Fewer people are rolling up to Mass on Sundays. The evidence of this was there for all to see when I took my wife along to a Mass for the Sick at St Patrick’s Church in Dumbarton on Sunday.
I remarked on this later to my son who is a regular attender at Sunday Mass in Edinburgh.
While there is no evidence that the pattern of steady decline in churchgoing, and the number of people identifying as Christian, is being interrupted, the Masses in the Scottish capital’s churches are overflowing with people.
The Masses at the Sacred Heart parish in Lauriston and St Peter’s in Morningside are very well attended.
At the same time there are striking increases in the numbers of young people being received into the Church. Something interesting is happening, despite Kevin McKenna’s contention in a Herald opinion piece that the heirarchy is silent.
According to The Tablet religion magazine, the best way to find out what is going on is to listen to some of these new converts.
They sent Aili Winstanley Channer, their young journalist intern who herself became a Catholic while at university, out with her notebook and she returned this week with a feature that includes an extraordinary range of personal stories that defies many of the lazy stereotypes we have of the Gen Z fledgling Catholic.
“Every story I heard from a young convert was different,” Aili writes, “and none of them exactly matched my own.”
The Church in England and Wales might be shrinking, but the energy these young converts are bringing is potentially transformative. In Scotland though, we have no figures to guage what the situation is at this time.
Pope Leo, in his message for Lent, has urged Catholics to abstain from harsh words and rash judgement, to refrain “from words that offend and hurt our neighbour”.
But in her Tablet column this week Liz Dodd confesses, “I rather think I might do the opposite.”
She points out, “If the Epstein revelations have taught us anything, it is that evil flourishes in polite silence, but bold, courageous offensiveness, directed relentlessly and recklessly towards the powerful, emulates Truth …”
I am glad to hear that. For speaking truth to power, such as it is at their level, I have been banned from speaking to the communications officers (spin doctors) at West Dunbartonshire Council.
They will brook no criticism of their elected members and highly paid officials.
Lucy Beckett isn’t inclined to polite nuance either. In a terrific opening piece in their Lent series by eighty-something writers, she reflects that as you grow older possibilities narrow, but God gets closer.
She worries, of course, about the future she won’t be there to see, and how her grandchildren will negotiate the dreadful polarisation and over-simplification of every human challenge, but knows too that this particularly menacing patch of history will pass, people will realise they need each other more than they need smartphones, “and, when Trump and Putin and Netanyahu are no more, common sense in all its meanings, and even responsibility in all of its layers of meaning, may return to guide the powerful.”
In recent weeks, Gordon Brown, whose father was a Church of Scotland minister, has spoken of his deep regret at bringing Peter Mandelson back into government in 2008 and has said “only a century-defining rebalancing of power and accountability is equal to this moment”.
Feature writer James Macintyre reveals that the former prime minister now regrets not being more open about the way in which his Christian beliefs motivated him while he was Prime Minister.
Abigail Frymann Rouch examines the alternative lenses through which the increasing violence in Nigeria is being seen; the religious dimension to it is clear, but she argues that the framing of the conflict as a “Christian genocide” will only make Christians more vulnerable.
Fiona Sampson traces the influence of her convent education on George Sand, the cross-dressing, promiscuous French novelist who transformed both the nineteenth-century novel and progressive political dialogue by writing from feelings and ideals instead of abstract principles.
Meanwhile, at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Clyde Street, Glasgow, people turned up to join the queue to join the Catholic Church at Easter assembled for a special service of welcome conducted by Archbishop William Nolan.