An Ambush of Hope on Maundy Thursday

There was I preparing my usual Maundy Thursday jeremiad on the crises of our time, the evaporation of meaning from our language and culture — all the usual things — when, all of a sudden, from various different sources, I was ambushed by a fusillade of extraordinary statistics.  In London’s largest Catholic diocese of Westminster, there has been a twenty-five per cent increase in adult baptisms in a single year; taking neighbouring Southwark into account, nearly a thousand adult Londoners will be baptised.  Across all churches in Britain there has been a fifty-five per cent increase in numbers since 2018.  Moreover, the growth is among young people: whereas in 2018 only 4% of 18–24-year-olds were regular church goers, that proportion has now risen to 16%, and of this number, 41% are Catholic.  Meanwhile, in France, there has been a record number (17,800) of adult baptisms, a growth of forty-five per cent in a single year.  Again, young people seem to be the driving force: an extraordinary 42% of those baptised are aged between 18–25.

Living in London, I have long had a sense of the vitality of the Church here, and it is remarkable to see now this hard evidence of a revival, of a New Evangelisation under way.  It is my privilege to count several of these recent converts among my friends, and I can attest to their dedication and energy; also to their level-headedness and prudence.  From them I draw the same conclusion as the statistics suggest: this is is no fad or emotional spasm, but the sum total of many careful decisions made after long thought and prayer, and a serious and genuine trend.  ‘Something is happening out there,’ as the American social commentator Mary Eberstadt has said, and it is as true on this side of the pond as it is on hers.

Screenshot from Catherine Pepinster’s article in the Telegraph, 13 April 2025: ‘The extraordinary resurgence of the Catholic faith in Britain’.

The situation has even piqued the interest of (largely secular) colleagues at (very secular) work, and on more than one occasion I have found myself fielding questions in, it seemed, an impromptu press conference.  They were intrigued enough to hazard their own explanations, many I think accurate: the crises of our time, both visible and invisible (in the first category, pandemic, war, climate change and the economy; in the second, of meaning, relationships and of the human body).  The degradation of our culture, the damage to the environment, the chaos of the online continent, the philosophical challenges posed by political upheavals and by the rise of the smartphone and by artificial intelligence… these are the crises that we all know about.  And also playing their part are the crises that the Church has, however unfashionably,  long been predicting, and which now even the secular world cannot avoid noticing: the collapse of trust and happiness between the sexes, the unsustainably low numbers of births, the decline of marriage and the prevalence of family breakdown.  (Another astonishing statistic from Versailles diocese was that 80% of catechumens in their twenties come from broken homes).

But the reason for the conversions is not necessarily, and certainly should not be, entirely negative.  It is not solely out of fear and uncertainty that we ‘turn to religion’ as my colleagues put it.  The explanation might be far simpler: that our spirits crave more than the sugary junk of a moral and cultural code that secular progressivism has been serving up for the last six decades, and that we long for more — that we hunger for beauty, truth and goodness — that we seek the face of God.

What is also inspiring is that many of these converts have found their way to the faith from quite a remote position: raised without a connection to the Church, they have set out and found their way home, in the face of all fashion, against all trends, and indeed, risking outright disapproval from all directions.  And in their search for meaning and clarity they have fallen for none of the insane ideologies waiting to scam their souls — or at least have not fallen for them permanently.  They have come to the Church that so many wrote off, mocked, dismissed, sought to smother.

But, this being Maundy Thursday, are we getting ahead of ourselves?  Statistics are only statistics: after all, in the early 1960s the seminaries were full, and few foresaw the decline that is still the general trend.  Professor Stephen Bullivant has said that, numerically, the Catholic Church is only doing the least badly of the Christian Churches; in 2023 Mass attendance in England and Wales was only 555,000, compared to pre-pandemic figure of 702,000.  And if in bleaker years we have remembered rightly that the Church does not depend on numbers, that ‘Truth draws strength from itself, not from the number of votes in its favour’, or that ‘where two or three gather in my name, there am I among them’, then increased numbers now do not in themselves make the faith any more or less true.  The disciples, arrived in Jerusalem for Passover, might have reckoned they had done a decent job over the previous three years, but events were imminently to render any performance appraisal utterly irrelevant, to leave their competencies as against agreed objectives quite beside the point.

Likewise we in the Church, soon to be blessed at the Easter Vigil with so many new brothers and sisters, know that this remarkable gift is not just the measure of mission statements and strategies — true though it is that a great deal of hard work and courage lies behind this new growth.  It is again a sign that God’s ways are not our ways, that we are His instruments in the New Evangelisation, not He ours.  And certainly, seeing things in this way, there is never a dull moment: it is at times like these that we see how dramatic the results can be.  

And speaking of drama, now we follow the disciples into the Upper Room, as evening falls, and the lamps are lit, and the shadows play around the walls…

The setting by Maurice Duruflé (1902–1986) of the Tantum ergo, sung by the French ensemble La Cité de la Voix in the Basilica of Sainte-Madeleine de Vézelay, Yonne.  ‘Therefore, so great a Sacrament / Let us venerate with heads bowed, / And let the old practice / Give way to the new rite; / Let faith provide a supplement / For the failure of the senses.’