A Catholic Country?

Britain: a 'Catholic' country screams the headline.

Roman Catholicism has been in the news recently. This is mainly due to Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister, converting to Catholicism, only months after his bid to put Catholic adoption agencies out of business.

I was interested to see the comment by the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, asking whether or not Blair would repent of his voting record on "life issues", such as abortion, embryo research and euthanasia. Ann Widdecombe, the Conservative MP who is a Catholic, points out that Blair's voting record is at odds with his faith.

But both SPUC and Widdecombe miss the point. Blair is one of the breed of ambitious politicians for whom "religion" is a Sunday morning hobby, kept in its place, in church. Monday to Saturday, such a politician will be a secular humanist. Religion needs only be dragged out of its Sunday morning box when politically convenient, when looking for votes.

Hence all the opprobrium that Ruth Kelly, now the Transport Secretary, faced when she was Education Secretary and then as Communities & Local Government Secretary and Minister for Women. Kelly was not one of these religion-is-for-Sunday-mornings only politicians, and the controversies over her were always around her refusal to separate her faith from her actions as a Cabinet member.

So, with the Catholic Church having just had the public relations catastrophe of Blair joining it, is this now a Catholic country?

This is based on there being more people in Catholic churches for Mass on Sunday morning than at Church of England services.

Despite what seems to be commonly believed, there are more denominations than just the Church of England and the Roman Catholics. There is only one Catholic denomination, whereas Protestants are spread across several. I recently attended a men's event at a church- not mine- and I was surprised at just how many small evangelical churches there are locally.

Another issue is that in May 2004 the European Union expanded to take in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Malta, Hungary and Cyprus. Hence, citizens of those nations gained the right to live and work in Britain.

As a result, there has been a sizeable influx of Poles to Southampton, and these tend to be Catholics. Hence, in one newspaper, there was a compare-and-contrast between Catholics and Protestants in Southampton. You can compare the huge Catholic church, packed to overflowing with the Poles here, with the struggling Protestant church, dying on its feet.

Now, the Catholic church used as the example is one I know of- big and central. And it was from their records that I was able to do some genealogy (having some Irish Catholic ancestry which ended up in Southampton post-famine; hence distant relatives in both the USA and Canada- one of whom met Mary McAleese, the President of the Irish Republic, when she visited Toronto earlier this year).

The Protestant church is a small Methodist one on the outskirts. We used to share a minister with them (in the Methodist church, a minister will cover 3 or 4 churches). You wouldn't expect an "outskirts church" to be big, just as it would be unfair to compare a city centre church with a village one. And who says that big is best? If it was size, then there are at least a couple of large evangelical churches which would not fit the "Protestantism- dying on its feet" spin.