Missing the Wood

Last week a reverend gentleman wrote to the Church Times:

"The evidence is there for all to see. The churches that water down the teaching and replace the Christ-given holy eucharist with 'home-made services' drawn up by a committee, and fall over backwards to conform to the inroads of secularism, are the ones in decline. ... The churches that teach the Catholic and apostolic faith in all its fulness, and have a dignified parish eucharist at the centre, every Sunday, backed with solid teaching, are invariably growing churches."

And this is my reply; not sure whether it will get printed, so I put it here.

"While I share Revd Geoffrey Squire's frustration at churches (and Churches) 'watering down the faith' and not recognising the effect (Letters, 1st April 2011), I'm not sure that trad Anglo-Catholics should be quite so self-congratulatory. There are far, far fewer churches in the Catholic tradition than there once were. Of those I've attended, two have closed in the last 15 years and one is struggling to keep going. If we look at the 21 churches involved in the 'Battle over Benediction' in London in the 1920s, only seven survive in any form and only three (St Mary Bourne Street, St Stephen Gloucester Road and St Peter London Docks) are in any sense part of the Catholic movement; St John Holland Road has just been taken over by HTB. London is a special case but almost every town has its closed church or churches from the Catholic tradition. This means that people who like Catholic worship have to gravitate towards a smaller number of churches which, naturally, look more flourishing as a result, and younger, enthusiastic clergy also have less choice as to where to go. The strength of a small number of trad Anglo-Catholic churches is, I suspect, less about teaching and more about demographics.

"The good side of this is that such churches have a wonderful opportunity to help the Catholic movement revive, if they can manage it. Some of that will involve precisely the kind of imaginative outreach work that our Tractarian forebears engaged in, as well as reverent and beautiful celebration of the Mass."