THE “distinctiveness” that, 50 years ago, was a source of embarrassment to Roman Catholics is drawing young people to the Church and keeping their faith alive, a new book argues.
In a post-modern culture characterised by the search for identity, belonging, and meaning, it is “strong religious subcultures” that will often draw young people into the fold, argues the book After Secularisation by Stephen Bullivant, Hannah Vaughan-Spruce, and Bernadette Durcan, published by the Catholic Truth Society.
When it comes to the parish, the book observes a “growing trend of people choosing which parish to attend based on reasons other than pure geography. . . The cultural importance of individual choice and authenticity in the post-Christian era has made an indelible impact on the practice of Catholicism.”
Growing parishes understand this, the book suggests. Instead of operating as “generalist organisations aiming to serve all in a heterogeneous market” (a quotation attributed to the sociologist Tricia Bruce), they understand the appeal of “distinctiveness”, offering a “strong religious subculture”. They are also skilled at adopting an “outside mentality” — able to consider what it is like to approach as a newcomer — and at recognising the desire for community. Young newcomers featured in the book “entwine their social and cultural lives into the parish”.
The book draws on a 2019 survey of British RCs to draw comparisons across the generations. Among the findings was that 41 per cent of the 18- to 24-year-olds surveyed reported attending mass weekly, compared with just 17 per cent of 55- to 64-year-olds. Almost two-thirds of this youngest cohort said that they “definitely” or “probably” believed in the Real Presence, compared with 41 per cent of the older age group.
“Younger Catholics have, thanks to relentless secularisation, been raised in a much less religious world,” it says. “In order to still be ‘ticking the Catholic box’ . . . younger adults are necessarily more likely to mean something by it. . . Their very commitedness is, in large measure, a side-effect of, and reaction to, their highly secularised environment.”
Chapters on youth movements and university chaplaincies explore what happens when these “deviantly religious” young people get together. The accounts shared by young people were “awash with references to experiences of the supernatural”, the authors report. At the heart of the Youth 2000 events is a “Eucharistic healing retreat”. More generously resourcing these ministries could, the authors argue, “radically re-route the current trajectory”.
Professor Bullivant, director of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society, at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, said that, while it was important to avoid caricatures, generational tensions could result from the fervour of younger RCs, who were “palpably more traditional and theologically conservative” than older clergy and congregations.
“Liturgically, they will want to do things that will horrify the parish stalwarts,” he said. “Younger Catholics tend to be far happier with kneeling for communion, for example, girls wearing a Mantilla or lace veil. . . Even things like the rosary or devotions to saints. You’ll have young adults getting married and following the church teaching on contraception which horrifies their mothers, let alone their grandmothers.”
Younger clergy were also more conservative, he observed. The late Pope Francis, who once denounced the “scandal” of young priests and seminarians trying on fancy vestments in Roman shops, sometimes made these clergy the “pantomime villain”.
Among the new book’s recommendations is that “liturgical niches”, including “Latin Massers” (it estimates that, on any given Sunday, there are 3000 to 4000 British people attending mass in the Extraordinary Form), should be “actively encouraged and organised for, rather than tolerated and accommodated”, in a “diverse ecosystem”.
More broadly, it argues that the “blanket, seamless provision of the Catholic ‘product’ across an entire geography” is an approach that no longer works for parishes. “‘Targeting the middle’ . . . fails to meet genuine spiritual need.”
Dr Bullivant said: “Everyone rightly hates talking about Church as if it was a managerial corporate thing, and we have a product that we are trying to shift a product consumers. The whole point about metaphors in religion is that you are not meant to confuse them with the thing you’re actually talking about.”
He defended, however, the need for “creativity and zeal”, observing that “pockets of super-committed people” or “gathered niche communities” offered mutual encouragement while generating vitality in the Church through a “spillover” effect.
Asked whether the zeal of a “committed core” could prove off-putting to a large fringe of more nominal Christians, Dr Bullivant said: “The only thing that is ever going to create more cultural Christians is active Christianity. . . Where baseline Christianity is very low you are going to find disproportionate strength in more stronger culturally weird camps. . . Catering to the middle of a middle that is becoming less and less Christian all the time shrinks and shrinks and shrinks.”
After Secularism emphasises that decline continues. Mass attendance on a typical Sunday fell from almost two million in 1980 to 592,000 in 2022. In 2019, just before the pandemic, it stood at 829,000.
But the book predicts that decline will “bottom out” and “at least to some degree, reverse” in the coming decades.” It contends that “how well-equipped the Church is to bounce back” will largely depend on how well it “recognises, resources, learns from, and leans into” the “sectors of resistance” explored in its chapters.
These include the “significantly under-appreciated” impact of diaspora communities, and the ministries that have grown up to serve them. Among the gatherings studied are the monthly conventions held by Anointing Fire Catholic Ministries — a movement within the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church — which regularly gather between 2000 and 3000 people at a conference centre in the West Midlands.
Fr Stephen Langridge, parish priest of St Elizabeth of Portugal RC Church, Richmond, in south-west London, is due to speak at “Springtime for the Church of England: Where are we seeing growth?”, a Church Times event on 31 January.
Book tickets here: churchtimes.co.uk/springtime-for-the-church-of-england-where-are-we-seeing-growth
