In the last 15 years, I have attended Masses all over England, and what has struck me most about English Catholics in the pews is how similar they are to Catholics in the United States today. In the suburbs, you find the churches filled with older people, there out of long habit and young families, trying to pass on the Faith. There are almost no single young people.
In the big city churches, a grand mix of types of all races and nationalities – singles, couples, old and young, plus a sprinkling of tourists. And in the solemn Latin Masses, the pews are filled with a creative minority of intellectuals, artists, entrepreneurs and young families with lots of children.
So who are they, G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Secret People,’ the Catholics of England?
Today’s Catholics represent a small minority – 9.6 percent of the population in England and Wales, about 5 million people. These derive from five distinct groups: Lancastrians, Irish, recusant families, converts and immigrants. To varying degrees, these groups have inter-married and mixed, of course, but it helps to understand their provenance.
Lancaster, in the north of England, stubbornly persisted in the Faith for nearly four hundred years, despite the persecutions of the Crown and later oppression and discrimination. Its capital is Liverpool – home of the Beatles, but more importantly the center of immigration for Irish fleeing the famine of the 1840s. Thousands died of cholera and other diseases; in the crypt of the Cathedral are buried ten priests who died heroically, struggling to save the lives of the sick poor refugees.
In Liverpool, and in many other northern cities, the Irish set up urban parishes in ‘ghetto’ patterns which will be familiar to ethnic European diaspora Catholics the world over. Today, Liverpool is 46 percent Catholic.
The recusant families of England are famous for both their wealth and intransigent adherence to the Faith through the centuries of brutal repression. Many of the high aristocracy trace their lineage back to the Norman French who invaded the island in 1066, though recusants can also be found among ordinary people and the country squires in remote villages in the North unreached by the Crown. For hundreds of years, these families paid astronomic sums to the Crown in order to be allowed to practice their religion
Their unofficial leader has always been the Duke of Norfolk, a hereditary dukedom based in the diocese of Arundel. The Duke has stepped in at various critical points, for example in the depths of World War II Nazi bombing of Birmingham, to quietly arrange to move John Henry Newman’s Oratory School to safety on 600 bucolic acres in Berkshire. (When the next Monarch is crowned, it will be the Duke who will be in charge of the coronation, a responsibility traditionally entrusted to him, regardless of his religion.)
REGINA|12