English Priest, Georgetown University Grad Has A Lot To Say

Signs of hope and joy

After crossing the Atlantic in the mid 1970s to train for the priesthood in England, Fr Christopher Basden finds that twenty years on, English Catholicism now has much to learn from the thriving orthodoxy of many initiatives in the USA.

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An excerpt.

It was the summer of 1975 and a difficult decision had to be made. I was 22, a recent graduate of Georgetown University and I left American shores to train for the priesthood in an English Seminary. The reasons for this were complex. I had in fact previously made happy contact with the local vocations director when my parents were then residing in Britain. Now however, I had painfully to return alone to England because of a yet unarticulated unease at symptoms in the US Church. These currents of fashion seemed so contradictory to everything that I had loved in the Church of my boyhood. A generation later I had to concede ruefully that all these currents had also crossed the Atlantic and that the Church in both countries had suffered from a precipitous decline.

This included about 50% of Mass attendance, an increasing dearth of priestly and religious vocations and, up to very recently, a virtual cessation of the converts who had always made the Church strong.

Almost twenty years later, I found myself back in the USA working for a year in different places in order to be closer to my parents. Resigning myself to the inevitable looniness and desolation of the US Church I was unprepared for the signs of hope in most of the areas I visited. Dissent, secularism, feminism and liberalism have eroded the once arguably most powerful and fruitful Church in the entire world.

Link to the full and thought provoking article at Catholic Resouces on the Internet (here)