Diversity of English Catholics

by Fr.
Michael Richards
THE other day I was talking to a French priest who had come over here to collect material for a book he is writing about English Catholicism. He was asking me about the various intellectual "tendencies" to be found among Catholics in this country. When I am in France I often find myself confronted with the same kind of question: "What is the tendency represented by the Clergy Review, New Black/riffs, the CATHOLIC HERALD?" and so on.
Now it is certainly true that we have our various "tendencies," liberal, authoritarian, left-wing, right-wing and plenty more. This has been the case ever since the nineteenth century revival of Catholicism and will no doubt continue to be the case, in spite of the feeling of many that such varieties of opinion disturb the peace that we ought to have in the Church.
This feeling, too, has existed since the nineteenth century. It may well be one of the factors that has helped to keep us together, but I cannot help feeling that if we arc to stay together, something a little more dynamic is needed than the desire for peace and quiet.
The reason why I feel uneasy when I answer questions of the kind put by the French clergy is the fact that by using the classifications of a rather intellectual kind which are common in France, they are really missing the point about our local brand of Catholicism, and are failing to see the particular
opportunities which are available to us as well as the extent to which we are meeting those opportunities, in spite of the peace-lovers who don't seem to want Catholicism to make any sort of news at all.
The point which our continental visitors regularly fail to notice is the fact that we are in this country a free and independent Church, uninhibited by links with the State and able to develop our missionary and pastoral work in our own way. And at the same time, we are, sociologically speaking, very far from being a sect. No other church in this country contains such a wide cross-section of the whole population as well as providing in the way we do for immigrant groups of various nationalities.
While the Church in France, in so many ways, leaves us all in her debt, she has a number of weaknesses. -French Catholics tend to get enmeshed in discussions of theory, and are still involved in memories of their national past and in various political options in a way which damages their unity and hinders their apostolate. They tend to look when they come over here at the Church of England as at another "national" Church, which will have problems similar to their own, and to overlook what we are doing. But I am sure that they really have at least as much to learn from their English Catholic brethren.
In the nineteenth century, some of their scholars were well aware of this and wrote some important studies of English Catholic history. Then for a long time the interest seems to have faded, but in recent years the idea has been gaining ground once again that English Catholicism has had a distinct contribution to make to the life of the Church and that it has been able to make it precisely because of the fact that for so long it has been a "pilgrim" Church, untouched as was the Church in France by some of the less happy aspects of the spirit of the CounterReformation and the Ancien Regime.
Admittedly, we have not done very much to explain ourselves to the French, or, for that matter, to give ourselves a very conscious sense of purpose. So in trying to explain to a French Catholic what I think are the particular opportunities in front of us, which he perhaps misses if he look at us too much in terms of his own Church life, I rather hope that at the same time I shall be saying one or two things which we do not often enough put clearly before our own minds.
The main point of being a Catholic in this country is the conviction that in the Catholic faith we have the central and ail-embracing expression of Christianity. which can find within itself a place for all human types and temperaments, and which will therefore be the means of reconciling divided Christians and of providing a basis for our whole way of life in our own particular society. in being a Catholic in this country, we are not bound to conform to patterns set by this or that group of Catholics in the past, whether recusant, or Irish, or converts from Anglicanism. We must be understood in terms of our faith, and not in terms of what sociology or history have made us.
T. S. Eliot failed to see this point when he made the judgment that English Catholics are a group to be situated on the edge of English life, and aligned himself instead with the Church of Eggland because of the special relationship which he believed it to have with English national culture. In declaring himself an AngloCatholic and a monarchist, he was really making himself a representative in this country of the sort of thinking about the Church and the social order which was to be found in conservative circles in France. He Was allying himself with what is in fact a restricted form of Catholicism, and not with a Church which whatever the political commitments of its members is itself essentially free and independent : a Church which cam in fact, be seen more clearly in the life of the recusant minority in this country since the Reformation than it can in many European countries.
I do not want to make exaggerated claims for our achievements. But I do want to point to our potentialities and to say that if a new English expression of Christianity is to take shape in the years ahead, it is with the English Catholic community that men must begin. This is because of our faith and because of the situation in which we have arrived in society as a whole, and obviously not because of our human talents a,nd qualities.
If people are to be helped to see this, then we must, far more insisteritly than in the past, speak up for ourselves and not give the impression that we are just a minority group interested only in preserving a minority way of life. The Bishops' Statement on Moral Issues and the work of the Catholic Information Office are two recent examples of a positive and outward looking spirit of a kind which could bring about a profound shift in the relationship between the Church and local society.
The national press has not quite cottoned on to this yet. The Times, for instance, while it pays more attention to us than it did in the past, still
follows the rather heavily patronising line which it took twenty-five years ago. The National Commissions, however, for Justice and Peace, Social Welfare, Ecumenism, the Laity and so on, together with the various diocesan and parish councils, all now provide the nucleus for a new pattern of English Church life from which can spring a revival every bit as important as the various movements which have been given that name over the last three hundred years.
What is happening at present is, in fact. much more significant than, say, the Methodist revival or the Oxford Movement. These were movements within the national church or away from it. And the same can be said of many other developments which, fruitful as they were, were nevertheless limited in their scope and have now lost much of their momentum. The new developments within English Catholicism, however, address themselves to the whole range of the national life and seek to bring it back within the scope of a single world-wide communion and faith.
My French visitor, many fellow Catholics, and most of my English friends may well say that if this is the case, the leaders of the English Catholic community do not give much evidence of believing it. I think that, in fact, they do believe it but that perhaps by the time they get to be our leaders they are a little tired of saying it. Whatever the explanation may be. these are the terms on which I myself, and I think most of my friends, practise our Catholicism, and I still hope that one day French Catholics as well as the English public will wake up to what is happening.
Fr. Richards is Editor of the "Clergy Review."