The secret of Anglo-Catholicism’s success
SIR – Matthew Schmitz’s cover story (February 24) is absolutely spot on. Faith cannot just be dependent on intellectual or ethical assent if it is to reach out to all people. What was lost during the “reforms” following Vatican II left many Catholics bereft, and failed to win more followers to the faith.
For a majority of people, beauty, whether in the visual arts, music or liturgy, is an essential to their lives and, without it, life can seem stripped of anything worthwhile. Someone living in poverty, working long hours in a dead-end job just to stay afloat, may have precious little access to beauty. The great Anglo-Catholic “slum priests” of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Fr Robert Dolling (builder of St Agatha’s in Portsmouth), understood this perfectly. They offered their parishioners practical help in their daily lives, and access to beauty in church buildings and worship, copying many ritual practices of the Catholic Church. This brought many hundreds, indeed thousands, of people into their churches who would otherwise have remained firmly on the outside, considering the Church to be for the respectable middle classes.
