Young Brits give account of the faith that's in them

It’s hard to defend the faith when you don’t know what it is. It is also hard to defend the faith in the face of enormous public skepticism. Catholics in Canada have the comfort of knowing that they make up more than 40 per cent of the population. Catholics in Britain are a small minority, and fewer than 10 per cent of them go weekly to Sunday Mass.

Meanwhile, bad feelings towards Catholicism have been stirred up during preparations for the Holy Father’s September visit to Britain. Faithful Catholics, who have never forgotten the English martyrs, like St. Edmund Campion, and the Scottish Martyrs, like St. John Ogilvie, are discovering what a modern “martyrdom by a thousand media cuts” feels like. Even the London Review of Books is in on the anti-papal action, with Colm Toibin’s frivolous review of the scurrilous, sniggering The Pope is Not Gay!  

But some young British Catholics are determined to not only welcome Benedict XVI when he comes to visit, but to defend their faith. Evangelium, an annual apologetics conference for young Catholics in England, hopes to help them do this. It grew out of a multi-media catechetical program composed by Frs. Marcus Holden and Andrew Pinsent when they were still seminarians at the English College in Rome. My friend Dr. Alan Fimister, a 34-year-old lecturer in Ecclesiastical History, remembers when the idea for a conference was first discussed.

“A group of (Catholic) Oxford graduates gathered at Fr. Marcus’s then-parish to discuss St. Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy. In our spare time we discussed the need for initiatives in the spirit of (the Evangelium course) to revive evangelization in England. In particular it was felt that many existing initiatives had a flavour, some theory or spin, when what a lot of people needed and wanted was Catholicism pure and simple and help in defending and propagating it. The idea came up of an annual conference to help people learn to defend the faith.”

Among such other interesting Catholic speakers as Fr. Aidan Nichols, OP, and Fr. Tim Finigan, Fimister himself was scheduled to give a talk (“What is the Faith, and How Much of It Should I Defend?”). So I caught a bus to England and got a lift to the Oratory School in Reading for the conference. I thought it would be a good opportunity to meet other Catholics although I found myself a little older than most of the 170 participants, who were between 18 and 35.

The Oratory School was founded by Cardinal John Henry Newman in 1859, and his upcoming beatification was very much on everyone’s mind. There were frequent references to him during the lectures, the workshops and the homilies. We sang the hymns he composed, and his personal crucifix was visible, kept carefully behind glass, in the school’s main chapel.

This 19th-century theologian means, I realized, quite a lot to English Catholic apologetics, even today. He was an Establishment figure, one of Victorian England’s great men, when he took the status-destroying step of becoming a Roman Catholic. The English Catholics at Evangelium seemed determined to remind their countrymen that England had been a Catholic country, that Catholics had given much to England and that Catholicism ought to flourish there again. Nicols’ lecture was entitled: “The Conversion of England — Christendom Awake.”

As I talked to other participants, I became friendly with two other women, Lisette, 28, a teacher and youth worker from Birmingham, and Liesel, 34, an engineer from Bedfordshire. After the conference, I e-mailed to ask why they had gone to Evangelium and what they had enjoyed most.

Lisette had gone for a weekend away, a retreat and catechesis. She said that she had been defending Catholicism and found herself ill-equipped to do so. The conference gave her new tools.

“The whole thing (conference) was a good and positive experience: meeting like-minded young Catholics, being able to openly and positively discuss the faith, the overall richness and quality of the weekend in terms of speakers, workshops and worship.”

Liesel had also been defending Catholicism. She wrote that she went to this conference to be “fed… i.e. to receive teaching about my faith and worship God with other believers.” Evangelium was a boost to her faith

It was a boost to mine, too. It was great to see the small 19th-century chapel or the big modern chapel fill up for every morning prayer, evening prayer, Benediction and Mass. There were no guitars or rock songs; the liturgies were solemn, intelligent and prayerful. The traditional form of the Mass was also on offer, and priests were available to hear confessions. The liturgies are what Liesel enjoyed most.

“So much richer and more satisfying than my usual Sunday Mass in my parish church,” she wrote.