UK Catholics look to the Pope
to make them more valued
Sept. 12, 2010
The BBC has released the findings of an opinion poll they commissioned into attitudes among British Catholics on the eve of the papal visit. Here are some of the findings:
• 69% think the Pope’s visit will be helpful to the Catholic Church here;
• More Catholics think the Pope should drop his insistence on clerical celibacy than do not (49% to 35%, with a further 17% uncommitted);
• More than six in ten Catholics (62%) say women should have more authority and status in the Catholic Church -- with identical scores for men and women.
• Almost six in ten, 57%, feel their Catholic faith is not generally valued by British society
• A majority of Catholics – 52% - say that the scale of child abuse within the Catholic Church, and how it has subsequently been handled, ‘has shaken their faith in the leadership of the Church’.
[Such is the effect of media's blanket assault on the Church on Catholics whose faith is shaky enough to be affected by the dominant opinion as the media portray and shape it! For half of the Catholics surveyed to prove so swayable - a similar percentage is advocating abolitoon of priestly celibacy - is, for me, the most distressing result of this survey.]
None is very surprising. The first finding -- 7 out of 10 Catholics think the visit will be helpful to the Church -- should be set aside the fourth: almost 6 out of 10 say their Catholic faith is not generally valued by society.
There is a perception among Catholics that the Church's voice is largely excluded from the public sphere, and a belief that Pope Benedict can help put that right.
The desire for women to have more leadership roles in the Church is to be expected, given British cultural attitudes to gender. Most Catholics would be suprised to discover -- because they will seldom see them -- the number of women who administer parishes (as pastoral assistants) or who are in charge of formation and catechesis, let alone those who run abbeys and schools.
That said, there could be, should be, many more Vatican departments run by women.
[This observation overlooks the simple fact that most Vatican departments, by the nature of the services they must perform, must be run by priests, and therefore, leadership roles for women in the Vatican will necessarily be limited to functions that can be carried out by lay people.]
Perhaps, eventually, it will be possible for women to lead Vatican organisms that do not primarily involve ecclesiastical or theological responsibilities that can only be carried out by priests and bishops - such as the pontifical councils for the family, for health care workers, for migrants and itinerant workers - even though these are all qualified by the words 'for the pastoral care of...' There is greater opportunity for women in some of the pontifical academies (where Mary Ann Glendon, for instance, has been president of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences for almost a decade now).
Many -- not far under half, in fact -- of the 'Catholic Voices' team are lay women...
A rare bright spot in the Guardian's relentlessly dire and negative presentation of the papal visit and related news so far is this report, which uses the noun 'church' to denote all the Christian denominations in the UK:
Church attendance in the UK for
all Christians has bottomed out
by Benita Hewitt
Saturday 11 September 2010
It's time to believe that the church in this country is no longer in decline. The latest statistics coming from various denominations are clearly showing stability in church attendance and even signs of growth. This news may come as a surprise to many people who believe that the church is a dying institution.
But the news is no surprise to us at Christian Research. We've been watching the church adapt and change over recent years, and have been collecting statistics for some time which suggest that the church in this country is in reasonably good health. There is now enough combined evidence to state confidently that the decline is over.
The long term decline in weekly Mass attendance in the Roman Catholic church in England and Wales ended in 2005 and the figures have been broadly stable since. In 2008 there were 918,844 attending Mass, an increase from 915,556 the year before.
The Church of England has seen fairly steady attendance over the last ten years, with 1.67m attending services each month in 2008, compared with 1.71m in 2001. An important point to note is that the statistics over the past decade include all worship during the week, and not just Sunday morning services.
One of the most significant changes we have been monitoring in the church is the growth in mid-week worship, which is an indication of how the church has been adapting and changing over recent years.
These figures for the Church of England do not take into account the significant number of people that attend churches at Christmas and Easter: 1.4m at Easter 2008 and 2.6m at Christmas.
They also do not include many of the people who have joined 'Fresh Expressions' of church, which is a growing movement of new ways to do church in this country. They represent something of a challenge to us researchers as the Fresh Expressions are growing so quickly it is difficult to count what and where they are, let alone how many people are attending them!
Christian Research has been monitoring with interest the growth in Cathedral worship which has steadily increased by a total of 28% since the start of the century. Again, midweek services are an important factor adding 81% extra people to those worshipping on a Sunday.
The Baptist Union of Great Britain has seen attendance rise from 148,835 a week in 2002 to 153,714 in 2008, with particular growth in the contact with young people aged 13 to 18 – up from 34,095 in 2002 to 41,392 in 2008.
In July of this year Christian Research conducted 1000 interviews in the streets of 44 locations in England and Wales with a representative sample of the population.
63% think of themselves as Christian, 14% said they attended church at least once a month and 29% at least once a year. Those are significant proportions of the population.
The research also shows that 41% of adults agree "The Bible is an influence for good in society". Just last week there was also research published which showed that
two in three adults agree "British Society should retain its Christian culture".
There are more statistics we could quote relating to growth in other factors of church life, for example the steady growth in the number of people training for ordination in the Church of England together with increased levels of parish giving to record levels.
All of this paints a picture of the church as living movement rather than a dying institution. And it is a living movement which is generally recognised as a good influence in society, one which many people do not wish to see decline and die. It is time to stop talking about the decline of church and start facing up to the fact that it is here to stay.
I am sorry to see that Cambridge professor Eamon Duffy, who wrote a pre-visit article for the Irish Times on 9/8 [posted in the preceding page of this thread], has now spread his purposeful and systematic denigration of Benedict XVI - in 'dreadful' comparison to his predecssor - to the pages of the Daily Telegraph.
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/the-pope/7996573/A-visit-that-reflects-our-changing-ti...
Duffy's views of Benedict XVI reflect his obstinate refusal to see anything in the past five years that could possibly change the prefabricated animus he already had against Joseph Ratzinger when he was elected Pope. I limit myself to posting a link to the article, which is a mere rewrite of what he wrote for the Irish Times and therefore repeats the same biases and fallacies.
Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor says Benedict XVI
will warn against 'privatizing' religion
Sept. 12, 2010
In a radio interview with the BBC World Service, the retired Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, says Pope Benedict believes "Europe is afraid of its future".
He says the Pope in the UK will want to lay out some "principles" governing the question of the "freedom of religion in the public sphere":
He does not want religion to be privatised. He wants it to play its part in the public forum. He thinks it would be disastrous if religion in that sense were to be just personal, not social.
He will be saying to the Government: we respect the opinions of others, this is a free society, but society must also respect the views of the Church, which should be able to propose them in a public forum. There have been occasions when the state has gone too far in limiting the rights of churches and faith communities to their disadvantage.
I do think there's a very large number of people -- the majority: good, sensible people -- who are not averse to hearing this message. Because there is a worry that some of the freedoms that society gives have gone too far and that the views which make a community flourish are not being heard enough.
That's why some of the Pope's messages are countercultural. But there's a feeling in this country that maybe we must listen to this alternative voice.
But for Christianity to be counter-cultural - is that not what Jesus himself had warned the Apostles it would be, when said his teachings would be 'a sign of contradiction' in the world?
Here's another welcome entry from CATHOLIC VOICES - especially since I have been unable to see anything of the Times of London online since it became a subscribers-only reference recently (Who knows what they have been writing these days? But I do have in reserve a rather 'lovely' TofL editorial hailing the success of Benedict XVI's visit to the US in April 2008, which you would never suspect to have come from them.)
Look out for 'Benedict enigma',
says Our Man in the Vatican
Sept. 12, 2010
"I have to say I have never met someone who is so different from his public profile", Francis Campbell, British ambassador to the Holy See, tells
The Times's Rome correspondent, Richard Owen.
People expect Benedict XVI to be a "stern dogmatist", says Campbell, "but in fact he is a somewhat shy individual. He comes across as an elderly granderfatherly figure, an academic. He is always deeply interested in the person sitting in front of him, he is not looking at the big stage beyond."
The British, he predicts, "will be surprised at his gentleness and humility".
Campbell recalls Pope Benedict's visit to Sydney for World Youth Day two years ago. "One heard in Australia a lot of the same things we are hearing in Britain -- the cost, why is this happening, and so on. But there were 250,000 young people there. Sydney was thronged with people wanting to see Benedict".
Three gems:
o The Pope, who represents more than 17 per cent of the population, "is someone who may be the spiritual leader of your friends, neighbours and co-workers. There is no other foreign head of state of whom that is true."
o Far from writing off Britain as godless, the Pope sees Christianity as "very much alive" in Britain. "It may be small in terms of practice, but it has a very vocal position in society, including Anglicanism, Catholicism, Presybterianism and evangelical groups".
o Pope Benedict "draws a distinction between the Anglo-Saxon version of the Enlightenment, which was about
freedom for religion, and the French or continental version, which was about
freedom from religion. ... What he would object to is not atheism or humanism; they have their place and are part of the dialogue with faith.
What he objects to is the irrationality of some of those on the polemical militant fringe who want to impose their order to the detriment of everything else."
[Of course, all right-thinking and fair-minded persons think that, but it's a sentiment that the Pope cannot express so bluntly, being Pope.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 12/09/2010 21:53]