Our Lady's Dowry
Sir – Despite your article "Catholics are on course to outnumber Anglicans in Britain" (April 2025), it is still the case that numbers of practising Christians in England and Wales are falling (the figure has fallen to below 50 per cent of the population for the first time in 2021). England has not been Catholic for nearly 500 years; in his Characters of the Reformation (1936), Hilaire Belloc argued that Elizabeth I's Secretary of State, William Cecil, was "the man who by his own genius and that of his son Robert did the essential work of changing England from a Catholic to a Protestant country". The Catholic experience was extremely changeable. At various points, Catholics have considered the conditions for the "Conversion of England", and in the 1850s they seemed ripe as England experienced a resurgence of Catholicism, described by Newman as a "Second Spring". Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman (1802-65), the first Archbishop of Westminster, was particularly attuned to this, and wrote a great prayer for the conversion of England (below). As a young boy living in Edenbridge in the 1940s, I regularly served Mass; it was commonplace for Cardinal Wiseman's prayer to be recited at the end of the service. While I can still recite it word for word, its use has slowly faded. Perhaps the prayer has a renewed potency to encourage those looking for reassurance and a sense of consistency to join the Church.
(Dr) Michael Straiton KCSG
Cuddington, UK