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Immigration swells ranks of British Catholics

As Anglican churches suffer from lack of attendance, Catholic churches fill up.

By Washington Post
Published February 25, 2007

LONDON - More than 5,000 Catholics attend Masses every Sunday at Our Lady Mother of the Church, packing the old stone church so completely that loudspeakers were recently installed outside so the overflow crowd can hear.

"I go to Mass here every Sunday and sometimes during the week, too," said Dominika Marszalkowska, 27, an engineer from Poland who was among the throng listening to the 11:30 a.m. Mass on Feb. 18.

Marszalkowska, who said she earns more managing a London restaurant than as an architectural engineer in Poland, is one of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants transforming the Catholic Church in England. The surge in devout newcomers is so strong that many analysts said Catholics now surpass Anglicans in weekly attendance.

Since King Henry VIII renounced his Catholicism in the 16th century, Anglicans and Catholics have often had a difficult relationship. Queen Elizabeth is the official head of the Church of England, and it is still a rule that if members of the royal family marry a Catholic, they forfeit their place in the line of succession.

There are still far more people here who consider themselves Anglican. But for millions of English, their only connection with the church of their baptism is attendance at an occasional funeral, wedding or holiday service. With so few churchgoers, some old and ornate Anglican churches are being turned into apartments, gyms and cafes.

In the last few years, roughly the same number of Catholics and Anglicans have been attending Sunday services - about a million each, according to spokesmen for both churches. But now "ethnic congregations are exploding," said Francis Davis, author of a new report on the influx of Catholic immigrants by the Von Hugel Institute at Cambridge University.

Davis said that as many as 500,000 Catholic immigrants, many of them very devout, are causing Catholic church attendance "to take off." One London Catholic church was down to 20 members when they introduced Masses in Portuguese, and suddenly had about 1,400 people attending Sunday Mass, he said.

Arun Kataria, a spokesman for the Church of England, said that weekly participation at services is only one way to measure the strength of a church. There are 26-million people who are baptized Anglicans, compared to 4.2-million baptized Catholics, and the number of Anglican worshipers is holding steady, he said.

The new influx of immigrants is generally traced to 2004, when the European Union expanded from 15 countries to 25. That meant workers from the new countries, eight of them in Eastern Europe, were legally allowed to work in Britain.

[Last modified February 25, 2007, 01:27:44]