Fun in the archive

Looking over the Catholic Directories from 1839 to the present was interesting in a number of ways. The adverts, which got going after the War, show architectural and liturgical items which are actually rather nice and well-made in the 1950s; later there are endless ugly promotions for CAFOD; today there are endless adverts for schools,l generally Catholic in name only. Here's an early one which caught my eye: the Dome of Home, SS Peter and Paul and St Philomena, in the Wirral, clearly a prestige project for the architects who are using the High Altar to drum up more custom.

Early 20th century Directories periodically included a map of the Dioceses. It would be very useful if it were possible to get hold of an up to date one. In this one the dioceses of Wrexham, Menevia, East Anglia and Arundel and Brighton don't yet exist.


In the very early editions, going into the 'Laity's Directory' before 1839, there are complete catalogues of Catholic books: pages and pages of books for sale, on history, 'controversy', theology and so on. Real evidence of a 'well instructed laity', and a scholarly community to serve them.

The gaps in the data are infuriating; I get the impression that at certain points they just didn't care. They gave up reprinting two years of tables in 1990, a practice of the Directory dating back to 1925. Why? It means the series is more vulnerable to glitches and errors; a number of time the reprinted table has slightly revised numbers.

The date of the data for Baptisms, Marriages, and Conversions was always one or two years earlier than the date of the rest of the table (numbers of clergy, places of worship, and Catholic population), from 1912 to 1994, at which point they decided to bring them into line. Fine: but they didn't bother to print the missing year's numbers, those for 1992. Why? Two years' Directories were never printed, in the transition from Burns and Oates to the Universe. When it came back, in 1973, only the table for 1973 was printed. What happened to the data for the previous two years? And how can you print data for the year following the thing's publication? Always before, and soon afterwards, the date of the table is a year or two earlier than the date on the front cover.

These are a researcher's gripes, I suppose they weren't thinking of posterity when they did these tables. (What were they thinking of, I wonder?) But here is someone else who didn't care about posterity: though he was very keen 'to embrace the sick'. This is the bookmark bound into the 1987 edition, showing the late Jimmy Saville.

Pro-Life Witness in Oxford

Every Catholic has to be concerned about the horrifying reality of abortion in the modern world. Please support these events.

Here in Oxford:

Saturday, 25th May.

PLEASE join us to pray for all the unborn babies who are at risk of abortion.

Each time your heart beats another baby is killed by abortion.

3pm - 4pm

At- Entrance of the JOHN RADCLIFFE HOSPITAL, HeadleyWay, Oxford.

The Most Blessed Sacrament is exposed for the hour in the Church of St Anthony of Padua, right behind where we stand.
(115 Headley Way,Oxford OX3 7SS) 

Refreshments available afterwards in the Church Hall.

Video on the Gregorian Chant Course

In which yours truly makes an appearance!

One Weekend in April, Part Two: The Gregorian Chant Network Weekend Course from LMS on Vimeo.

Historic Statistics for Ordinations and Priest numbers

After another session in the archive, we have been able to extend the historic data to as far back as it will go. It seems that for numbers of priests this is 1841, the fourth year of the publication of the Catholic Directory; for ordinations, it is 1846. The 'Laity's Directory', which was in many ways the predecessor publication (though they overlapped for two years), does not give this information.

We have also tidied up the methodology of collecting the data and made some corrections. A full and complete set of Excel files of the raw data can be downloaded from the LMS website here.

Numbers of Priests ordained for the Dioceses of England and Wales, and for Religious Orders here, from 1847.

 The growth in the period up to the Great War is steady and workmanlike. The period from 1925 to 1964 represents a new phase: recovery from the each World War but heightened growth going somewhat beyond that. And then, after 1964, a catastrophic and unprecedented decline.

The red line, for religious orders, which is steadier, shows a very clear trend over a century up to the mid 1960s. It is impossible to describe the figures for the 1930s or 1950s as frothy or unsustainable: they were just the culmination of a long period of growth. Perhaps they kept their heads better than the secular seminaries in those decades. But they certainly lost them after 1960.

Numbers of priests in England and Wales, 1841 to 2010

The big jump in 1890 is unexplained; a decision to include regular clergy for the first time would fit the bill, however. There were 1,475 of them in 1912, when a separate total for them is included for the first time; there could very well have been 1,100 or so in 1890.

Again the boom starting in the 1920s is preceded by a long period of steady growth; it didn't come from nowhere, and that is important to stress. The unprecedented decline starts early - numbers peak in 1965. Even the large number of ordinations that year, 225, was not enough to offset the number of priests dying or being laicised. Laicisations must have had something to do with it, because assuming priests had an average life-span after ordination of 30 years or more, the cohort of priests going to their reward in 1965 had been ordained, on average, before ordinations went over 150 a year. It looks as though about 75 priests more disapear from active service than you'd expect.

Of course, once we have the double whammy of ordinations dropping and the extra-large cohorts of priests ordained 1925 to 1965 dying, the decline in priest numbers accelerates. There were also, of course, a very significant number of laicisations in the following decades as well. We have increasing life-expectancy to thank for it not looking a lot steeper; as it is they've started counting 'Retired Priests' (who are still included in the total), and we have now about 800 of these, 15% of the total. Even with the latest medical technology the '60s generation isn't going to live forever, so we can expect this graph to look more like a cliff in the next decade.

I photographed the tables called the 'Recapitulation of Catholic Statistics' from every volume of the Catholic Directory in which they appeared (not counting the ones which appeared twice); anyone who'd like to see them can view them on my Flickr page here. You can see, for example, breakdowns by diocese for many of the statistics.

Same Sex Marriage: a reminder

I plight thee my troth...

As the legislation for Same Sex Marriage (SSM) makes it way through Parliament, there has been another splurge of bad arguments against it.

SSM is bad for the Tory Party. True, but not really to the point.

SSM has no democratic mandate. True, but that is not an argument against it. At best it would be an argument for a brief delay. That gets us nowhere.

SSM is going to be bad for Religious Freedom. True, but as I've said a number of times here, what religions can demand in the way of freedom depends on what is regarded as just by society as a whole (or: the law), and not the other way round. You can't use Religious Freedom as a card to trump Justice. If stopping gays marrying is unjust, the religions opposing it are unjust and will have to change.

People should stop using these arguments. There are much better ones which have been articulated with great clarity by a number of people. Here is the central one:

In order to accommodate same-sex couples, the legal concept of marriage will have to shed the distinctive characteristics which make it useful and important for heterosexual couples starting a family. It will no longer be understood in terms of an exclusive sexual relationship, geared towards children, which is difficult to escape.

Same Sex Marriage will destroy marriage as it currently exists; marriage as it currently exists is a vital and irreplaceable institution of civil society for the protection and education of children.

Here are a series of posts I did about the Defence of Marriage when the legislation was first proposed. (The first one is at the bottom, the last at the top.)

The best full-length account of the case against SSM is the Girgis, George and Anderson paper, What is Marriage? (A revised and expanded version is available as a book to buy.)

Loftus: reverence to Our Lord is totalitarian

'On a general level a priest naturally, and supernaturally, will want to smile into the eyes of those to whom he gives Holy Communion. [So this is for the priest's benefit, right?] It's a lot easier to do so if they are all joyfully singing the Communion song together with their heads thrown back [ie, without looking at a hymn book], in accordance with liturgical law [yes, a chant or song is allowed at Communion, well done Basil], rather than looking at the ground as they first of all bow, and then try to avoid being swiped by a redundant communion plate, as prescribed by rubrical nit-pickers [surely, 'liturgical law', which says that the 'Communion Plate is to be retained' (Redemptionis Sacramentum para 93) and the recommendation to make an 'act of reverence' before communion (Redemptionis Sacramentum 90)].

'Look at North Korea. Is there in that blighted and over-regulated dictatorship any of the joy and freedom which is needed if human dignity is to be protected? Was there any joy or freedom in Stalinist Russia or Maoist China, or East Germany? Would anyone in the free world want to live there? In all of this there are lessons about freedom and joy for the Church.'

Lost: if found, please send to the Catholic Times

Mgr Basil Loftus, Catholic Times 19th May 2013.

I kid you not. Is he finally losing his marbles? Does he really want to suggest that Bl Pope John Paul II, under whom those rubrical prescriptions were made in Redemptionem Sacramentum in 2004, was a joyless dictator to rival Erich Honecker, Kim Jong-Il, Stalin and Mao? Where are the gulags where dissidents were locked up to maintain this reign of terror? Oh, how silly of me! They were condemned to the ultimate torture: of writing perpetual articles in the Catholic Times.

Actually, Basil, reading this stuff is the real torture, not writing it.

I sometimes complain that it is not really my brief to defend the Novus Ordo; I mean I'm happy to do it, but why is it left to me? Why aren't all those 'conservative' Catholic bloggers defending these rubrics against Loftus and his ilk? I fancy they have given up. But you can't just give up: he's spewing this stuff out every week.

Yet again this week - I think for the third time at least - he recounts the story of Pope Francis saying 'the carnival is over' to the Papal MC Mgr Marini, despite it long since being debunked as a malicious smear, above all a calumny against the Holy Father, who doesn't share Loftus' habit of unthinking rudeness.

When is the madness of these articles going to end?

Holy Communion at the Family Retreat, with Fr John Hunwicke

Since I'm not a neo-conservative with the task of defending every detail of the Novus Ordo Missae ('Ordinary Form') and its associated legislation, I should add that Loftus is given an easier target by the awkwardness of the current liturgical settlement, if I may call it that. It is perfectly true that there is something a little unnatural and contrived about asking people to bow before receiving Holy Communion. Why not just have them kneel down? And it is also true that the is something a little unnatural and contrived about having a communion plate where practically everyone receives in the hand.

These rubrics were ways of trying to claw something back from the disaster of the spread of, and then the permission for, the abuse of receiving Communion in the hand, and the novelty of receiving standing up. Those things didn't work, and trying to ameliorate them with these rubrics hasn't worked either.

But then, the Novus Ordo manner of receiving on the tongue is awkward too: having to say 'Amen'. You can't make it clear that you are ready to receive - people tend to stick their tongues out, pull them in to say 'Amen', and then stick them out again. At least, this is what I seem to end up doing at the OF.

Say what you like about the Traditional Mass, it works. It works because it has developed to work, over many centuries, instead of being some kind of bureaucratic compromise in the midst of an endless liturgical war.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

What happened to conversions?

Over on Rorate Caeli I've been talking about the meaning of the statistics the LMS has collected on Catholic marriages; there's also article on our research in the print edition of the Catholic Herald out today, on p3. There is just so much to say about these statistics it is impossible to cover them all in a single post: here I'll say something about adult conversions (coyly renamed 'receptions' in the statistics for 1976 and thereafter). In another post I'll have a look at baptisms.

England and Wales has a special place in the world-wide Church, I think, as constantly refreshed by converts, to an extent far greater than in other countries. For long stretches of time Catholic life here has been dominated by converts, men like Newman and Manning in the 19th century, or Chesterton and Knox in the 20th, or indeed St Edmund Campion in penal times. One of the remarkable things about the statistics from before the Council is the scale of conversions.

 
Between the start of the series, in 1912, and 1960, 534,117 people were received into the Church, not counting those received in 1942, for which data were never published (probably in the region of another 10,000). Well over half a million people. People were talking about the 'conversion of England', and it wasn't hot air. Those are the kinds of numbers which actually make a demographic impact. Remember, the population of England and Wales was only 32.5 million at the 1931 census, and 43.8 million in 1951 (there wasn't a census in 1941.)

If you look at the graph expressed per 1,000 Catholics, the achievement of the interwar years is even more impressive. Fr Martindale and his like, hardly remembered today, were truly the St Francis Xaviers of their day.


However you look at it, something truly horrible happened between 1960 and 1970. The number of conversions declined by about three quarters, and assumed a plateau at this new, abysmal level. It is as if the Church shifted from one gear to another, an effect far more dramatic than the disruption caused by the Second World War.

Now, there were certain changes in the Church in the 1960s and early 70s, to say the least. They shook up the existing Catholic community, who were presumably often set in their ways. They were designed, however, to make the Church more attractive to outsiders. As Pope Paul VI wrote in Evangelii nuntiandi (1975):

'... on this tenth anniversary of the closing of the Second Vatican Council, the objectives of which are definitively summed up in this single one: to make the Church of the twentieth century ever better fitted for proclaiming the Gospel to the people of the twentieth century.'

Well, it didn't work.

One aspect of what we see, of course, is the lessening of the phenomenon of 'marriage converts'. Catholics were no longer taught that marrying a non-Catholic was seriously problematic, and that dispensations to marry a non-Catholic were not a mere formality. Some people think this is a good thing, on the basis that any kind of incentive to become a Catholic (such as wanting marry one) undermines the purity of the motive to convert.

This is a truly silly and deeply unCatholic attitude, however. All sorts of things stimulate conversions, and are designed to do so: should we deliberately put people off the Faith, so they have to struggle more to join? One does hear that sort of idea expressed, but it is not what the Saints did: they tried to attract the flies with honey. We should also remember the great social pressure not to become Catholic, up to and including the 1950s. Let's hear it from the great Fr Bryan Houghton, speaking in persona of his fictional Bishop Forrester, but certainly from his own pre-1970 pastoral experience.

'In the odd twenty years that I had cure of souls, either as curate or parish priest, I doubt if I ever received fewer that ten converts a year into the Church. I loved them. Along with the Eternal Truths I gave them all I had to offer. I never talked down to them, no matter how simple they were. The human mind can absorb infinitely more that it can rationalize and explain. How wonderful they were and how I admired them! ...
     'I suppose rather over half, say 60%, were "marriage converts". They were often among the best. Human love seems a natural introduction to divine love. In those days, the Catholic knew he had something to give and the non-Catholic something to receive. It was right and proper that the wedding ring should be set with the Pearl of Great Price. And the heroism of so many of those marriage converts! Not only were they cut off from their families (a more tragic situation in the working than in the educated classes), but they undertook willingly to obey the marriage laws. "I am only a marriage convert, Father"; my dear, you could be nothing more noble.'
(Mitre and Crook (1979) pp85-6)

Most of Fr Houghton's experience was garnered as Parish Priest of Bury St Edmunds in East Anglia (from 1955 to 1970), a part of England with an exceptionally low number of Catholics. There, one might assume, there would be more Catholics marrying non-Catholics, or converts, than in places of higher Catholic density, such as Lancashire or the Irish community in London. Supposing, then, not 60% but half of all conversions in England and Wales over this period were 'marriage converts', that would mean a bride or groom had converted in about a quarter of the weddings taking place over the period 1913-1960, a figure which is striking but not totally implausible.

Suppose, then, we halve the number of conversions recorded in 1959, and compare this reduced figure with the total for 1973 (after the gap in the series of Directories): what then? Well, then we get a decline of 27%. In other words, even if we took the insane view that, because of marriage converts not being sincere, the pre-1960 figures are inflated by 100%, we are still looking at a huge decline in conversions.

Has the new policy of granting dispensations to marry non-Catholics without quibble, and of not encouraging young people to seek partners from the household of the Faith, been a roaring success? I don't have numbers for divorces and annulments, but I think it is pretty obvious that this policy has been a disaster. The 'pastoral' policy, as so often, has created a pastoral nightmare.

Sodality and Confraternity

St Augustine of Hippo

Some time ago I advertised the Latin Mass Society's new Sodality of St Augustine, which prays for lapsed and non-Catholic family and friends of Sodality members. The response has been very pleasing, and it has 134 members. We will shortly be advertising a public Mass for the Sodality's intention. See here for more information and to join.

I also wrote a series of posts about the lay apostolate: why we need a new type of organisation for the new needs of Catholics: the Confraternity of St Gregory.

The point of this is that it maintains the tradition of the old parish groups, of having face-to-face meetings of members, especially for prayer together. But it does so in a form which is not too demanding for the people who might otherwise be able to join: so not weekly or monthly, but quarterly, and in a format which can be combined with attendance at existing LMS events, such as pilgrimages. This enables it to work at a regional and national level, not one the parish or '30-minutes drive' level. At the more local level, there just aren't enough people for it to work.

Since the point of the Confraternity is to meet others and pray together, we need a critical mass of expressions of interest before we can launch it. We haven't got there quite yet, so I am repeating my appeal in the latest Mass of Ages and on this blog.

If you want to do a bit more than the bare minimum, if you feel that getting to Mass each Sunday is not giving you the sense of community and common purpose which you would like, then you have the same sort of feelings that our predecessors had going back to the earliest times. They added to their round of religious obligations membership of all sorts of Guilds, Sodalities, and Confraternities; these groups made considerable achievements in supporting parish life, schools, in care for the poor, and in enabling Catholic culture to flourish; some ended up owning property, others had an important political dimension. We need something like that today: of course we do, it is needed in every age and every region of the world.

Pope St Gregory the Great

There are groups which do good work in England and Wales today which fulfil some of the functions of the old associations, but they tend not to do so from the basis of a shared spirituality. This means that, however pious their members, their organisation works essentially like a secular group. This misses out a central component of Catholic activism. What Catholics attached to the Traditional Mass need is a group based around that Mass.

So please enquire about the Confraternity of St Gregory; the LMS Office will send you more information and register your interest if you email

info@lms.org.uk

Sung Sunday EF Mass in Oxford for Pentecost

In the Church of SS Gregory and Augustine's, Woodstock Road, Oxford, at 12 noon.

The Golden Thread of Faith: EWTN series sponsored by the LMS

The Latin Mass Society is the sponsor and co-producer of a new three-part series on the Catholic Faith in Wales. The series includes footage of the LMS Pilgrimage to Holwell last year, which was led by Bishop Rifan of Campos, Brazil.

It will be broadcast from 10th June; in due course the LMS will be able to sell DVDs of the series. Here's the EWNT schedule for that day.

I've seen an early draft of it, it is both fun and informative. 

Queen Boudicea: makes an appearance

The Golden Thread of Faith
Part 1 From Roman times to the Age of Saints 
A new docudrama series about the Catholic Church in Wales. In part one, the Roman conquest of Britain and how Christianity spread among the Romans and Britons. After the Romans left, Christians travelled around the western seas evangelising as they went.

Monday 10, 2:00, 9:00, 21:00 (30 mins) 

Part 2 From the Age of Saints to the Reformation 

St Richard Gwyn, Welsh martyr & LMS patron

For a thousand years the Catholic Church in Wales was vibrant, the village church and the great abbeys were the centres of Welsh life, an age when Wales placed Christianity at the heart of its existence.

Tuesday 11, 2:00, 9:00, 21:00. (30 mins) 

Part 3 From the Reformation to the Present Day Pilgrims 
King Henry VIII’s unwelcomed “Reformation”, the dissolution of the monasteries, Welsh recusants, Civil wars, the Titus Oats plot and the Welsh martyrs. Today Welsh Catholics can once again practice their faith and go on pilgrimages.

Wednesday 12, 2:00, 14:00, 21:00. (30 mins)