A break on the LMS Walsingham Pilgrimage last year.

In my last post I noted that the figures for lapsation from the Church given by Stephen Bullivant, which originated with the British Attitudes Survey, are systematically distorted by attitudes to Church membership and motives for getting babied baptised, which themselves vary over time and between regions. The inclusion of people in the category of 'self-identified Catholic' who have only a nominal or tribal affiliation increases the number of 'Catholics', but not the number of church-goers. If they felt that they shouldn't call themselves Catholics, the rate of practice would increase without any increase in the numbers of bums on pews. For this reason, I think that saying that 39.2% of 'Catholics' never or practically never go to Church is pretty meaningless.

More helpful is the analysis of church-goers. The age profile is one interesting thing. The small number of the youngest group, and the large number of the oldest group, is perhaps not surprising. What is a little odd is that of the four remaining age-segments, the younger two practice more than the older two. This graph is still about proportions of self-identified Catholics, but this trend is reflected in the graph (below) which zeroes in on weekly-or-more attenders. What is going on?

People who were 65 or more in 2014 (the vintage of the data) were 21 or more in 1970. The next two younger age groups were young adults or children at the time of the liturgical reform. Once we get back to people of 34 or younger, we are dealing with people who didn't experience the reform at first hand at all: they hadn't been born. Bearing in mind the liturgical and catechetical anarchy of the period between about 1965 and 1978 (the election of Pope John Paul II), I don't think it is very surprising that people who experienced this as children or very young adults were traumatised. These statistics, at any rate, show that the 'springtime of Vatican II' did nothing to draw more people into to the practice of the Faith.

Even more intriguing are the figures for sexes. I've written a lot on this blog about the lack of men in our churches, but I've been quoting statistics from the USA. Here we can see exactly what the situation is here in England and Wales.

Before anything else, we can be confident that Catholic families, on average, have as many boys as girls. If there are differences between the number of men and women among adult Catholics, it is because there is a differential lapsation rate, and to a smaller extent perhaps a different rate of conversion. (Converts account for 8% of self-described Catholics.)

First, we find that more women than men identify as Catholic: of those who call themselves Catholic, 40.9% are men and 59.1% are women.

Second, of those, the women practice more: 30.7% weekly or more, 36.1% never, the rest in between. For men it is 22.8% weekly, and 43.8% never.

Third, looking at who is actually at Mass on a weekly or more basis, fully two thirds are women, and one third are men.

Finally, look at this
graph of the sex ratio of weekly-or-more attenders, which is also broken down by age. Notice something odd about it? Not only is it skewed towards women, whose column is twice the size of men; not only does it demonstrate the large number of older women in our congregation: women over 65 make up a quarter of the typical congregation. But something else. The bottom category of the male column is missing. What happened to men aged 18-24?

The BSA survey is based on responses from 3,000 people; half of them actually took part in the survey. In this impressive sample, they found no men aged 18 to 25 who went to Catholic church once a week or more. Not one. Their set of men at that age going to church every week is empty.

Don't imagine that lots of young men are going to church slightly less frequently: as the first table above shows, whereas 14% of nominal Catholics aged 18-24 go to church weekly (presumably, these are females), only 5.3% go 'at least monthly', and if that number includes men, there aren't many of them. Obviously there are some young Catholic men who go to church. But they are statistically negligable.

At this point I need to refer back to the Position Paper I published about the Traditional Mass and men, and to my other discussions of related issues. It is demonstrable that men are turned off the liturgy and general atmosphere of the Church, but come in large numbers to the Traditional Mass and traditional devotions; traditional Catholic congregations, again, are astonishingly fertile in terms of vocations to the priesthood, and harbour large numbers of children. Come to the Chartres Pilgrimage, and you will realise that suggestions that men are simply less religious than women, or that Catholicism is intrinsically feminine, are just nonsense. It is the way the Faith is presented to young men which is the problem.

Our parishes and schools are failing Catholic boys.

Pilgrims about to enter the Shrine at Walsingham.

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The latest from Lux, made for EWTN.

'The series will be premiered by EWTN in October of 2016 and is a four episode docudrama. It was filmed across Europe in 2015 and was completed in early 2016. It is perhaps our most ambitious yet with live action.'

EWTN's new docudrama series explores the history of the Inquisitions. What they were, why were they set up, and why have they acquired such a bad reputation today? Indeed if the modern media are to be believed the Inquisitions, particularly the Spanish Inquisition, are laced with images of cruelty, terror and religious fanaticism. However, these images are false, a misrepresentation developed over four centuries ago by Protestant Northern Europe as part of the propaganda campaign against the Catholic Church, and perpetuated ever since. This new four part original film was shot on location in six countries across Europe. It uses drama sequences and interviews with leading historians and churchmen to reveal the truth.

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A gesture characteristic of the Dominican Rite, and not found in the Roman Rite: just after the Consecration.

Mass last Saturday was for Bl Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, executed by Henry VIII out of hatred for the Catholic Faith on 28th (or 27th) May 1541. She was the daughter of George, Duke of Clarence - the one done to death in butt of wine in Shakespeare's Richard III (and, extraordinarily, probably in real life as well). Henry VII married her off to a loyal relation of his, Richard Pole, and she became lady in waiting to Catherine of Aragon, both during Catherine's engagement to Prince Arthur, who died, and when she was married to Henry VIII. Margaret's son Reginald Pole, in holy orders on the continent, wrote against the break with Rome, and two of her other sons were executed for treason (ie, Catholic sympathies).

As a Plantagenant, a Catholic, an associate of Queen Catherine, and the mother of Cardinal Pole, Henry VIII had no shortage of reasons to hate her. Nevertheless she remained in the Tower for two years before the king ordered a hasty and almost botched beheading, when she was 67.

This was the first Dominican Missa Cantata I have attended. The Epistle was sung by a cleric.

Another characteristic of the Dominican Rite: the use of the Paxbrede at the kiss of peace, for clergy, servers, and religious in choir. In the Roman Rite the Pax is normally given by the 'emplexus', embrace, but this only happens at Solemn Mass. The Roman Rite does use the Paxbrede for Prelates sitting in choir in Low Mass, and interesting the Pax is extended to the congregation using the Paxbrede in Spain and its former possessions, as was the practice in England in the Middle Ages.

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Any book shining a light on the heroic witness of those killed for their Christian faith under Communism is to be welcomed. This major two-volume work is especially so, because of its comprehensive coverage of Soviet and Soviet-bloc persecution.

Well done to Jonathan Luxmoore, otherwise known for his occasional news stories in the Catholic press. The publication of this work marks the culmination of a massive project of research and writing.

The book is available from Amazon (Vol 1, Vol 2) and directly from Gracewing.

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God of the Gulag, by Jonathan Luxmoore

Volume 1: Martyrs in an Age of Revolution

The eight decades from the Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Iron Curtain brought a wave of anti-religious repression comparable to anything seen in the fabled persecutions of the first Christian centuries. It inflicted sufferings and agonies equalling those of the darkest periods; and it stimulated writings and reflections paralleling the most insightful and moving from Christian history. This first volume of The God of the Gulag shows how the paradigms of persecution and martyrdom were established in the Early Church, when Christians were hounded by the Roman state as a threat to the established order-and how they reappeared when anti-Christian persecution returned on a mass scale after the French Revolution, as new hostile states and popular movements tried again to dismantle the power and influence of the Christian Church. Drawing on accounts and documents in many languages, it examines the first phase of communist rule after the 1917 Russian revolution, when a ruthless campaign was launched to destroy all organised religion and redirect spiritual strivings towards an absolute subservience to the Marxist vision. It looks at how Christians attempted to defend the Church and witness to their faith as the communist dictatorship was extended under Stalin to post-War Eastern Europe, bringing a new wave of arrests, trials and purges.

9780852446393 - 536 pages £20.00

Volume 2: Martyrs in an Age of Secularism

By the end of the 1950s, more than four decades had passed since Lenin and his Bolshevik followers had first seized power in Russia. Open brutality and terror had given way to administrative forms of repression and control. But the aim of communism was still very much alive-to create an egalitarian society ruled by the working class under the direction of the Party avant-garde. Intimidation and coercion by the secret police were still indispensable tools for pursuing that aim. Hostility to the Church and contempt for religious faith were still fundamental to the communist programme. This second volume of The God of the Gulag details the continuing campaign against the Church and its members, as the age of revolution gave way to an age of secularism, and new efforts were made to impose scientific atheism and rid the world of religious superstition. Drawing on accounts and documents in many languages, it shows how the requirements of Christian witness evolved as the policies and tactics of the one-party state developed, and how Church leaders sought new ways of sustaining religious life after the 1962-5 Second Vatican Council. It recounts how growing dissent was strengthened by the shock-election of a Polish Pope in 1978 and the rise of the Solidarity movement two years later, and how the bitter and protracted endgame of communist rule was played out in the 1980s. It assesses the lessons to be learned by the Church and its opponents from this modern era of persecution and martyrdom; and it looks at how the heroic testimony of the twentieth-century martyrs should be recognised and commemorated.

9780852445846 - 484 pages £20.00

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