Father John Armitage has the reassuring voice of the good pastor of anime and does not disdain to wear the austere black palandrane of the old parish priests. This is the reason that this is why his Catholic Church, St. Margaret’s, in Canning Town, one of the poorest areas in London, has always been full of faithful in recent times. “Only in the Holy Week of Easter came 5 thousand people,” he says. “For ashes people could not enter the church.” They are above all young adults, tells this priest who keeps putting in English, Romanian and Latin and widens your gaze on a desire for continuously increasing participation.
Yet his parish does not boast attractive activities. “We have no missions, we keep meetings and celebrate mass” he explains “but people started to tire so numerous that at some point we had to increase the number. We even had conversions, so from nothing. But it is not only us, it happens in many other parts of London ». Also in areas of the capital with very different ethnic, social and economic compositions, such as in the diocese of Westminster and Richmond, where the same phenomenon is recorded.
And it’s not just London. The CNA, the Catholics news agency, reports that the diocese of Arundel and Brighton in 2024 recorded an increase of 60 up to 90 catechumens -adults who embrace the Catholic faith -, while the Archdiocese of Birmingham this year had 201, about seventy more than last year and could go on with dozens of other cities scattered in the United Kingdom. A trend explained, in part, by the turning point impressed by Pope Francis and by the use of social networks, which, however, only partially illustrate a turnaround, which proved to be so surprising as to be certified as an official fact.
“The quiet revival”, the silent return, called him The Bible Societywhich in a full -bodied study compares the data collected between 19 thousand adults in 2018 with another 13 thousand of 2024 and which highlights not only a general return to the Christian faith in the kingdom, but which identifies, for the first time from the schism of Henry VIII, the young Catholics as promoters of this rebirth. Since 2018, the attendance of the Church has increased by 55 percent and 16 percent of the subjects between 18 and 24 years of age can be considered regular visitors, people who in 41 percent of cases is Catholic.
Small numbers, as the most cautious commentators say, but indicative of a phenomenon that no one had foreseen and few expected. In an increasingly hedonistic and consumer society, the prospects related to traditional spirituality – different and less captivating from that offered by the many seven who appear in recent years – remain relegated to a few faithful “subversives”, however, constantly put to the test by the scandals that have unloaded the foundations of the Catholic Church, linked to the sexual abuses committed by its servants all over the world.
An indelible stain, the nefarines of Catholic priests in Ireland, protected by a network of guilty silence. But the same self -protection mechanism recently destabilized the English Anglican Church (which was already crossing a vocations crisis) with catastrophic consequences. “I did not do enough,” admitted Justin Welby, a former archbishop of Canterbury, forced to resign last November, when his name was connected to that of John Smith, a charismatic lawyer and volunteer in the Evangelical-Christian youth centers between 1970 and 1980, who sexually harassed, physically and psychologically hundreds of children and adolescents both in the united kingdom Africa.
Violence that took place thanks to the total coverage of the ecclesiastical institutions that never made anything, indeed allowed Smith to move abroad Where he continued to perpetrate his crimes undisturbed until his death in Cape Town, as a free man, in 2018. The famous phrase “will certainly be judged in front of God” certainly is not enough to make you forget the wall of silence and indifference to which Welby also included.
Far from curbing a crisis already underway, his retreat was the first of a long series, motivated by the same reason: Having allowed, silent or lying, that some gears present in the Anglican parishes could continue to commit horrible crimes for which, in the world of ordinary mortals, we end up in jail.
George Carey, who played the same role as Welby from 1991 to 2002, left the core dress a month after him, following an investigation by the BBC who told how he had allowed a priest suspended by the Ministry for five years – because he was accused of having sexually attacked a girl – of returning to active service. The malagestation of the same case then also touched Welby’s current temporary successor, the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, who resisted the numerous requests for resignation, while admitting the existence of a deep fracture within a church that no longer seems to reflect the expectations of the faithful, not even in England where he has always dominated.
The latest scandals, however, are not enough to explain the overtaking by the Catholic “cousins”, however crossed well before by the same very serious sins. So what does people push people to these more or less large parishes, where a new small universe go to pray, to study the Bible, to speak with others of spiritual practices?
Father Armitage’s response is crystal clear. “In times like these, full of uncertainty and sense of loss, more than ever confident points of reference are needed,” he explains. «London is becoming a city that is difficult to live, with increasingly extensive pockets of poverty. There is an anthem that says: “Stay with me! The darkness thickens; Lord, stays with me”. Here, perhaps other churches wanted to follow too much the direction taken by the wind, while we remained in our place. Let’s say that we are like grandmother’s cuisine, I am sure that you Italians can understand the metaphor … ». Even the British, apparently.
