British Catholicism’s Bright and Various Future

After Secularisation:
The Present and Future of British Catholicism

by stephen bullivant, hannah vaughan-spruce, and bernadette durcan

catholic truth society, 184 pages, £19.95

In the last few weeks,” the theologian Jacob Phillips recently remarked, “I’ve spoken at various Catholic events which were full to the brim with recent converts in the 18-30 age range, mostly young men. Priest after priest has told me that it’s gone from [one or two] adult converts a year to numbers of 20-30 each Easter, and they’re in double figures for new inquirers already since then. As it was eloquently put by a dear old reverend father I’ve known for many years: ‘wtf is going on??’”

The priest in question might do well to pick up a copy of a new book from the Catholic Truth Society called After Secularisation. Written by Bernadette Durcan, Hannah Vaughan-Spruce, and Stephen Bullivant, it is not a book specifically about young adult male conversions, but it does inquire into some of the energy sources that are currently causing many more to quietly wonder what, indeed, is going on in England, Mary’s Dowry.

Of course, all books about the contemporary Church in most Western countries must first recognize that the single, immense “sacred canopy” (to use Peter Berger’s image) under which Catholic life was once conducted has been lowered, dismantled, and deserted. After Secularisation is no different in recognizing this reality. The leakage rates are both banal and astounding. There are around 7.2 million British adults who were baptized Catholic, but only 3.6 million of them identify as Catholics in surveys, and just 500,000 turn up for Mass on any given Sunday.

However, After Secularisation also presents quite a beguiling picture of small “umbrellas” being raised from spots on the ground where the great canopy has fallen, separately assuming its functions of both sheltering the faithful and bringing them together to form close-knit bands of disciples, but in more intimate, distinctive, and idiosyncratic ways. 

Five umbrella-raisers are identified. First, the revitalizers and re-inventors of parishes—at a time when the importance of “geographical” territory and attendance at “the church down the road” is giving way to the alternative of “existential” territory and immersion in the life of the church that most closely satisfies our felt spiritual needs, wherever this church is located. Second, the adherents of various youth organizations, from the international movement Youth 2000 to a group run by Nashville Dominican Sisters in a small town in Scotland. Third, the diasporic groupings—whether Ukrainian or Nigerian or Polish—contributing so strongly to the comparatively robust performance (when viewed against other denominations) of Catholicism in England. Fourth, the students rocking up in increasing numbers at university Catholic Societies. And fifth, the Latin Massers. 

After Secularisation thus invites the reader to assume the role of a silent partner on a road trip around Britain, peering under each umbrella to see what is going on and how people are feeling. The journey starts in West Bromwich: a post-industrial town in the Midlands, which, for those who do not know and love it, might act as a byword for humdrum. Here, a monthly convention run by Syro-Malabar Catholics attracts close to three thousand attendees. The road comes to an end in the north of England, in Preosta-tun, the Old English name for Preston, meaning Priests’ Town. Once a Catholic heartland, the liturgically traditionalist Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest has assumed responsibility for two churches here that might otherwise have closed and crumbled. 

This road trip prompts two big questions (at least) that this slim volume does not pretend to answer in full, but for which it will provide base camp in years to come.

First: Will the umbrellas one day grow large enough, and cluster together in sufficient numbers, to re-form a new kind of canopy—something more patchworked than before, but made sturdy through participation that is highly voluntarist and intentional? And this is a question with offshoots: Should deliberate efforts be made to manufacture unity among the umbrellas, and, if so, at what stage in their growth? Or should things be left entirely to providence?

Second: What are the risks that such vibrant diversity serves to mask hopeless divergence? The authors seem reasonably confident that the answer is “low.” Traditional liturgy and “being pastoral” is not, they observe, “a zero-sum game.” In the various sub-groups examined here, traditionalist or otherwise, expressions of doubt, or ignorance, or uncertainty, are not pounced upon as reasons to exclude. And, in the midst of innovations and reinventions, “holding on to what is unchanging, such as doctrine and liturgy,” remains possible. The book concludes by mounting the case for the benefits of Britain’s liturgical “long tail”: the 25 percent of weekly churchgoers found in different niches outside the dominant group attending a novus ordo Mass in their home parish. 

Interestingly, while I did not keep an exact count, I am fairly confident that the Catholic practice most frequently alluded to in the pages of After Secularisation, across all of the different groupings, is not Mass or confession, or Bible study or prayer groups—though they are all in there, of course—but adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. The prominence of adoration in the stories uncovered is perhaps significant. I struggle to think of anything more markedly countercultural in the whole array of Catholic ways and habits: hours spent in stillness gazing at or bowed before a single unmoving object when the general culture would have us scrolling through non-stop, noisy, twitchy thirty-second reels for hours on end.   

Why are the young in particular seeking it out? It may be that they have concluded—some tentatively, some more securely—that they have been sold a pup by the culture at large, in the shape of, as one young interviewee dubs it, the “hyper-individualistic, me-and-my-enlightenment approach” to life and meaning. Adoration, in all of its mystery, gentleness, and silence, is both a standing affront to modernity’s casually atheistic consensus and a refuge from the same. After all, to quote the agnostic Douglas Murray, although Richard Dawkins “may feel that he has solved our mystery—and although science has indeed solved part of it—the fact is that we do not feel solved.”  

This returns us to Jacob Phillips’s bewildered reverend father. What is “going on” is perhaps the outworkings of a generational realization—a realization that feeling more solved, or at least feeling a little less unsolved, is not a state that modernity can ever truly offer, despite all its noise and bravado, and despite the smorgasbord of exhilarating identities it spreads at our feet, all of them making excited claims about fulfillment. Instead, the answer waits—mysteriously, silently, eternally—on the other side of the doors of a church.

Image by Ackers72, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.