In England and Wales, Catholicism Is Raising Its Head

A breath of optimism within the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales (CBCEW). The latest figures for Sunday worship show that in 2023, 554,000 faithful gathered in church pews every Sunday: an increase of 50,000 faithful compared to the previous year. Further, some parishes have not yet communicated the results of their count.

The trend towards an increase in the practice of Catholicism in this part of the United Kingdom has been observed for several years, and suggests a religious revival, even if it is still far from the statistics from before the Covid-19 pandemic. At that time, Sunday Mass brought together 700,000 faithful, but the drastic confinement measures, sometimes followed with great zeal by the clergy, left many pews empty.

Stephen Bullivant is professor of theology and sociology of religion at the University of St. Mary in Twickenham. According to him, we should observe “cautious optimism,” because a third of pre-pandemic practitioners have never returned to church. But the researcher notes that the increase in practice corresponds to the arrival of new recruits to Catholicism.

They are recruits who are perhaps increasingly disappointed by the Anglican religion, which is very much like a dying patient placed in palliative care: an impression that was not contradicted by the sensational resignation of Justin Welby, leader of Anglicanism in the UK, at the beginning of 2025.

The man who bears the title of Archbishop of Canterbury, but whose ordination is considered invalid by the Catholic Church, like that of all members of the Anglican clergy. It has not weathered the storm that is disorienting an English Protestantism that is as much undermined by progressive views as by the affairs widely publicized by the British press.

As Le Figaro points out, if at the turn of the millennium, the weekly religious service brought together 1.27 million Anglicans, 24-years later there were only 693,000 left to cross the doors of their place of worship.

Suffice to say that more and more English Protestants, tired of the official positions taken by their clergy in favor of "homosexual marriage" of ministers of religion, have eyes for the Roman Catholic Church. For several decades - and especially in recent years - conversions have been multiplying, even at Buckingham Court.

Could Catholicism one day prevail over Anglicanism? It is likely. Already in 2009, the number of practicing Catholics, which then stood at 861,000, briefly exceeded that of Anglicans, then at 852,000, going to church every Sunday. Still, not all  is well with Catholicism at this time and certainly the crisis in the Church does not help.

We only have to remember the immense disappointment and the deep pain of the academic Julien Green when he discovered on television the reformed rite of the Mass by Pope Paul VI in 1969. He found troubling points in common with the Protestant religious service that he had abandoned a few years earlier.