English Catholics

...Postcons are suspicious not of authority but of ideology...

...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...

...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...

...They eat into brain and heart...

...But experience—of God, love, communion—hits them between the eyes...

...Catholicism was given intellectual leadership by the stream of distinguished converts who followed Newman into the church...

...Though I gulp back salt, your breakers sweep over me, they drown my songs, they will flense my flesh...

...at odds with the dominant culture, which had been Protestant and was becoming secularist...

...His combination of intelligence, sanctity, and common sense was admired far beyond the Catholic community...

...Oh, to leap, to swim, to sink into you once more, before beaching...

...Nowadays it is not so easy to know who is a Catholic, or what one understands by Catholicism...

...The notion of dominant English secularism has been questioned by some sociologists of religion and probably needs qualification...

...Oh, Maker of magnificent tails, reconsider stranding this body, far from the circle of my kind...

...I can recognize the postcons' stance, though I find it disconcerting...

...Catholicism revived after the Emancipation Act early in the nineteenth century...

...Columns of blubbles rise, our spoken net to enfold a wayward son...

...Anti-Catholicism is still apparent, though it now has an ideological rather than a religious basis...

...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...

...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...

...But experience, as it so often does, brings surprises...

...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...

...Last year Austen Ivereigh, a staff writer, set down some plausible reflections about the present state of English Catholicism...

...This was said as a challenge to Catholics rather than as an endorsement of the theory of secularization, but it hit the headlines...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Individual Catholics in public life can, in fact, get a very good press if their personality and achievements warrant it...

...As Ivereigh put it, "As children, the cons were taught to obey and to learn...

...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...

...Once Catholics stood out as conspicuously different, in ways that generated either suspicion or respect...

...Never mind...

...Northern Ireland is a difPondering the power & the glory PHOTO CREDIT: KARSH Commonweal 18 June 18, 2004 he old generation of literary converts has now died out, except for the novelist Muriel Spark, still writing in her eighties...

...there are parishes that provide Tridentine Masses in Latin, where Communion has to be taken in the mouth, while kneeling...

...English people still claim to believe in God...

...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 worst the cons say about anyone is that he or she is 'authoritarian...

...These events provided the basic structure of English Catholicism as it has existed for the past 150 years...

...His successor as archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, has had the misfortune to be touched by the pedophilia scandal...

...Its numbers were greatly increased by large-scale Irish immigration following the famine of the 1840s...

...They had a good grasp of the cognitive dimen-sion of faith, they knew that a sacrament was the outward sign of inward grace...

...When Cardinal Hume was alive he was regarded as the de facto leader of English Christianity...

...Traditionalist attitudes are propagated in some Catholic publications and from some pulpits...

...Evelyn Waugh might have dismissed them as pathetic muddlers who did not belong in the church...

...Irish papers as well as English Catholic ones will be on sale after Mass...

...The church is at-tacked, 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...

...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...

...I am, by the way, focusing on England rather than Britain as a whole...

...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...

...Laurie Klein and that Christian churches still have a visible presence, if only for marriages and funerals and to offer prayers at moments of national crisis...

...Instances include John Braine and Anthony Burgess, both of Northern English Catholic origin, both now dead...

...There is a wide spectrum of people who were baptized as Catholics and regard themselves variously as "nonpracticing," "lapsed," "ex," or "former" Catholics...

...Cardinal Basil Hume, who died in 1999, was one example...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...His most recent book is A Victorian Wanderer: The Life of Thomas Arnold the Younger (Oxford University Press...

...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...

...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...

...You command my breath, as ever...

...Cormac Murphy-O'Connor sounds echt-Irish, but his hyphenated surname has an upper-class English ring...

...They may not be much interested in religion but they are rather keen on what they call "spirituality," and New Age practices are popular...

...With a word, I'm consigned to unknown shores...

...Then, may whatever end you design, kindly close its mouth over me...

...ENGLISH CATHOLICS A singular history & an uncertain future Bernard Bersonzi 0 nce, England was a Catholic country...

...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...

...his voting record is said to be vulnerable to orthodox scrutiny in the way that Senator John Kerry's is...

...She was once commemorated in a Dire Straits song, "Lady Writer...

...I have heard it said that bishops known to be conservative now have the most students for the priesthood...

...The post-cons, 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...

...A few months ago I ran into a former colleague I have known for thirty years but see little of now...

...when he was a bishop in Sussex, he moved an of-fending priest to another post, where the man offended again...

...those who didn't go were putting their souls in danger...

...She asked if I would act as her sponsor and I was happy to agree...

...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...

...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...

...Once attendance at Sunday Mass was the touchstone...

...Commonweal 20 June 18, 2004...

...They were encouraged to display their faith and be proud of it...

...Women writers in this category are likely to have complicated emotions about their convent schooling...

...This was the Chesterbelloc mythology, which strongly influenced educated English Catholics in the twentieth century...

...Instead, as Wilkins puts it, "faith is reached by individual decision, which cuts down the members...

...Public statements of repentance have been made and financial compensation paid, though the pain of the victims continues...

...Let the dripping thing live...

...They have no automatic loyalty—as the cons had—to the church as an institution...

...In England, people don't go to church very much...

...The Holy Spirit stays ahead of the game...

...Now, even practicing Catholics are more relaxed about this obligation, like those in Mediterranean countries...

...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 Bums, John Wilkins, and now Catherine Pepinster...

...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...

...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...

...The probably inevitable loss of that old order will, I think, be a real one...

...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...

...But there is no general hostility, and Catholics in public life are treated with respect and mild curiosity...

...After active persecution ended, the small Catholic community was still subject to legal disabilities...

...Hume was a hard act to follow...

...Many of the Sunday congregation in an English church are still likely to be of Irish origin, whether first or second generation...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Though Ivereigh does not pursue the point, more people—some of them young—think like Waugh than old cons like me care to admit...

...The only notable cradle Catholic was Hilaire Belloc and he was half-French...

...Postcons lack faith-knowledge because the ones who taught them were anxious not to impose rigid orthodoxies...

...Before he retired from the Tablet, John Wilkins surveyed the scene...

...She is also a very committed Catholic who has had four children since she entered Parliament in 1997...

...Human beings are, after all, religious animals...

...This is an acute account...

...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...

...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...

...I'll do as I'm told, only ease the lung-numbing gulp, the heavy breach, the intestinal hell...

...it was Protestantism that was provincial...

...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...

...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 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...

...There are occasion-al later instances, like Sara Maitland, theologian, novelist, and feminist, who became a Catholic a few years ago...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Doubts are lice...

...Their concern, when the council came, was to make authority accountable...

...A distinguished exemplar is Marina Warner, novelist, cultural historian, and author of a learned book on the Virgin Mary...

...Commonweal 19 June 18, 2004 Jonah's Whale Addresses the Almighty Ruler of oceans, who can fathom this awkward summons...

...Pity my moans, this long throat aching for everyday air...

...It is significant that the Economist, the magazine for thoughtful businessmen, has recently appointed a religious-affairs correspondent...

...The English do not go to church very often or have clear religious beliefs, but they like the idea that some people do, T ferent planet as far as religion is concerned...

...One of the most prominent is Cherie Booth, Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife and a leading lawyer in her own right...

...They were Bernard Bergonzi writes from England...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...After the Reformation, Catholicism declined with strange rapidity, though it was never extinguished...

...Groups inculcating South European devotional practices are becoming noticeable...