I know St Therese never said anything bad, or listened to anything bad being said, about bishops – but then that was about her bishop, and this one isn’t mine, so – he’s either stupid or malicious. [that was mebbe a bit strong. Sorry. Just an attack of the "oh MAN!", gonnae-no-dae-thats.]Here’s a recent thing he thought up, and then a couple of reminders:

A three-week course designed to introduce foreign priests to the British way of doing things in the Roman Catholic church has opened at Ushaw College outside Durham in Northumberland, England.The first group of seven priests is from India, Nigeria and Poland.“Some foreign priests working in Britain tend to be too dogmatic about the church’s moral rightness on just about everything,” said Rev. Terry Drainey the president of Ushaw College. “That’s not how we do things here. This course shows how we deal with a whole range of issues affecting Catholics, including the role of women, divorce, the lay ministry and homosexuality.” It is the first course of its kind and is the brainchild of Bishop Crispian Hollis of Portsmouth.

From On the Side of the Angels, from The Anglican Journal.

Research by Anthony Spencer, of the Pastoral Research Centre, shows that over the past three decades attendance has slumped by 40 per cent, baptisms by 50 per cent, Catholic marriages by 60 per cent and confirmations by 60 per cent. Fewer than one million people now attend Mass weekly.

A Times article.

The Sunday Mass attendance and Communion figures for Poland for the last 27 years (scroll down to the tables). “The dominicantes figures, after a fall over the years 1980-1990, clearly stabilised in the next years with slight tendency to increase.” (Ks. Witold Zdaniewicz SAC, Lucjan Adamczuk)

Another way of putting it. The lowest diocesan Mass attendance in Poland now is 31.1%. A commentor on that Holy Smoke blog wrote “[W]eekly Mass attendance in Liverpool in 1960 was 262,000 out of a total Catholic population of 750,000 (c. 35%). In 2005 it was 67,000 out of a total Catholic population of 500000 (c. 13%).” Now I don’t know if that, like the Polish figures, is calculated on the basis of parisioners bound by the Sunday obligation (e.g. over seven, not house-bound etc.) – but if it doesn’t then the fall in family size would mean that in fact the attendance has fallen even more. Some allowance should perhaps be made for the fact that so many Poles have left the country, so that there is a slightly higher proportion of the famous Mohair Berets to Young Adults.

Nonetheless.

Perhaps I am reading the article with a Hermeneutic of Suspicion. After all, there are little things, as I was discussing with a Ghanaio-Norwegian accountant on the bus the other day, that are different and can make life tricky. The way an apology is accepted in Britain, for example. Perhaps the then-rector’s quote came out wrong.

On the other hand, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you ….