were notably always the same areas century by century. What will it be next, one wonders? It will certainly be something.
The influence of the C of E was always going to decline as soon as economic, social, cultural andpolitical power had passed to anyone very much from outside the class enriched beyond its wildest dreams by the Dissolution of the Monasteries, since only that class has ever really identified with the C of E to the extent of eschewing everything else. Hence Recusancy, Puritanism, Methodism, the Oxford Movement...