The Rule of Thirds?

Around 700 former Anglican clergy, including 16 former bishops, have been ordained in the Catholic Church in Great Britain between 1992 and 2024, including 35 per cent of Catholic priests ordained in England and Wales. To my certain knowledge, many more priests ordained in that period have also been adult converts. I would disbelieve a total figure of less than 40 per cent, and 50 per cent would not surprise me.

At least of clergy, there are going to be fewer converts from the Church of England, from her sisters and from her rebel daughters in the next 30 years; the people who are still there now are at least resigned to it as it is. But the influx of young men from all sorts of backgrounds into the Catholic Church is already very striking, and cradle Catholics are taking advantage of how much easier the Internet has made it to teach themselves the Faith even while putting themselves through an hour per school day of colouring in illustrations of trite moral messages.

Although all my instincts are in favour of greater restrictions on adolescents' access to social media, that would significantly arrest both of these welcome trends. Like sound politics, the sound theology on which some of us contended that sound politics depended would be kept away from teenagers who were becoming conscious of such concerns, while the schools and the official media (not only the state ones, in either case) rammed the official ideology down their throats.

After all, even in Northern Ireland, the state school RE and collective worship arrangements are going to have to be completely rewritten because the Supreme Court had found that they did not meet the needs of the third, third, of children from non-Christian homes. If the Democratic Unionist Party, whose organisational even if no longer necessarily its electoral base is not even in the three transferor churches, thinks that it can retain any democratic right to the Education portfolio, then it had better start importing its brethren, whom it has always struck me never did move to Northern Ireland. But culturally Anglophile, if by no means always politically pro-British, though it was, and capable of paying for its own transport and accommodation, would the WASP elite on two or more other continents be large enough to rescue a Church of England that now performed only one in 10 of the opposite-sex marriages on its territory?