Britain now a Catholic country
Figures show more in UK attending Mass rather than Anglican services
LONDON – Roman Catholics have overtaken Anglicans as the country's dominant religious group. More people attend Mass every Sunday than worship with the Church of England, figures seen by The Sunday Telegraph show.
This means that the established Church has lost its place as the nation's most popular Christian denomination after more than four centuries of unrivalled influence following the Reformation.
Leading figures on Saturday gave warning that the Church of England could become a minority faith.
The statistics show that attendance at Anglican Sunday services has dropped by 20 per cent since 2000.
A survey of 37,000 churches, to be published in the new year, shows the number of people going to Sunday Mass in England last year averaging 861,000, compared to 852,000 Anglicans worshipping.
The rise of Catholicism has been bolstered by an influx of immigrants from eastern Europe and Africa, who have packed the pews of Catholic parishes that had previously been dwindling.
It is part of the changing face of churchgoing across Britain in the 21st century, which has also seen a boom in the growth of Pentecostal churches, which have surpassed the Methodist Church as the country's third-largest Christian denomination.
To combat the declining interest in traditional religion, the Anglican Church has launched radical forms of evangelism that include nightclub chaplains, a floating church on a barge and even Internet congregations.
Reverend Alister McGrath, professor of historical theology at Oxford University, said the church attendance findings from the Christian Research organisation should act as a wake-up call to the Church of England.
"While it can rightly point to the weight of history, the importance of cultural memory, the largest number of church buildings and nominal church members in defence of its continued status as the established church, there is clearly a problem emerging," said Prof McGrath, one of Anglicanism's most respected figures.
"What happens if the established church becomes a minority church?"
The Catholic Church has also suffered a serious fall in the size of its congregations, but the expansion of the European Union in 2004 resulted in its numbers being bolstered by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Poles and Lithuanians.
Attendance at Mass in 1991 was recorded at 1.3 million, a drop of about 40 per cent since 1963. But over the past six years it has fallen by only 13 per cent – the rate of decline slowed by immigrants from Catholic
countries.
Right Reverend Crispian Hollis, Bishop of Portsmouth, said the Roman Church has been active in trying to win back lapsed worshippers, but conceded that mass immigration was a significant factor in swelling its
numbers.
"We don't want to be seen as scoring points over the Anglican Church because we are in no way jealous of its position as the national church, but of course these figures are encouraging." – The Sunday Telegraph
