Still Running Off at the Keyboard

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”.

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