The fruits of adversity

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TO SEE two faces of Catholic Britain, you need only walk a short way from Parliament. The train and bus stations of Victoria, where many migrants arrive to seek their fortunes, are even closer.

First there is the squat red brick of Westminster cathedral, home of England's Catholic hierarchy; its Byzantine mosaics, glinting in candlelight, are a splendid setting for one of the country's finest choirs. Round the corner things are more down-to-earth at a hostel and day-centre for the homeless (the largest in London, it is claimed) set up by a religious order, the Daughters of Charity. Among the duties of the priests and nuns who work at The Passage is liaison with police, hospitals—and undertakers, in the fairly common event that homeless people, often young, succumb to addiction or despair.

Perhaps the distance between the two should not be overstated. For a body that works at society's sharp end, the hostel has many friends in high places, including banks. Staff at Goldman Sachs help in the kitchen; employees at Barclays assist the homeless with tips on how to open a bank account. And for all its splendour, the cathedral is a newish building for a newly revived institution, one that remembers being weak. It was only in 1850 that Catholics felt able, for the first since the monarchy broke with Rome in the 1530s, to have bishops in England. And 20 years before that, office-holders had to be Anglicans.

Such discrimination may be a fading memory, but then churches have a different way of measuring time. Among the cathedral's treasures are the remains of martyrs who died for the Roman faith at the hands of a Protestant state. (Protestants were killed by Catholics too, of course, but earlier.) Even in its finest bastions, Catholic England does not feel a place grown arrogant on a diet of unfettered power.

These days Catholic Britons—who will be welcoming Pope Benedict XVI to their shores this month—have little obvious reason to call themselves embattled. In an historic reversal, adherents of their faith have been named to one top job after another. Chris Patten, a Conservative politician (and co-organiser of the papal visit) is chancellor of Oxford University, an institution that Catholics avoided attending (until the pope allowed them, in 1896) even after Anglicans admitted them. The previous speaker of the House of Commons was Michael Martin, whose roots are in Hibernian, working-class Glasgow. And the head of the BBC, Mark Thompson, is of the Papist persuasion. Almost the only thing a Catholic (or even the spouse of a Catholic) cannot be, by British law, is king or queen.

But the senior Catholics who are hosting the pope do not talk or act as if they had laurels to rest on. Instead, they point out that their co-religionists work hard for whatever prominence they now enjoy as the biggest body of churchgoing Christians. Whereas the established Church of England is still trying to reconcile inherited privilege with a shrunken flock, their Catholic compatriots have had their muscles toned by some hard battles.

Nor does the success of individual Catholics mean that life is easy for conscientious believers, insists Charles Moore, a columnist and Catholic convert. Given the liberal, secular consensus that prevails in Britain, it would be almost impossible for a strict Catholic—one who accepted the church's teaching on abortion, homosexuality and stem-cell research—to become prime minister, he thinks. “The old Anglican prejudice against Catholics has been replaced by the secular sort.”

It is true that Catholic politicians face hard questioning: Ruth Kelly, a former education secretary, was criticised for her Roman leanings. Tony Blair converted to Catholicism only after he had stepped down as prime minister. John Battle, a Catholic Labour politician, says his biggest act of religiously inspired defiance was not a bio-ethical issue but opposing the Iraq war in 2003. But he thinks his co-religionists have won respect for their willingness to work with other faiths in easing social problems, including the plight of migrants.

As the pope will see, the latest challenge facing his followers in Britain is also a huge opportunity—an influx of Catholic workers from eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa. Under the impact of immigration, Catholic churches are flourishing—and trying hard to adapt to new languages and styles—in greater London and other southern places such as Reading and Southampton. Further north, some old Catholic areas—like Lancashire and Liverpool—have seen church attendance plunge, but there are pockets where particular groups of migrants have settled. In bits of Lancashire there are lots of Indian Christians from the state of Kerala.

Most of the migrants who throng London's churches are doing better than the occupants of The Passage, but sometimes not much. “The Ground of Justice”, a church-backed survey of migrant worshippers published in 2007, found that in some London parishes three-quarters of the congregation had no legal right to be in Britain (and were thus vulnerable to illegally low pay and blackmail). For many, hearing mass in Portuguese or Tagalog was a moment of calm in a grinding existence. In a few cases, new worshippers were instructed to “integrate” with a local flock that was weak and collapsing.

As an example of Catholicism at work in a grittily multicultural area, take the Jesuit church in Stamford Hill in north London, where Hasidic Jews have been joined by Hispanic and Slavic newcomers. Gimcrack shops offer cash-remittance services to distant lands. And on Sundays, mass is said first in English, then in Spanish, then in Polish. If migrants are not satisfied by that, they have choices: what meets their eye as they leave mass is a smart new Pentecostal church, with worship in Portuguese as well as English. For anyone who thinks churches need competition to stay on their toes, this is a healthy sight.

Nor are hard-pressed migrants the only element in Catholic London's rich diversity. Another contingent is formed by young, successful men and women whose style and theology are conservative: believers in “salvation by tweed alone”, as one clerical wag dubs them. Some have emerged from monastic private schools; others are one or two generations away from roots in Ireland or eastern Europe. Their views are often well to the right of an older group of churchgoers, who sign up readily to green and third-world causes.

Nor should their influence be underestimated. Francis Davis, a Catholic scholar, recalls an earlier cohort of liberal worshippers who reacted with dismay to the Vatican's rigid line on contraception, for example, but stayed in the church. These days such people tend to lapse altogether, leaving more conservative types in the pews, albeit in small numbers.

That leaves wide open the question of how the church will look when today's young fogeys reach middle age. Filipinos and Poles are often traditional in their devotional practices; they are comfortable with statues and saints. Will local conservatism mix with the imported variety to forge a new style of Catholicism, girding for fresh battles with secularism and longing for a reversal of the Reformation?