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 the moral and cultural menu 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.’

In the Next Few Years

Half the battle, in these next few years, will be to keep our heads.  These are troubled, unreal, topsy-turvy times, and even leaving aside, if we can, the war in Ukraine, where the horrors of the 1940s have come howling back into our continent; even if we concentrate on our own society and culture, there is a widespread sense that the world has gone mad, and is going steadily madder. 

The first thing is not to follow it: we must not panic and go mad ourselves.  There are at least two false paths to be avoided — to give in and simply go along with the world’s insistent lunacies, or to allow ourselves to be goaded into an opposite, contrarian madness.  Both are easier than we think, even for honest and well-intentioned people.  Not for nothing do we speak of sanity as the state of being ‘well-balanced’, as a kind of equilibrium which has to be maintained, and which by implication it is more than possible to lose.  And such a balanced mind can indeed be hard to maintain, or to be sure of having maintained, especially if all around are losing theirs.

How, then, do we keep ourselves steady?  There is some considerable strength to be drawn simply from calm observation of the situation at hand.  With the right bearings we can, in all humility, taking into account our own flaws and follies, still have the confidence to point out the world’s madnesses, and to be sure that they are indeed the world’s, and not ours.  We can say that women and men, though radically equal in dignity, are also different from each other in certain essential ways, and that the blurring of such distinctions carries great risks, including to that same equal dignity.  We can say that an undue preoccupation with racial and ethnic characteristics, even with the ostensible goal of eradicating unjust prejudice, will actually do more harm than good to race relations.  We can say that the freedom of adults must not take precedence over the flourishing of children.  We can say that political causes do not make good religions.  And so on.  It helps simply to be able to say these things, to reassure ourselves that we at least have kept our heads.

 

All the same, the situation we find ourselves describing may still be a grave one.  We churchgoers, for instance, are trying not to find particularly daunting the displacement, by means of a potent blend of secularist, materialist and progressivist ideologies, of the Christian imagination of Europe: a process which has been going on for several centuries but which seems in our times to be ascending to a new climax.  Now because we are churchgoers we know too, of course, that this is nothing new.  The forces of chaos — and human beings in general — have been in rebellion against God and good sense since time immemorial.  We saw it yesterday, on Good Friday, which I find more shocking with every passing year.  The silent treachery of Judas, the queasy pragmatism of Pilate before the hissing Sanhedrin, the spittle-flecked blood-thirst of the mindless mob, Peter’s three (three!) denials, the exquisite ingenuity of the malevolence of the soldiers, the agony beyond agony of the road to Golgotha and the anguish of the Mother who stood beside it, the skull-stark desolation of the Cross itself, and then the final, unthinkable horror actually coming to pass: ‘He bowed his head and gave up his spirit.’  We were not there, and yet in truth we are there all the time.  For we know what this is all about: we have all heard of such things, or witnessed them, or indeed committed them; it is the history of the world.  Yes, we know all this.  And yet, since the forces of rebellion take different forms in different times and places, it is possible to make observations about the particular circumstances of different ages; and in our own day, it seems to me, the various threats to the Church add up to something that is without precedent in history.  

In part this is because these threats are not usually overtly violent: they are often invisible or intangible as well as appearing sophisticated and civilised, and therefore more insidious, disorienting and difficult to oppose.  So, for instance, here in Britain we have, in only a century or so, and with scarcely any controversy, transformed ourselves from an at least outwardly Christian civilisation into a largely secular-progressive one.  Perhaps because the trend itself has remained constant for most of our lifetimes we might not realise how great a shock this is, but we should not underestimate its effect: even taking into account the atheism and scepticism already widespread in the British establishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it amounts to a swift and drastic revolution, and one by which we have made serious alterations to the moral and ethical foundations and fabric of our society.  Partly it came about by the sheer cost of the the two world wars, whose shattering violence left intangible things as well as tangible beyond straightforward repair: social solidarity, love of country, standards of decency, trust in institutions.  Then since the war we have had the Revolution of the Self, a phenomenon that Ed West has gone so far as to call a second Reformation, and whose general coarsening and cheapening influence successfully ushered in a radical transformation of our understanding of family, morality, culture and of truth itself.  The attack was deep, determined and aimed more or less directly at Christian morality.  Wise and brave people sounded warnings to no avail.

In recent years, though, something else has begun to happen.  Partly it is something we might have been expecting: some kind of counter-reaction to that Revolution of the Self, as the sheer magnitude of the cost of its false promises became clear.  Something along these lines has now indeed begun to materialise, but it not the sort of thing we might have hoped for.  Angry beyond coherence, it rails indiscriminately against more or less anything that is inherited from the past, so that, instead of vindication for the Church, we now, to our horror, find ourselves actually lumped in with the Sixties revolutionaries, as if we straightforwardly share the blame for the problems they caused.  Never mind that it is the Church that has, say, warned most strongly and consistently against the myth of ‘free love’: no, the traditional Christian understanding of marriage is still considered as grave a threat to the fulfilment of women as the post-Sixties status quo.  Likewise, in the renewed focus on the wounds left by the slave trade, there is scant acknowledgement of the Christian motivations of the abolitionists, still less a willingness to make the distinction between the teaching of a religion and the decision by some nations and individuals at times to disregard this teaching.  We might also have hoped for any counter-revolution to have a cleansing, refreshing effect on our culture and language, and to restore some of the old care and courtesy in self-expression, but what has happened instead is that new and arbitrary speech-codes have been drawn up, so that we are terribly nervous about words like ‘Christmas’ and ‘Easter’ or ‘man’ and ‘woman’ or ‘unborn baby’, while the public conversation in general remains as casually crass and foul-mouthed as ever — and they accuse us of using hurtful language.  It is all deeply unfair and demoralising.

A hostile culture is by no means an unprecedented proposition for the Church.  But what seems different in our own time — what makes our mission a New Evangelisation — is precisely this complexity, this many-layeredness of the hostility of the twenty-first-century West towards the Church to which it owes so much.  We are not dealing with straightforward persecution, but a sulky, cynical, irreverent, suspicious, yet also strangely gullible society.  Meanwhile it often feels as if the Church has no traction, no way on it; that we lack the language and credibility to address the world (though this is partly our own fault as well).  The words of the Gospel, however rich and life-giving they may sound within our sanctuaries, can seem to ring hollow or trite in the stale atmosphere outside.

In the face of all this, our feelings, too, are complex.  We might be fearful of being wrong-footed by our culture’s many self-contradictions, never mind embarrassed by its vulgarity and narcissism.  We know we need a new kind of courage, and a great deal of it.  All this understandably makes us hesitant about what to do next.  

There is often, too, a sense of not only being attacked but tormented and goaded.  To use the famous phrase of Benedict XVI (to whom Happy Birthday, for he turns ninety-five today!), the steadily consolidating ‘dictatorship of relativism’ — which, as he put it so presciently, ‘does not recognise anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires’ — has brought about some maddening, bewildering situations.  For instance, we are witnessing simultaneously this aforementioned obsession with fundamentally unimportant distinctions regarding ethnicity, yet also the vehement rejection of essential and crucial distinctions between the sexes.  To take another example, the long revolution against marriage has not demolished it straightforwardly, as one might have feared in the Sixties, but instead captured and refashioned it in a new image by means of sleight of hand and word games.  For the meaning of such a fundamental word to change underneath our feet, for it to be stripped of its transcendent, cosmic significance and shrunk to something beholden to human whim, is almost more dismaying than plain iconoclasm would have been.  It was not enough for marriage to be destroyed; it had to be disfigured and then destroyed.  It is not enough for abortion to be permitted as a necessary evil or last resort; it must now be championed as a positive good and a civil right.  It is not enough that the Church should be defeated — the Church must be humiliated and then defeated.  Truth must be twisted and then toppled.  Christ must not only be crucified; He must be mocked and crucified.

This being Holy Saturday, these words are necessarily sombre.  I know that, amid all these woes, opportunities for good are emerging all the time — such as the fact that most ordinary people, whether believers or not, remain reassuringly normal and sane; or the youth and vitality of the pro-life movement — and also that, every minute of every day, we have the unwavering assurance of Providence that all manner of thing shall, in the end, be well.  But even if all evil is ultimately in retreat — even if any advancing menace or host can only hope for a Pyrrhic victory, and a temporary one at that — this Triduum gives us the opportunity to acknowledge the dreadful strength that evil can and does wield.  Evil is frightening; it roars and ambushes and twists the knife and goads us even as it wounds us.

But however many bearings we feel we are losing, we always have the faith and the saints and the True North of the Mass.  For alongside the long history of human power and human misery is the other, parallel, unsung history, forgotten by the chronicles but every bit as true: the history of all the Masses said every day, all the prayers uttered, as well as all the words and deeds of kindness and courage done by people of good will.  It is by this compass, always present, never erring, that we keep ourselves sane and rooted.  Let it be recorded, not on this ephemeral blog but in hearts and minds now and in years to come, that even in these unreal years there were those who still believed in the eternal verities, who still cared about the inheritance of their forefathers; who cherished such things and passed them to their descendants in the confident hope that evil shall in the end be outlasted, outweighed and outdone by good.  If we do this, then we shall have kept our heads; if we keep our heads, then that will be half the battle won; and a half-won battle is one we can hope to win outright.  Let us keep heart too, then, as well as our heads, so that generations to come will enjoy heart’s ease and happiness in a gentler culture, a fairer society, and a world closer than our own to the will of its Creator.

DrewCR2 · There is a green hill

The too-seldom-heard setting by Herbert Sumsion (1899–1995) of Cecil Frances Alexander’s hymn ‘There is a green hill far away’, sung here by the choristers of Grimsby Parish Church, directed by Andrew Cantrill, and with the organ played by David Leigh.  I have a soft spot for ingenuous Victorian Evangelical hymns like these, and the fine balance they strike between sentimentality and starkness.

He died that we might be forgiven,

He died to make us good,

That we might go at last to Heaven,

Saved by His precious blood.

Ten Years Since Benedict’s Visit

Pope Benedict leaves Lambeth Palace for Westminster, 17th September, 2010

Already it has been ten years since Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain.   Ten years, then, of tea twice daily from my souvenir ‘Papal Mug’ (I make that over seven thousand cups), and ten years, too, that my life has been on the course on which those four days confirmed me: a course with a particular direction, with a particular confidence, in the service of a particular Person.  I cannot be the only one for whom the whole experience helped to affirmed and clarified all that matters most in life, and indeed what life really is.  So, not least because it also happened at a formative time for me, on the threshold of university, I remember the Papal Visit with great happiness, and continue to draw strength from its memory.  It will remain a high moment for the rest of my days.

The long-serving Papal Mug

This had not always seemed likely, however.  One way and another, the months before the visit constituted a rather unpleasant prelude, in which whole swathes of the press and media engaged in an eight-month campaign of hostile publicity not simply against the idea of the visit, but often explicitly and unashamedly against the person of the Pope and the Catholic Church as a whole.  The opposition, overwhelmingly secularist-atheist in character, often went well beyond legitimate criticism of the Church’s institutional failings, or reasonable scrutiny of public expenditure, and curdled swiftly into ill-veiled hatred of the Christian faith itself.  Commentators who ought to have known better indulged in highly personal attacks on Pope Benedict’s character, or fulminated against caricatures of Catholic teaching, or simply ranted against religious belief in general.  Crazed calumnies about Joseph Ratzinger’s supposed corruption or Nazi sympathies or authoritarianism, all nonsense and all child’s play to refute, were sent gleefully off to the printers instead of the compost-heap where they belonged.  Deep down, of course, what these commentators really disliked was Benedict’s resistance to moral relativism; his quiet insistence on the absolute truth of the whole of Catholic Christianity, including those aspects that our age finds difficult.

The most enthusiastic opponents organised themselves into an outfit calling itself ‘Protest the Pope’ (American style — they didn’t even have the decency to protest against the Pope in the British and prepositionally proper manner!).  It was extraordinary to see how much they loathed the Church, or at least what they mistook for the Church; it was both sobering and instructive for us to hear things said and left to stand which, if uttered against almost any other visitor to this country, let alone any other religious leader, would have been seen by all for the smears they were.  The ‘Protest the Pope’ gang was from the outset both very silly and very small, but it received such disproportionately generous airtime from the media that things at one stage began to look serious.  Would Richard Dawkins and his accomplices actually attempt a stunt like a ‘citizen’s arrest’ of Pope Benedict, ridiculous as it sounded? Were they seriously going to ruin the whole thing?  It is by inducing such anxiety that many bullies work, intimidating others as much by their threats as by their actual deeds.  Even in March there was a sense that the whole visit might be in jeopardy:

Some would oppose this proclaimer of peace;
Some disbelieve what he wants to increase;
Some would believe that the world has no hope;
Others know why we must welcome the Pope.

Some have more interest in money than God;
Some are content to give anger the nod;
Others, who know what is built on this rock,
Welcome his peace.  Let him come to his flock.

Well, in the end, this prayer was answered, thank God.  For at last the day came, and the moment Pope Benedict landed in Scotland, the mood changed utterly.  No sooner had all and sundry seen what he was really like, and the public’s true attitude became clear, than the press changed its tune.  The hatred and opprobrium vanished; it was shown to have been over-amplified, even illusory; it was gone with barely a whimper.  ‘Protest the Pope’ simply ceased to be relevant.  There was no longer anything to fear, and we bore our disparagers no ill will.  The BBC, transformed, began excellent and thorough coverage of the visit.  (It is so often the way with the Corporation that it does come up with the goods in the end, when it knows the world is watching!).  Above all, Pope Benedict received the warm and triumphant welcome he deserved, and there followed in succession four days of remarkable gestures, images and experiences.

What strikes me, in retrospect, is to see the different ways in which these moments worked and touched us: though always the same man, he was visiting us in various different guises.  Here was a head of state, a pastor to guide his flock, a thinker with ideas to contribute to our cultural and social conversation, a missionary to a land forgetful of God, and a priest entrusted by Christ with His authority and consolation.  He was both ‘world leader’ and ‘humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord’, and a figure of interest even to non-Catholics, even to non-Christians, including some of my own friends.  This many-layeredness was evident from Pope Benedict’s very first engagement, his meeting with the Queen in Edinburgh.  This being a state visit, the first of any Pope to the British Isles — St. John Paul II’s 1982 journey having been technically a ‘pastoral visit’ — Benedict was, formally speaking, Her Majesty’s guest and counterpart.  But, in the very same moment, the head of the Church of Rome was greeting the head of the Church of England, and the healing of old religious as well as political wounds was continued.  Most simply, and perhaps most importantly, we saw two people who understand and believe the Christian faith and share its hope, who know both the burden and the importance of duty, offering by their steadfast example quiet encouragement to millions of people.  So it was that, even within the first hour, Benedict had touched the people of Britain in the national, the ecclesiastical and the personal spheres.

The day in Scotland concluded with a Mass in Bellahouston Park (with a specially-composed Mass setting by James MacMillan), and the next day, the seventeenth, the Pope came down to London.  That afternoon a group of friends and I went to see if we could catch a glimpse of him leaving Lambeth Palace on his way to Westminster.  Now at last I could see for myself just how mistaken the media had been in the months beforehand.  The mood among the waiting multitude on Lambeth Bridge was one of unalloyed excitement; open delight was alive in this city that is often so jaded and cold-shouldered.  The anticipation steadily grew and grew, until a ripple of cheers rose to our right… all at once the Pope-mobile was in view, sweeping rapidly towards us — and there he was!  A wave of jubilation accompanied Benedict across the bridge in the twixt-season afternoon sunlight.

Only an hour later, the Pope was giving his remarkable speech in Westminster Hall, a speech which remains no less urgently relevant a decade later:

The role of religion in political debate is […] to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. This “corrective” role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed, though, partly because distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems themselves.  And in their turn, these distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion.  It is a two-way process.  Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person.  Such misuse of reason, after all, was what gave rise to the slave trade in the first place and to many other social evils, not least the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century.  This is why I would suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilization.

Religion, in other words, is not a problem for legislators to solve, but a vital contributor to the national conversation.  In this light, I cannot but voice my concern at the increasing marginalization of religion, particularly of Christianity, that is taking place in some quarters, even in nations which place a great emphasis on tolerance. […] I would invite all of you, therefore, within your respective spheres of influence, to seek ways of promoting and encouraging dialogue between faith and reason at every level of national life.

Pope Benedict XVI, Meeting with the Representatives of British Society, 17th September 2010. <http://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2010/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20100917_societa-civile.html>

Then came the first visit by any Pope to Westminster Abbey, and sung Evensong.  For those who love England and long for Christian Unity, it was greatly moving to see the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope embracing and kneeling side by side in prayer before the shrine of St Edward the Confessor — and then what a sheer treat to hear the music of Herbert Howells thundering from the organ, and the beloved hymn beginning — 

All my hope on God is founded:
He doth still my trust renew.
Me through change and chance He guideth,
Only good and only true.
God unknown,
He alone
Calls my heart to be His own.

Some readers might wonder: why all this excitement for one man?  Well, of course, the Pope is a mortal like all of us.  But the office he holds goes all the way back to Christ; the first of his predecessors was St Peter himself, to whom Christ turned and said ‘You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church’.  So he is Christ’s earthly representative — though the authority entrusted to him is not simply raw power to do with what he likes; rather, his is the responsibility of the hand on the tiller and the eye on the horizon.  He keeps the Church together on the straight and narrow through time and space, so that the one eternal Gospel can be proclaimed anew in every age.  This responsibility remains whether or not the Pope himself is a good or a bad man — though it obviously helps if he is a good one.  That Benedict himself is a kind and gentle man, blazingly intelligent and perceptive to the crises and opportunities of our time, only gave us more reasons to love him when he was Pope.

Procession of parish banners in London’s Hyde Park, 18th September

The summit of his 2010 visit was to be the beatification of the much-loved Cardinal — now Saint — John Henry Newman, at Cofton Park on the outskirts of Birmingham.  But it was the vigil the evening before in London’s Hyde Park that was the high point in my book.  As on Lambeth Bridge, it was the atmosphere that made this gathering extraordinary.  The first hint was at at Victoria station, where a proliferation of the distinctive yellow bags with which we had all been issued drew my eye to a large group of fellow pilgrims.  There was a feeling of recognition, of fellowship, of deep togetherness, not in the least bit oppressive, but refreshing and liberating, which only swelled as we converged on Hyde Park.  As we realised how many we were, the great cultural headwind subsided, and another, sweeter spirit took its place.  Eighty thousand of us all together — I had never been in a gathering that size — and with no need of an enemy for our unity.  Yet for all that volume of people, it felt rather like a family gathering, which of course is exactly what it was.  It was such a simple thing, for us all to meet like that together, but even then I knew the memory would be so happy that it would last for years.  Great assemblies of people can be joyful or they can be ugly… but here we had all fallen in with a very good crowd.

Pope Benedict arrives at London’s Hyde Park, 18th September

And we young people present could see for ourselves, by our own sheer numbers, that we were not as alone in our beliefs and hopes as we might feel in ordinary life.  We all went wild when Pope Benedict arrived, of course, but the hush that descended at Adoration was more memorable, and more unique.  What else would bring about such a moment?  Who else could deliver such a lucid, sincere, quietly but deeply stirring address, with that way of calling us ‘Dear young friends…’ as no mere celebrity or political ideologue would do?  Here was a man who knew how seriously young people want to take life, who knew the depth of our hunger for truth and wisdom, who would not patronise us, offering us a serious speech which was also a message of great joy.  He called us not to mere comfort or apathy or fruitless self-indulgence, but to truth and to greatness and to love — the real thing, measured not by the world’s standard but in a higher currency.  Quoting the same John Henry Newman he was to declare a near-saint on the morrow, he urged us to see dwell deeply on our vocations.  He gave us not the off-hand secular doctrine that drawls at us to do as we please, but the call first to discern and then to follow the true path that God has in mind for us, and thereby to discover the only way to real happiness and real greatness:

Here I wish to say a special word to the many young people present.  Dear young friends: only Jesus knows what “definite service” he has in mind for you.  Be open to his voice resounding in the depths of your heart: even now his heart is speaking to your heart.  Christ has need of families to remind the world of the dignity of human love and the beauty of family life.  He needs men and women who devote their lives to the noble task of education, tending the young and forming them in the ways of the Gospel.  He needs those who will consecrate their lives to the pursuit of perfect charity, following him in chastity, poverty and obedience, and serving him in the least of our brothers and sisters.  He needs the powerful love of contemplative religious, who sustain the Church’s witness and activity through their constant prayer.  And he needs priests, good and holy priests, men who are willing to lay down their lives for their sheep.  Ask our Lord what he has in mind for you! Ask him for the generosity to say “yes!”   

Pope Benedict XVI, Address at Hyde Park, 18th September 2010. <https://thepapalvisit.org.uk/home/replay-the-visit/day-three/the-holy-fathers-hyde-park-vigil-address/>

Perhaps it was then that I knew I belonged to the Benedict Generation.  Most thoughtful young people do indeed hunger for some great mission; they do want to be called to marriage or to make some great vow of love; they are drawn to authenticity and integrity; they yearn for worthy and meaningful lives and to pursue truth and goodness; they want to know how to help others, and how to understand the world and the mystery of life.  

There could hardly have been better words ringing in my ears as I began the adventure of university.  I was to encounter the spirit of the Benedict Generation again at Fisher House, the student chaplaincy, where I learned that the Faith is intelligent as well as beautiful.  I was to find it in new friends I have made in the years since.  I was to see it in churches and at lectures.  I know I was not alone in this — it is alive in the articulateness of Catholic Voices, and in the lives of many Catholics now in their twenties and thirties.  It is also worth mentioning Paschal Uche, who delivered an address to Pope Benedict on behalf of all young people in Westminster Cathedral’s Piazza the morning before the Hyde Park vigil.  Since his ordination last month he has been Father Pascal: the call he discerned was a vocation to the priesthood.  In short, we in the Benedict Generation know what we learned from our German Shepherd, and will draw strength from that treasure-store for ever.

The Hyde Park vigil begins

So it was that those four days made certain things very clear to me at an important moment.  Whereas I had already been well aware that that the Christian faith was hardly the in-thing in the twenty-first century, the visit’s prelude showed me that a significant cohort of fashionable secularist Britain, not content with mere mockery, hated it outright.  But they did not have the last word, nor did they even speak for most ordinary British people, who remained their usual tolerant (or at least rather apathetic!) selves.  For the visit itself revealed the groundlessness and weakness of the hatred — of all hatred — before the strange strength by which inner goodness and holiness drive out evil; the way in which (to quote Douglas Gresham, C. S. Lewis’s step-son) ‘Christianity simply works.’   

How could people hate a man so gentle as Benedict?  The situation presented a clear choice to me.  Whose side was I on?  Was I to go along with fashion, or to be loyal to my Church and my faith, even if this meant dissenting from the spirit of the age?  Yes, I would be I was on Benedict’s side, the side of the Church, and the side of Him whom the Church worships.  I knew where my loyalties lay, and I have never since had cause to regret that choice.  Even when Catholic life requires courage and hard work and unwanted conspicuousness, and however clumsy my efforts, it does not call on any strength that it cannot also supply.  It is the only way.  As they sang in Westminster Abbey, 

Christ doth call one and all:
Ye who follow shall not fall.

Thank you, dear Pope Emeritus Benedict!  May God bless you!  And, as you asked on arriving in our land, “may all Britons continue to live by the values of honesty, respect and fair-mindedness that have won them the esteem and admiration of many.”

40,000 gather for ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ 2019

The writers Joseph Pearce and K. V. Turley have observed that it is often quite ordinary, out-of-the-way places that God chooses for his purposes: Walsingham, Lourdes, even Nazareth and Bethlehem themselves.  I wonder whether something similar is true of Sybiraków Park in the suburbs of the Polish city of Rzeszów.  By all appearances this broad open space, with its municipal playing-fields overlooked by blocks of flats, is exemplary in its plainness, having its commonplace counterparts in every major town and city on earth.  But every year, in early summer, as dusk falls on the feast of Corpus Christi, this place is so transfigured that, in truth, it comes to resemble very little else on earth.  For one evening it becomes the setting of the ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ concerts of open-air hymn-singing, whose story I have tried to tell elsewhere in these pages.

This year, on the 20th June, after months of rehearsal, the big stage was set up for the seventeenth time, large enough to accommodate the choir, orchestra, soloists and other musicians.  There, according to Rzeszów News, they were joined by some forty thousand people, who raised their voices in prayerful song as dusk fell.  The claim to the title of ‘Europe’s largest concert of Christian music’ does not seem so unreasonable: the aerial photos speak for themselves.

These concerts have such an uplifting quality to them.  Partly that is because there is no compromise on musicianship: a great deal of time and trouble is taken for the preparations, both the performance and the arrangements, which are mainly the work of the musical director, the film composer and jazz musician Marcin Pospieszalski.  Maybe not all the music is to everyone’s taste, nor even to mine (I tend to prefer the orchestral arrangements, where the majesty and solemnity of the choir and orchestra are allowed to flourish): it is mainly the idea and the atmosphere that I am praising.  But the musical repertoire has been really carefully chosen so that most of the music will lift the spirits of most of the people there, and some of the numbers are irresistible.  The idea of giving favourite hymns uplifting and rich arrangements is, I think, thoroughly inspired — every little detail that Pospieszalski puts in adds to the overall spirit of beauty in truth, and to the dramatic, even ‘epic’, dimension of the faith.  The music comes from every age and corner of the Church: medieval plainsong, traditional hymns, translated versions of more recently-written songs from America, and some new music from Poland itself, all leavened and deepened by the forces of orchestra and choir.  You could take your girl friend or your grandmother to these concerts — in fact the idea is probably that you should take both.

This is because the concert’s foundation is spiritual, as well as musical.  Nobody is suggesting that this is a substitute for going to church and receiving the sacraments, but it is, I think, something semi-sacramental, popular piety for the twenty-first century, drawing people into real and authentic togetherness.  Something brings those forty thousand souls closer together than ordinary audiences or crowds.  The originator of the idea, Jan Budziaszek — who even in Poland could not find the resources to get his idea off the ground for twenty years — has an oft-repeated refrain which runs along these lines: ‘Do you want to hear good music?  Then make it yourself!  Because the heart of man is never truly happy unless he is giving to someone else’.  At a given point in the concert, the voice of St John Paul II is played over the speakers: this year the multitude (as JPII would have called them) heard words of encouragement to men and women to marry, to vow not to leave each other until death, and to keep that vow.  And the organisers add words of their own which would be unthinkable in sullener lands further west: ‘May our entire society be freed from this illusion of freedom, free love… Too much this illusion costs.  Too many children are made to lose trust in their parents, so that the indispensable ground on which they themselves have to build their future, and the future of society, gives way’.  The concert’s organisers are at pains to point out that it is not a performance or a show: it is a gathering, ‘nasza Rodzina JSJD’, ‘our JSJD Family’, in which thousands of people, unified in prayer and song, are made — according to the concert’s name — ‘of one heart and of one spirit’.

A sight like this may seem unbelievable to us in Western Europe, but it is a glorious reality in Poland, which I think has a jewel in this astonishing annual tradition of musicianship with its vital air of togetherness, which has no need to rely on an enemy or a scapegoat for its unity.  This is what, say, Ireland could easily have been — or even Britain, at a stretch.  Has the different path that we have chosen been worth it?  Well, in the choice between the dullness and ennui of self-centred secularism, and the joy of an occasion like this, the answer is clear enough to me.  This is the New Evangelisation in action.  Long may these concerts prosper.

‘Wykrzykujcie Bogu, wykrzykujcie Królowi’: an adaptation of the forty-seventh (forty-sixth) Psalm (‘Clap your hands, cry to God with shouts of joy’).  Music originally by Marcin Gajda, arranged by Marcin Pospieszalski.

Youth, the Faith and Vocation: seven thoughts

On the list of urgent matters to discuss in this world waist-deep in crisis, I can easily see that the lives of young adults do not come first.  More immediately pressing matters tend to push their hopes and anxieties into the background.  Still, these hopes and anxieties are there; they do not go away, and behind the louder elements, whose politicised protests are seldom representative of the whole, they accumulate into a silent mountain to which it is difficult to do justice.  

The world’s bishops, assisted by young lay representatives and others, has recently had a go at doing them justice, though, gathering in Rome for a Synod over the course of October to discuss ‘Young People, the Faith and Vocational Discernment’.  ‘What is life like for you?’, the Catholic Church has been asking its young members, those aged 16-29, this past year.  ‘How do you find your faith and work out your calling?  And what about young people who are not in the Church… or no longer in the Church?… What are your lives like; what meaning do you think the Church has?’  It is the Church’s business to help is in working out the meaning and purpose of our lives.

The Synod’s final report has just been released.  I have been meaning to write about it here long before now — ever since it was announced, in fact — not least because I fall squarely into the age bracket in question.  It is not a lack of interest that has silenced my keyboard.  I have been thinking and reading quite a lot about it all, and following the Synod’s progress.  I filled in the Church’s official online questionnaire earlier this year, and in the early summer attended three invigorating meetings of young adults with the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, before he went off to the Synod.  So I feel that I have managed to repay the bishops’ frank appeal for views with some considered answers.  But I have not added much to the online conversation, having been left with too many thoughts to hammer out easily into a concise blog article.  Only now have I managed to boil them down to these seven, so that, for my own satisfaction at least, I can record my own point of view before I read the final document.  What do any readers think — do these sound true and fair?

1.  How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
Human nature never changes; one of many thunderbolts to strike me while at university was to read the Pensées of Pascal with their freshness of informal jottings.  But history does change, of course, and just now even seems to be actually accelerating into the ever-uncharted territory of the future, even as mankind’s joys and sorrows remain the same.  So the Church’s mission, to go out and bring mankind home to God’s house, is desperately urgent, especially where history is changing most quickly: among young people.

I am an ordinary rank-and-file pew-filling Mass-goer, living and working amid the pulsing tumult of London, belonging proudly to the ‘Benedict Generation’ who came of age in faith under Pope Benedict XVI’s gently determined steersmanship.  To me the Church is truth and home.  But for huge numbers of young people my age this is clearly not the case.  To most of my contemporaries, even those of good will, the Church means little or nothing: an unnecessary and obsolescent encumbrance, rather than a life-giving stronghold of joy and encouragement.   I think also of the members of my parish’s Youth Choir, aged between nine and sixteen, who will be young adults themselves sooner than we suppose, and the scale of our task weighs heavily on me.  I think of the forces ranged against them, all the other ideas and lifestyles that clamour for their allegiance, the dazzling superficiality of the secular universe, and of the gulf of distraction and misunderstanding that threatens to separate them, or already separates them from the hearth of the Church.

The Synod has come not a moment too soon.  I know, because I have grown up with them, how deeply relativism and individualism have sunk their teeth into the young men and women of my generation here in the West, and how far away and foreign the Church appears to them.  The name Jesus Christ means, to many, merely a harmless spiritual teacher who lived long ago and may have had some sensible things to say which have since been improved on anyway.  The shocking idea that He was God, and then that He took on our nature, body and soul, walked and breathed and worked as we do, and suffered as we do to the point of death, and then was resurrected, thereby giving us too real hope in resurrection after death, is not merely strange to them, but it has never really been articulated to them.  The same goes for the idea that He may be still be encountered and befriended.  It is gone: if this knowledge was understood in previous generations, it has not been passed on and is forgotten now.  In the Church I think we already know this… but have somehow been slow, or even afraid, to contemplate the reality unblinkingly for ourselves (though I know that some observers’ gaze has been very clear and unwavering).  The New Evangelisation is urgent; it was urgent twenty, thirty, seventy years ago.  The reality is that many good people have no religious sense at all.

But nature abhors a vacuum.  Into the new void other ways of thinking and believing — new creeds, though they would never describe themselves in that way — have come rushing, and they are increasingly making their presence felt.  They do not necessarily declare themselves overtly to be enemies of the Church.  They sound nice and reasonable, at least at first, and certainly seem to make life easier.  They may even contain a great deal of truth, but in comparison to the Christian faith they are short-sighted and half-hearted, proclaiming a truncated, stooped vision of man, because they lack the sure, crazy foundation of love.  These new religions encourage us to place the weight of our faith in scientific progress, or governments, or unfettered liberty, or in political action, or social engineering, or in Me, the Ego, to solve our problems and fill the chasm of longing within.  In placing the individual at the centre of our lives, they leave us with an alarmingly blank slate when it comes to morality: we can do just as we please, provided we do not prevent anybody else from doing the same.  The new creeds claim to be harmless heralds of peace and freedom for all, but a nastier side can be revealed when they encounter resistance in the form of the Church’s teaching.  This is the dictatorship of relativism, which has nothing to say to those who hunger for more than the ‘OK culture’, and hope to live life to the full, to work out what life is really all about and to pursue heroic holiness, nor to those conscious of having done wrong and who search for true forgiveness, not for mere excuses.  In twenty-first century Britain, people still prove themselves capable of breathtaking acts of goodness, but a willing myopia shies away from asking why.  What lies beneath our common urge towards kindness, and behind the mystery of our simultaneous aversion towards and tendency to surrender to evil?  Nobody asks; it is as if we would rather not know.  Most of the moral values and ideas that survive in the secular world have a Christian origin, but that origin is allowed to be obscured, and the ancient philosophical pillars of strength that underlie them, and the revelation that lightened them, are not spoken of.  And anyway, in modern life, there is simply no time to think too much about these things, nor to seek anything approaching transcendence.  There is always something else that needs doing. Ours is a tired, unhappy culture, atomised in its homogenaeity; we are a great crowd of lonely individuals, constantly in search of something new to place on the altar where God should be.

In such a world, reverence is revolutionary and orthodoxy is rebellion. Going to Mass, even, often has a deliciously conspiratorial feeling about it, as if the Church were an underground resistance movement.  (That is partly because it is).  If for our parents’ generation it already took courage to go to church and to assent to the Creed with a straight face, for ours it is now actually subversive.   It really is counter-cultural and there really are people who hate the Church.  To be Catholic in these circumstances is often bracing for young people with fire in the blood.  But often it is tiring and isolating, too.

2.  The Question of Trust
There are many reasons why I am Catholic, and also many different kinds of reasons.  Among those reasons are people whose example vindicates the faith in my mind.  I am not the first, having traced good things to their roots, to decide that if such roots are good enough for certain people I have known, they are good enough for me.  Having admired and been impressed by these people, I have come to have trust the moral foundation on which they have built their lives.  I have confidence in what Church says about life.

I hardly need reminding of the wrongdoing that goes on in the Church.  I know that trust is its first casualty.   I do not wish to dismiss it glibly, but am aware it needs its own article if it is to be dealt with properly.  For now I will say that the first hope is this: that the Church has always acknowledged unequivocally that such wrongdoing directly contradicts her own standards, which are totally set in stone.  No excuses can be made for it.  Mercy is always there, it is true, but on Heaven’s terms, not our own.

But meanwhile it is hard to overstate how urgently the Church needs to make herself trustworthy.  Young people are in particular need of something to trust, and there is no shortage of movements in search of their confidence who could easily win too much of it: advertisers, political movements, Twitterers in search of disciples, professional cliques, gangs, to say nothing of those currents of thought that directly oppose the Church in their view of the dignity of life, marriage, wisdom, the law, the poor and so on.  All of those movements, though, have ulterior motives.  Who will love and affirm young people in their own right, for their own sake?  Above all the Church, it seems to me.  Dear reader, the Church will always affirm the absolute and irreducible dignity of your life, even when nobody else will — even if you yourself deny it — and what is more, can tell you why.

Young people hunger to do good, but often need confidence first.  The Church can give them that confidence and encourage them in difficulty.  We cannot outdo the secular world in slickness, but it is we who have authenticity.  So we need to be radiantly authentic.  That means that we must become good examples and living proof that the Church’s message is as valid and as fresh as it has ever been… living proof of the unwavering presence of Christ in the world.

3. Boldness
Our situation is now that the Church has to work hard to earn the trust that is placed in it, whether from within or without.  The Church should also repay this trust.  And I feel that one of the best ways to repay it is to be proclaim its own message boldly and confidently.  The Church needs to speak with authority, which does not mean with aggression or arrogance, but it does imply the courage to lock horns with the world if necessary.  I cannot be the only young Catholic whose experience of modern British culture is generally that of a head-wind.  It is so easy to sense our courage sapping without the Church at full steam beside us, trusting in God, reassuring us that the counter-cultural course we have set is worth the risk.

And the Church can do this because this authority comes from above.  This is at least one advantage we have over the secular world: we assert things not only because they sound good and we want them to be true, but because they are true, whether we like it or not.

4. The Vanguard of Anti-Cynicism
At one of the meetings of young adults at Archbishop’s House, Cardinal Vincent made some striking remarks about cynicism.  Answering a question on another topic, he suddenly spoke with some feeling of cynicism’s ‘corrosive effects’ on society and on individuals.  I wanted to burst into applause: he had articulated something I realise I have felt for a long time.  After the meeting I managed to thank him for his words, and again he lamented the prevalence of this cynical atmosphere; it was "everywhere in the papers", he said.  It is a kind of hardening of heart, and there are places in which it is so pervasive as to be more or less compulsory.  For example, it held absolute sway over my schoolmates between the ages of twelve and eighteen, so that it was seldom possible to have a serious conversation with anyone, and hardly anything anyone said was actually meant.  No high ideals, no hero-worships, no debates with any sincerity.  I know that this attitude is often adopted simply for the sake of self-preservation, but this does not make it any less caustic.  Even now that my generation has reached adulthood I often hear it lurking just beneath the surface, curdling laughter into sniggering, riddling the meanings of words with holes like wood-worm, corroding the sword of justice with sardonic resignation or bitter indifference, and hardening people against each other.  Some of my peers seem unable to turn it off.  It also gnaws away at beauty.  Look at what it has done to our art, music and poetry; look at the lovers of beauty it has beleagured.

But the Church is a stronghold against this caustic cynicism and irony.   I believe that we  lovers and defenders of good and gentle things  have no better fortress than the  Church from which to launch gleeful raids against cynicism, armed with the words and artistry to speak of beauty, delight, diamond innocence, and the pathos of the human condition.

This is not to overlook the cynicism that many feel about the Church.  For this reason, too, the battle for trust must be fought piece by piece: see part two, above.

5. We must be ‘Smart and Beautiful’

‘Smart and beautiful’ is how Bishop Robert Barron describes the Christian faith, and in doing so captures two things that draw young people to it: its intelligence and its poetic beauty.  

Catholicism is a serious, grown-up, intelligent faith that affirms and sanctifies everything I was right to love as a child.  It has more than enough intellectual fuel for any restless, curious mind; it is inexhaustible.  It is remarkable how deep it is possible to go and never reach the bottom, and others have descended far deeper than I have.   When I was a student, I was fortunate enough to have a chaplaincy where the chaplains gave homilies as fulfilling and stretching as lectures, and weekly talks with unforgettable thoughts: ‘If, when thinking about God, you do not experience intellectual vertigo, you are not thinking about God’, or that the news of the sack of Rome in 410 A.D.  ‘would have been as if we heard that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Paris’.  University chaplaincies can give tremendously stimulating moral, historical formation, and the Church must give them as much support as she can afford.  In general, I think the Church could make much more of her intelligence and brilliance.  Young people can all respond willingly to Pope Benedict’s exhortation to ‘know your faith with that same precision with which an IT specialist knows the inner workings of a computer’.  ‘You need to know what you believe’, is his invigorating challenge.

Yet this intelligence is not pretentious or supercilious.  At the same time, the Church could also afford to emphasise her down-to-earthness.  This is a religion of incarnation: of oil, of water, of wheat, of salt, of dust, of blood, of a baby in a cattle-shed, of carpenters and fishermen.  There is nothing airy-fairy about it.  And notwithstanding her intelligence, the Church is for us all, whatever our minds’ wattage.  The ranks of the Doctors of the Church include such a person as Thérèse of Lisieux as well as St. Thomas Aquinas. 

And as for beauty, the Church lies at the ideal strategic position from which to launch a new evangelisation in art.  We live in a culture that is remarkable for its inhuman ugliness, yet people, being human, still hunger for beauty, and indeed are often to be found seeking it in church buildings.  New movements of Catholic artists, composers, novelists, architects or poets, in single-minded search of beauty and generous with their findings, could answer our culture’s unuttered cry to God for consolation.  Not browbeating the culture around us but enlightening it, we could could have quiet but deep influence in the coming years, and be of great consolation to people of good will.

6. Togetherness
And in an age of division we will thrive if we remind ourselves, often, of our togetherness in the Church all over the world, present, past and future.  Great occasions such as World Youth Day, pilgrimages and outdoor gatherings, as well as renewed attention to the words of the liturgy (‘so that from east to west a perfect sacrifice will be offered to your name…’) resound long in the memory.  Pope Benedict’s visit to Britain in 2010 fired me up tremendously, and not just because, I confess, the media’s considerable hostility to Church in the preceding weeks and months only served to goad me into greater pro-Benedict enthusiasm and vigour.  I simply enjoyed, and will never forget, the uplifting yet unfamiliar feeling of kneeling with eighty thousand others with Pope Benedict in Hyde Park for Eucharistic Adoration (at the vigil of John Henry Newman’s beatification).  We need the confidence and resources to mount more such events, if we can, because their effects last well into the lean times of isolation.

Togetherness in the Church also means vigilance in ordinary life, however, so that legitimate disagreements do not sour into division, whether at the scale of parishes, of dioceses or of the Church on earth as a whole.  We all have different charisms — some, perhaps, are more inclined to social justice, say; others to liturgy, and most of us are somewhere in between.  Provided we all sign up to the Catechism and the Creed, and sincerely found our lives on Christ’s companionship, we are more or less all right.  Another point: if people struggle honestly to accept the Church’s teaching, and are not being deliberately belligerent about their difficulties, I think we should be as patient and kindly as we are resolute in affirming the truth.  Faith is a gift, and Christ never promised to make our lives easy.  It is often uncomfortable to be counter-cultural; a lot of people struggle with it.  We must be capable of working out disagreement between ourselves without giving anybody cause to feel undermined by their own side.

I am also convinced of the necessity of a determinedly ecumenical attitude.  The divisions between the churches, though much healed in the past century, still represent a great wound.  However distant unity seems, we must work very hard to maintain close friendship with our brothers and sisters in other churches.  The old disagreements cannot be brushed aside and should not be trivialised, and the pain of riven communion remains unhealed, but any survey of the terrain today will makes it plain that everyone who is signed up to the Creed is more or less on the same side now.  So, unless there is unequivocal evidence to the contrary, I think we must consider any serious churchgoer these days to be an ally.

7. ‘Young People Want Great Things’

Finally, I am very glad that this Synod has given such prominence to the idea of vocation.  It is tremendously important.  The sense of being called, rather than merely having floated or emerged into being, transfigures us.  It gives the longed-for direction to life that many others seek vainly in wealth, political action or Progress.  It gives meaning to days and years, to mere instants and whole epochs alike.  It can so convincingly capture the imagination for the side of light — within the soul, in the Church as a whole and throughout the world — that I think it should be made a mainstay of the New Evangelisation.  (This blog takes its name from Cardinal Newman’s prayer-meditation on vocation, incidentally).  Certainly in the West, where the dictatorship of relativism, the tyranny of mediocrity, reigns supreme, the idea that we might be called to a mission greater than ourselves, beyond our own desires, appetites and knowledge, is invigoratingly counter-cultural.  Also, as people tire of the dictatorship of relativism’s constant, off-hand instruction to make up a meaning for our lives, not caring a jot what we come up with, and as people detect the indifference that underlies this instruction (existentialism’s nasty backhand), they will look, in increasing numbers and with increasing determination, for something else — which they will know they have found when they encounter the idea of vocation compellingly expressed, and realise that they have one.  This is the Church’s secret weapon in our time.  

✛

‘Young People Want Great Things’, said Pope Benedict early in his pontificate, and the words leave very little else to say.  Young people are full of fire; we brim with energy.  But we need to know what to do with it, so that we can set to confidently, with God-given gumption.  We have the energy to purify first the Church, then the world.  In this age of destruction we yearn to build.  

Dear Bishops — Thank you for asking us your questions.  This is what we would like in the Church, please.  We want a challenge, but not without the Church beside us.  We want companionship so that we have the strength to face the isolating world.  We want more than the insipid, malnutritious menu presented to us by the world, in which anything goes and nothing really matters, but we also want to be able to speak with compassion to people who think that this fare is satisfactory.  We want to know how to have the courage, in a world which mistakes lesser evils for positive good, to announce what is really good all the way through — the Gospel, the electrifying news of hope — in a straightforward, calm, sane, unhectoring way, with our example as much as our words.  We want the miraculous triumph of the friendship of men and women that we call marriage; we want motherhood and fatherhood, defiantly raising families to the glory of God, or simply to be motherly and fatherly to those around us.  We want to be saints and artists and philosophers, holy and humble priests and nuns, teachers and scientists and gardeners and nurses; we want to be good companions.  We want to help people and to console them.  We want interesting things to read, homely places in which to discuss them, and like-minded people to discuss them with.  We want beautiful, beloved churches and energetic movements and associations. And our friends outside the Church want these things too, whether they know it or not.

Belonging to the Church is both a great joy and a lot of hard work.  But it could be more joyful still. We know that we need help, and instruction, and often forgiveness.  We need the gold standard of justice and, being every one of us broken, the medicine of mercy.  And, above all, youth wants truth.  And the Church’s strange and loving founder can give us all of this.  Long may the Church make a nuisance of itself by calling us all to greatness.

Some revisions made (to improve phrasing) in March 2019.

‘Excelsam Pauli gloria’ — Westminster Cathedral Choir.

Ireland’s Verdict

History will coolly record the facts as these: the final result of the referendum in the Republic of Ireland last Friday, 25 May, was that the electorate voted by 66.4% to 33.6% to repeal their Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, the clause which since 1983 has established in law the equal right to life of a mother and her unborn child.  This result will, it seems, leave the way clear for Irish law to permit abortion for any reason during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy.

Some shocks, however well anticipated, can never quite be braced for.  I knew that Ireland has hastened into secularism in recent decades; I knew that the mainstream media and popular feeling there was opposed to the crisis-stricken Catholic Church as an institution; I knew that Ireland’s Eighth Amendment was an obvious target for the international pro-choice movement.  Even so, for Ireland — Ireland! — to vote so decisively in favour of an idea so directly contrary to its past and character, to move so freely and willingly against the moral universe that made her what she is, takes some moments to sink in.  Behind Friday’s result is also a second slower, deeper horror in the emergence of a new Ireland, an Ireland willing to conform to its neighbours in a way that is wholly unprecedented and utterly out of character.  When before has Ireland ever jettisoned the values of its ancestors for the sake of popular opinion, for the sake of membership of a gang of more fashionably-minded nations?  (Precisely because Britain is a ring-leader of this gang, there are no grounds for self-satisfaction this side of the Irish Sea, either).  At Mass in my South London parish yesterday, listening to all the Irish names among the anniversary prayers for the deceased — the Murphys, the Collinses, the Kavanaghs — I wondered what they might have made of it, and sensed a great void, a great sliding into the sea of a cliff that, not long ago, had seemed unassailable crystalline granite.  The writer Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh says simply that ‘It is the most shameful day in Irish history’.  Indeed it is a defeat for the pro-life movement, a defeat for the Catholic Church, and a defeat for humanity.  I believe the referendum will come to be greatly regretted, and possibly sooner than many think.

We who have an eternal hope can look squarely at this defeat, however.  Yes, it is a very hard defeat.  We may see, as we look, the media’s slick tango to success, the bowed, wounded Church, many of its wounds its own work, and, in every Irish county but one, the triumph of individualism.  And yet the clearer and less flinching our eye, the better we see the vindication of the pro-life position, even in its defeat.  We see the fakeness and the joylessness in the very climax of the Repealers’ celebrations, the hollowness of the triumph even in its freshness.  What next?  Where next?  they seem to be asking.  We perceive in the shallowness of the slogans the barrenness that lurks behind the worship of the self and the will.  And in the very flimsiness of much of the argumentation, even as it carries the day, there comes to mind the one thing that the false and the shallow cannot resist, defy it as it might: the attrition of truth’s alliance with time.

Now, that has described a certain kind of pro-choice position, that of those most politically engaged.  I do not know how reluctantly or under what pressure some ‘Yes’ (‘Repeal’) voters will have cast their vote, and I am aware that I am observing the affair from a different country.  There are in Ireland, as in Britain, a great many people of ordinary good will who are simply not sure what they think about this issue, knowing only that it is very sensitive: their ‘Yes, Repeal’ votes will not have been born of firm principle.  Although the fundamental question is whether the life of the child in the womb is a human life, I think many people are reluctant to entertain the idea, out of fear, or guilt, perhaps.  They may, however, have been moved by the hard cases that must necessarily be examined when discussing abortion, and in voting ‘Yes’ done what they believed to be compassionate.  They may have remained impervious to the alternative vision of humanity offered by the ‘No’ side because it was nearly drowned out, or simply lost faith in the old Ireland and felt willing to throw in their lot with the new.  The temptation to treat this vote as another referendum on the Catholic Church will have been more or less irresistible, I should think.  The question might as well have been phrased ‘Do you want to give the Church another kicking?’.  Of course many people will have answered ‘Yes’.  Yet it is that first question, that of the humanity of the child in the womb, which is the more momentous.  It will not go away, and eventually we will be able to avoid it no longer.

I think, also, that this victory seems a little too obvious, a little too complete, much as the Crucifixion was a little too obvious and complete.  This bull’s-eye victory must mark nearly the zenith of the pro-choice movement, I think.  Having reached the zenith, the movement will then have to hold onto its position, and this is where all destructive revolutions begin to founder.  When secular paganescent progressivism has had its day, as it will have done sooner or later, what then?  Well, this is uncertain.  If referendums could produce pro-life results in 1983 and 1992, then this result is not least a sign not simply that people are for abortion, but that their moral positions are fickle and easily changed, perhaps because the idea of absolute moral principles has been so weakened.  At the moment Ireland, like a teenager in a tantrum, feels that it cannot throw off its Catholic heritage quickly enough, ashamed that it lasted so long.  Yet when this is over and all we are left with are the crises that readily-available abortion will produce — inconsolable unhappiness, spiritual and mental anguish, emptinesses and silences that children and the young should have filled — people of good will shall begin to ask questions.  They will need, instead of adolescent revolution, more solid fare: a serious discussion of the nature of humanity, the dignity of human life and our proper response to crisis pregnancies.  Whatever their religious position, they will return to the natural law.  They will hunger for a new vision that transcends the tired, inward-looking individualism of the 2010s.  Even at this moment, when the spirit of our time lent such a fair wind to the ‘Yes’ side, still a third of voters remained unconvinced.  If the New Evangelisation keeps lit the lights that it should, it will be able to step into the breach and speak, as once St. Patrick did, of the radical and irreducible nature of human dignity, of the strange commandment of love. 

In the meantime, though, Irish or not, we must bear the consequences of Friday’s decision and do what we can on the ground to ease the profound damage and pain that it will cause.