?Once a Catholic ? ?

During the past three years over 100,000 people have stopped going to Mass in England and Wales alone. In the coming weeks, we shall look at what moves are being made to invite them back. But first, we talk to people about why they went

One of the hardest things for Catholic parents is for them to see their children lose interest in their faith. There they are at Mass at the age of 15: sulky expression, arms folded, not taking part, not listening.

Is it just a rebellious phase or will it continue? There is every indication that many of those who start drifting away in their teens stay away for good. Mgr Keith Barltrop, director of the Catholic Agency to Support Evangelisation (CASE) says the dramatic fall in churchgoing in recent decades is largely down to a failure to pass on the faith to the next generation ? what the experts call ?a crisis of transmission?.

According to the most recent statistics available, and reported in the current Catholic Directory, Mass attendances in England and Wales fell by well over 130,000 in the three years to 2005. The Catholic Church is not alone in this. In his forthcoming book, The Biology of the Human Spirit, the zoologist David Hay traces the pattern of regular church attendance in statistics for over 100 years and concludes that if the trend continues ?there will be virtually no Christian institutional presence in Britain by the year 2050?.

Over the next few weeks, The Tablet will be looking at what various denominations are doing to try to halt the decline. But first: why are Catholics leaving the Church? To begin to find the answer I interviewed a dozen lapsed Catholics of different ages and backgrounds. It was striking to note that in virtually every case, siblings had also lapsed. One or two interviewees had left on principle and wanted to reject their religious background altogether. Rather more retained respect and affection for the Church, a belief that Catholicism still defined them and grounded their moral sense, even if faith itself had long gone. Some still considered themselves Catholics, others preferred to call themselves ?Cultural Catholics?, others again simply atheists.

Unrelated but with similar religious backgrounds, Ann, 56, from Liverpool and Kate, 60, from London were brought up Catholics, attended Catholic convent schools and later went to university. But while Kate adored the Church?s rituals and sang in the choir, Ann recalls being bored by the old Latin Mass. By the age of 15 she would tell her mother she was going to a Sunday evening Mass by herself, but instead would go out with friends. At university, Ann studied the philosophy of religion and became even more doubtful about Catholicism. She also began to feel there was deep-seated misogyny in the Church.

?There wasn?t a debate about women priests at that time but I was generally unhappy about the position of women. A lot of very poor large Catholic families lived in Liverpool and they were not allowed to practise birth control. Abortion had become legal and I thought the Church?s attitude was very harsh to women on that issue as well.?

Kate?s rebellion began at her convent school, which she found ?incredibly repressive? in the last couple of years.

?I would have enjoyed any discussion or debate but that was a no-no. I really resented it. I was told if I applied to the LSE (London School of Economics) I would go to hell. I was very angry and bitter for a long time,? she says.

Kate studied sociology and later became a lecturer. She felt drawn to liberation theology and admired the worker-priest movement. Her anger has subsided over the years and she can see the positive and negative sides of the Church. She would consider coming back but says her lack of religious faith, which has never been strong, is an obstacle.

The Church?s approach to marriage and divorce is frequently a sticking point for people. Maggie, 41, was brought up a Catholic but stopped going regularly to Mass when she married a divorcee, and now attends a Church of Scotland service. She describes the Catholic Church?s views on divorce as outdated and unforgiving.

?I knew the Catholic Church would not allow it so we went to see a Church of Scotland minister who was lovely and forward-thinking and understood that my husband?s marriage split was against his wishes and that I had nothing to do with their break-up. He was very happy to marry us.?

Maggie still considers herself a Catholic but is planning to have her first baby, due later this year, baptised in the Church of Scotland. She still attends Mass occasionally with her parents but says, regretfully, that the Church has left her ?out in the cold?.

What Maggie perceived as the rigidity of Church teaching was something that in some ways appealed to Gabriel, although his faith never survived his departure from a small, overwhelmingly Catholic town in Northern Ireland. He had been bookish and devout as a child and enjoyed being an altar server but began to have doubts at the age of 14 when he started to be exposed to other ideas.

?I had been locked up in a very inward-looking society and discovered a wider world through reading. I began to scrutinise the religion I was brought up in and see some contradictions and things that did not ring true,? says Gabriel, an actor and writer in his early thirties. He kept going to Mass while he remained at home; he says it seemed aggressive to do otherwise, but his faith was slipping away. After he left home he attended only when visiting his parents in Northern Ireland. He recalls how on one visit he forgot to go to Mass and his father was so troubled that he arranged for his son to meet a Jesuit priest. ?We had a very nice chat about sceptical enquiry and continuing spiritual quest. The priest told my father that I didn?t have a problem but that he [Gabriel?s father] did.?

Gabriel retains a deep respect for the Catholic Church and, while he has no intention of returning, he would be troubled if it diluted its teaching to accommodate critics.

?The Church of England seems always ready to say: ?Let?s just see if we can stretch the boundaries a bit to include you?. The Catholic Church is more rigorous. It says: ?There is a line here, and we are on one side of it?. I am always ready to say, ?I am on the other side of that line?. ?

Natalie, a 37-year-old mother of two, would like her children to be baptised but feels that she cannot dedicate them to God. She considered a naming ceremony but had a party instead. ?My feelings are linked to the language of ritual which the Church is good at and which I do miss. In weddings there is something powerful about a church ceremony bound up with history and a sense of continuity.?

Natalie also harks back to the Sunday ritual and the sense of community at her local church, and regrets that her children will not have that experience. She gradually stopped going to church after university because she felt that she could no longer believe in God.

?Even after that, I had another try at God and I was doing reflection and prayer on my own and reading spiritual books. I tried but didn?t find anything I could call a relationship with God.?

Pamela from Blackburn in Lancashire seems to feel less that she has deserted the Church than that the Church has deserted her. Now in her early seventies, she still strictly observes some of the traditions of her youth ? she never eats meat on Fridays or on Wednesdays in Lent ? and regards herself as a devout Catholic. However, the changes to the Mass and other rules after the Second Vatican Council made her feel estranged from the Church. She travelled the 10 miles from Blackburn to Preston, to the nearest Latin Mass, every Sunday for a few years in the late 1960s, but when that service was no longer held, she stopped attending altogether. She feels particularly alienated by what she sees as a lax approach to the faith by today?s Church.

?It used to be very hard to be a Catholic, and it isn?t now,? she said. ?And they had bigger congregations when it was hard.?

Conrad, a 38-year-old lawyer, also continues to consider himself a Catholic, even though he has not regularly attended Mass for many years. ?I don?t see why I have to go to Mass if I don?t want to. The main reason I don?t go is that I can?t be bothered.?

Conrad?s attitude is not unusual, but clearly if it prevails the future for the Church is bleak. Some within the Church argue that the exodus is entirely down to outside factors including the effects of prosperity and materialism and the 24/7 lifestyle, which leaves no time for prayer, contemplation and regular worship.

Mgr Keith Barltrop argues for a more dogmatic approach to catechesis: firm resistance to a ?cafeteria? approach to Catholic teaching where people choose those aspects of the faith they like and reject the rest.

?An incoherent Catholicism is not Catholicism at all, since Catholic faith is symphonic, and it is no protection to young people against the siren voices of secularist materialism,? he says.

Modern catechesis, he says, is lacking in content. ?It?s all about experience, nothing solid. Or if teaching is given, it?s tentative, up for debate, not communicated with confidence. So young people are lapsing from a faith they?ve never actually been taught.?

He wants the Church to be bolder, firmer and not afraid of appearing fundamentalist. The Church can try this approach, but so long as women feel marginalised, many disillusioned by child abuse scandals and others excluded for their marital circumstances or sexual orientation, can we truly arrest the decline?

?Even in my darkest moments, I have never felt it necessary to turn to the Church for succour?
Michael Holland

I was born a Catholic and the whole of my developing years almost to adulthood at 18 were spent within a Catholic milieu. My parents were strongly committed to the Church, being active members of the various parishes we lived in. It was a peripatetic childhood, my father being in the army, but wherever we found ourselves posted, the first stop would be the Church.

I was always educated at Catholic schools, apart from a brief sojourn at an army school in Cyprus, which catered for all denominations and had an army chaplain attached to it. I took my O-levels and A-levels at Wimbledon College, the Jesuit school in south-west London, and it was in the sixth form that I withdrew from the Church.

Coincidental with my own personal teenage upheavals were those of the Second Vatican Council within the Church. Both my parents withdrew from an active part in the Church after Vatican II. As far as I understand it, my father did so because its changing rituals no longer gave him the solace he craved, and my mother because she no longer found it intellectually justifiable.

Before I left, I had been committed emotionally, regularly serving Mass during the week. And it was at an emotional level that I first left the Church, understandably, perhaps, given both the change in my own life and that going on in the wider world around me then. It was not until university that I fully left intellectually as well, denying the existence of any knowable supreme being that could either interact with me personally or with the world around me, and seeing the Church, as indeed all religion, as a more or less necessary sociological construct of Man.

Nearly 40 years on, it is a position that I still hold. Even in my darkest moments during these 40 years I have never felt it necessary to turn to the Church for succour, although I continue to find the benign care and love of many members of the Church, both clergy and laity, a source of solace and stimulation.

Indeed, while considering myself avowedly secular, I am increasingly coming round to thinking that, as a source of moral probity, religion in its more civilised forms is increasingly necessary as the secular world wraps itself in one ethical dilemma after another. In other words, its absolute position on a variety of subjects provides me with a springboard for discussion lacking in the secular world. I am wholly opposed to the militant atheism of the likes of Richard Dawkins, abhorring the facile condemnation of something that so obviously has created much that is good in the world. But of course, from my point of view, the good, like the undeniable bad, is a product of Man alone.

I do call myself an atheist, though some might brand me a rather extreme agnostic. I am open, in a rather woolly way, to something one might call transcendence in the human spirit, for me often revealed in music, liturgical and lay.

There is, of course, much that we don?t know, and an utterly ineffable supreme being would be one of them by definition. Yet there is much that we do know that works ? the guiding, humane principles of the Church, and indeed all religions at their benign hearts, being among the most important. But I don?t need God to tell me that.

Michael Holland is a journalist.