LONDON LETTER:The contribution made by immigrants may be disguising a decline in the church similar to that experienced here, writes MARK HENNESSY
THE HEADS of passengers on buses on Victoria Street turned with interest as the small hearse pulled up outside Westminster Cathedral on a cold chilly Monday this week, where several thousand people had gathered to greet it.
In a city where crowds tend to be small for funeral it was not, however, a funeral but the arrival of the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux, a French saint who died more than 100 years ago at the age of 24.
Incense wafted on the frigid air as eight pall-bearers carefully lifted the jacaranda wood casket holding portions of St Thérèse’s thigh and foot bones and carried them inside the cathedral, the mother church of Catholics in England and Wales.
For the last month, the relics have been on a tour of England. So far, more than 150,000 people have seen them and, by the time the relics leave the cathedral this afternoon for a Eurotunnel journey back to France, 100,000 more will have left prayers, entreaties and wishes during a 60-hour vigil .
Before arriving in Westminster, the relics had been taken to Wormwood Scrubs prison, where 100 prisoners – chosen from the 300 Catholic inmates currently held there – knelt and prayed before them during Mass.
Later, it emerged that one of the two prisoners chosen to act as altar servers – a duty they performed wearing fluorescent jackets – was overly vigorous in dispensing incense and twice set off the smoke alarms.
Known as “The Little Flower”, St Thérèse, in the words of the auxiliary bishop of Westminster John Arnold, who blessed the relics when they arrived on Monday, is “extraordinary because she was ordinary”.
“She was 24 years old when she died, having spent her whole adult life in a convent; she didn’t have much of an education, wasn’t an intellect, wasn’t a great organiser or reformer,” he told journalists this week.
In his homily before a packed congregation, Bishop Arnold described her as a simple French girl with poor health and only a basic education, who performed “no miracles, saw no visions and heard no voices”, but who is still one of the Catholic Church’s most loved saints.
Outside the cathedral, built in the late 19th century in the Eastern Byzantine style, the queue, formed into neat lines, moved quickly onwards, to the disappointment of some.
“I thought I would have to wait three hours. It should feel like a penance,” said one woman.
The coming year is an important one for Catholics in England and Wales, with the visit next summer of Pope Benedict and the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman, the first Englishman to be recognised as a “Confessor of the Catholic Faith” for more than 600 years.
“He [Newman] came only gradually to the fullness of Catholic faith,” said Archbishop Kevin Nichols. “It was a difficult journey for him yet, in his own words, he came to recognise our faith as ‘a working religion’, not concerned with ideas or vague generalities.”
Pope Benedict’s visit, nearly 30 years after that of his predecessor John Paul II, may be timed to ensure that the Newman beatification takes places in London, but it seems likely that it will not occur before the general election.
Former prime minister Tony Blair asked Pope Benedict to come in 2006, while Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop Nichols’s predecessor in Westminster, had wanted him to do so to mark the 25th anniversary of Pope John Paul’s arrival.
By the time it happens, however, Gordon Brown, a man of intense, if private, Presbyterian faith and one who already knows Pope Benedict well having met him several times when chancellor, may not be in Downing Street.
Instead, if the opinion polls are to be believed, his place may have been taken by David Cameron, who is more typical perhaps of the semi-detached relationship most people in Britain have with religion. Having once said that his faith “faded in and out” like a car radio in the mountains, Mr Cameron later said: “I believe in God and I try to get to church more than Christmas and Easter, but perhaps not as often as I should, but I don’t feel I have a direct line.”
The number of Catholics attending Mass halved from two to one million between 1950 and 2000, although numbers have grown in the years since then, because of the influx of Eastern European immigrants.
Some churches in London have had to put on Sunday Masses from 8am to 8pm to cope with the rising numbers, according to the Von Hugel Institute at Cambridge, with many of the Masses said by priests drafted in from the immigrants’ own countries.
Elsewhere, however, the picture is not so bright.
Churches are closing and parishes are being merged as the church struggles with the same problems that it experiences elsewhere – declining vocations and an elderly priesthood.