Revival For Survival

Are we on course for the sort of religious revival not seen since the eighteenth century? I suspect so, and that Islam will be the major force.

After all, what else could be? Much of the Evangelical-Charismatic-Pentecostal movement has gone the way of the mighty Nonconformity of old, merely baptising the presuppositions of the middle middle class. That way lies oblivion.

If Anglo-Catholic or Anglican Evangelical missionary bishops under African or other developing world authority were indeed to be set up in these islands as they have begun to be in North America, then they and theirs might have some influence. (Indeed, it is a wonder that no such thing has already happened in Scotland, in particular; and at letter from 101 clergy to this week’s Church Times leads one to assume that it might well happen in Wales before too long.)

But the only really significant alternative to Islam will be 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.