Warning over Scots drifting from pews
Sam Adams
THE BISHOP of Paisley has said the New Evangelisation is urgently needed in Scotland as “adherence to the Church is now looser than it ever was in living memory”. Bishop Philip Tartaglia said there had been
a “startling” drift away from the Church, espe- cially in the last two decades, and a “worrying hesitation in the transmission of the faith to the younger generation”. Writing the Scottish bishops’ response to the preparatory lineamenta document on the New Evangelisation for the Transmission of the Christian Faith – issued by the Vatican ahead of its discussion at the Synod of Bishops in 2012 – he said Scottish Catholics were suf- fering from the “general malaise” affecting
the Church across Western Europe. This was characterised by problems such as a lack of priests and vocations to the religious life and “an incipient weariness and fatigue among Catholic families in the practice and trans- mission of the faith”. Bishop Tartaglia also identified “a kind of missionary inertia on the part of parish communities”. He said families and schools are key to the
transmission of the Catholic faith, but warned that parents and teachers have “literally been overwhelmed by the godlessness of modernity in all its forms”. He went on: “in many instances, the parents and teachers themselves … have resigned themselves to the spirit of the age, as if to say, ‘what can we do?’ ” Nevertheless, Catholic schools in Scotland were “ripe for a new evangelisation”, and a new programme for religious education to be used in schools called ‘This is our Faith”, which would be a “really powerful resource” for the New Evangelisation of teachers and pupils. The Pontifical Council for Promoting the
New Evangelisation was created by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010 to promote the Catholic faith in traditionally Christian nations affected by increasing secularisation.
Tough decisions for bishops to take
DIFFICULT CHOICES will have to be made by the bishops of England and Wales as they determine how to spend their limited funds on their mission priorities in the coming years, writes Elena Curti. The bishops will spend the whole of next
Tuesday discussing this matter during their biannual meeting at Hinsley Hall, Leeds. They will consider a strategy paper prepared
by the bishops’ conference general secretary, Fr Marcus Stock, setting out aims and objec- tives for the future, and then allocate their budgets accordingly. With most dioceses experi encing falls in income, they will be con- scious that tough decisions have to be made. They have to choose, for instance, whether to prioritise their work supporting the Church in the Holy Land, the New Evangelisation,
parliamentary lobbying and materials to pro- mote marriage and family life. On the first anniversary of Pope Benedict’s visit last year, the bishops set out three pri- orities for the Church over the next three to five years. These include “promoting a culture of vocation”, “teaching Christ and his Gospel as saving truth” and “proclaiming the coming of the kingdom of God” to the whole community. The bishops will also discuss their response to the preparatory lineamentafor next October’s synod on the New Evangelisation and decide who will represent them. In addition, they will decide how to mark Pope Benedict’s Year of Faith which begins in October 2012, the fiftieth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.
St Paul’s report slams City moral standards
TECHNOLOGY AND deregulation have dehumanised the City of London and helped undermine its moral standards, according to a report by St Paul’s Cathedral, writes Sam Adams. In an introduction to the report by the St
Paul’s Institute, Dr Giles Fraser said the so- called “Big Bang” deregulation of the City by the Conservative Government in 1986 had taken “a great deal of direct human contact out of the act of [financial] trading itself”. Dr Fraser, who resigned as canon chancellor
of St Paul’s Cathedral and as director of the institute last month over the cathedral’s handling of the anti-capitalist protest on its doorstep, said that a growing reliance on tech- nology for trading and a decline in a sense of
shared values among financial workers may also “go some way to explain how a sense of moral obligation has come to feel less compelling”. The report included a ComRes poll of 515
financial workers which found that a majority of City workers believed they were overpaid while around 75 per cent said there was too great a gap between rich and poor in Britain. Three-quarters agreed that large bonuses
in the financial sector encouraged people to take greater risks, while 58 per cent thought companies should invest directly in deprived communities. More than 40 per cent said they believed in God, with around 16 per cent saying they attended regular services. (For the full report, visit
www.thetablet.co.uk.)
FROM THE ARCHIVE 50 YEARS AGO
Despite Europe’s chronic shortage of priests, two-thirds of all the priests in the world are European nationals. This is pointed out in a survey completed by the international Catholic Institute for Social Ecclesiastical Research, which shows that although Catholics in Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland com- bined account for less than 1 per cent of the Catholics in the world, these four small nationals supply 40 per cent of the world's missionary priests. It points out that late eighteenth-century Spain had 10 million inhabitants and 65,000 priests, while today its population is triple that and the number of priests stands at 25,000. Refugees from behind the Iron Curtain
have swelled the ranks of Catholics in some European countries and sharpened the shortage of priests: thus West Germany, which plays host to millions of refugees, now has only one priest for every 1,568 Catholics. Austria is even worse off, with one priest for every 1,578 Catholics. In Rome itself, there are 3,000 Catholics
for every priest. The north of Italy is much better off, with one priest per 831 Catholics. In central Italy, there is one priest per 1,085 Catholics, and in the south one priest to 1,317 Catholics. Portugal reports an acute shortage of priests. Switzerland and France are regarded as amply staffed with priests in most regions. The Tablet, 11 November 1961
100 YEARS AGO
Our contemporary The Church Timessays: “It is announced that two Roman bishops in England are to be raised to archi - episcopal rank, namely, those in Liverpool and Birmingham, which thus will become provincial centres. Among the conditions which have weighed with the Roman authorities in the selection of these two cities, we may, perhaps, be permitted to name one not unlikely one. Liverpool and Birmingham, subsequent to the appear- ance of Roman bishops there, have become the seats of territorial bishops in the provinces of Canterbury and York, and some confusion has been caused by the fact that, in each city, there have been two bishops using the same territorial title. This confusion will disappear when one is called archbishop and the other bishop, but greater emphasis will be given to the irregularity already existing, an irregularity accentuated by the residence of a prelate claiming to exercise metropolitan and diocesan powers within the diocese of the lawful Catholic bishop of the place.” … When The Church Times speaks of “the lawful Catholic bishop”, it all the time means the Protestant bishop. The Tablet, 11 November 1911
12 November 2011 | THE TABLET | 37
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