The always worth-reading Edward Pentin has penned a fine piece on the situation of religious and cultural decline in Britain, exploring its causes and effects, and raising the possibility of a Catholic revival in the land known since the Middle Ages as “Mary’s Dowry.”
Some of the ideas Mr. Pentin explores are treated at greater length on this site in a nine-part series of articles by Charles Coulombe entitled, England and Always, which I highly recommend. While I’m at recommending things, my own little piece, The Dogma and the Culture, might also be read in tandem with Pentin’s article with some profit.
One thing that is needed to make a genuine revival possible is for the Catholic Church in the UK to do what needs to be done everywhere else: to jettison religious indifferentism, and realize that, until we clearly and charitably teach the necessity of the Catholic Church for salvation, we will not do what we must for God’s glory and the salvation of souls.
Edward Pentin quotes many fine scholars and commentators in his analysis, including Dr. Gavin Ashenden, the one-time Anglican chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II, who is now a Catholic. But, for the quality of the comments, he really saved the best wine till last, where he quotes, in the piece’s final paragraphs, the English Catholic theologian who now lives in Connecticut, Dr. Alan Fimister. The good Doctor’s words — more purely theological and less sociological in character — really strike home:
What is needed above all is for the Catholic Church in Britain to return to fundamentals, and to resolutely fight for the faith by standing firm, said Professor Alan Fimister, a British native who teaches dogmatic theology at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Connecticut.
Quoting St. John Henry Newman, who once said the Church has “nothing more to do than to go on in her own proper duties, in confidence and peace; to stand still and to see the salvation of God,” Fimister pointed out that when the Church was doing this and “teaching, sanctifying and governing without fear or favor,” the powers of this age had “no choice but to simulate her virtues in the hope of leading people away from Christ.”
But when the Church “forsook the reproach of Christ in the hope of befriending the world,” the powers of the age “had no more need to fear. Contraception, abortion, pornography, sodomy, euthanasia et cetera have all been driven forward without opposition by the enemy and his minions.
“All we need do,” Fimister said, “is take up again the Sword of the Spirit and the enemy will flee before us.”
Read the rest of Pentin’s fine analysis at the National Catholic Register…
