English Catholicism Today

Not very working-class; in fact hardly so at all on a week-by-week basis, even in parishes where much of the population is generally so, and would largely identify as Catholic. Practising Catholics are disproportionately likely to have degrees, professional salaries, and so on. The Catholic schools, of course, are both large-scale producers and, in employing teachers, large-scale consumers of the middle class.

Barely at all Irish in anything beyond surnames, to the extent that someone like Dan Hannan can not only be hugely critical of the Northern Ireland peace process, also decried in the same classically Unionist terms in this week’s Catholic Herald by that newspaper’s Editor-in-Chief, but also use his Telegraph blog to bemoan the loss of Jim Allister’s seat. We will not see again a Cardinal who feels it necessary to affect an Irish accent despite being a Reading doctor’s son who went from public school to the heart of Recusancy, the English College in Rome. Practices such as saying “Ay-men” instead of “Ah-men” are now very visibly dying out, and may already have done so in some parts of the country.

Increasingly solid in its orthodoxy, as Catholicism itself, rather than some sort of inherited working-class Irishness, becomes more and more the point of it. Almost anyone under 40 or even 50 who attends Mass regularly is thoroughly sound in the spirit of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Most other people that age only turn up at Christmas, or for baptisms, weddings and funerals. Much like the poor, alas.

Influenced both for orthodoxy and (insofar as this is still necessary) for Englishness by the really quite striking, and growing, number of priests who are now converts, with at least one diocese that would close down, its territory absorbed into one or more of its neighbours, were it not for former Anglican clergy. Convert clergy are often well into middle age or even older, which brings all sorts of things of its own. But it should also be said that a very high number of such young men as are still being ordained in England are not cradle Catholics, generally having converted at university. There is a hugely important extent to which all practising Catholics of post-Vatican II vintage are essentially converts, Catholics by choice who, Catholic schools or no Catholic schools, probably discovered most of what they know about Catholicism after leaving school.

More and more aware of the special place of England in the heart of Rome, whereas Ireland has only ever been the Prodigal Son’s brother; it has always been for England that the fatted calf would be killed. After all, Rome is run by Catholic countries’ toffs and intellectuals. English toffs are disproportionately Catholics, and Catholic intellectuals (usually converts or with backgrounds at least partly on the Continent) are a permanent feature of the English scene. Whereas Irish toffs are Protestants, and Irish intellectuals (at least in the Republic), while traditionally coming from the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, are these days the most militant atheists in the Western world, defined by hatred of their Catholic family backgrounds. Chairs in Catholic Theology are now being created in English universities, something completely unimaginable in the Irish Republic, although it could probably be done in Northern Ireland. The emphasis in English historiography is now on writing all things Catholic in, rather than, as in Ireland, on writing all things Catholic out.

But not terribly Polish. Eighty per cent of people in Poland are practising Catholics. Yet only one Pole in ten in Britain is a practising Catholic. Have they come here in order to escape from the Church? Or do they dislike Her character here? If the latter, then the rise of orthodoxy into the Episcopate should do much to bind them to Her. But by then, will it be too late?

All in all, a very long way from where things used to be.