Scotland and the Parish
Stephen Watt asks in relation to Alison Milbanks article what the Scottish Church's response might be.
St Aloysius Glasgow
One of the reasons why St Moluag’s Coracle was set up was to develop a space where Scottish Catholicism could reflect on how our Scottishness might interact with our Catholicism. In an English-speaking environment, it is all too easy to allow better resourced American and English Catholic media to dominate reflection and hence to overlook aspects of specifically Scottish culture and society which might be important to Catholic life in Scotland. Given this background, the two parallel discussions in the Church of England and the Church of Scotland on future structures for their mission have provided some fascinating contrasts, and the Revd Professor Alison Milbank’s reflection on the role of the Church of England parish in modernity represents a much deeper engagement with the issues underlying these debates than is usually met with in Scotland. In the rest of this article, I am going to try and develop some initial thoughts on what Scotland and Scottish Catholicism in particular might learn from her approach to this issue.
While both churches face declining membership and the increasingly unaffordable costs of maintaining a large number of historic buildings, the debate in Church of England at the moment seems more focused on a competition for resources between traditional parish churches and the creation of new worshipping communities, while debate in the Kirk seems more focused on the rationalisation of presbyteries by closing large numbers of church buildings in order to focus resources on fewer buildings. Underlying the debate in the Church of England there is in part a disagreement about churchmanship: in Milbank’s words, there is an ‘inherited church’ which often seems to be regarded as being burdened by traditional liturgies and theology, and an ‘emerging church’ where ‘liturgy and theology are jettisoned and the faith reinvented’. Although I suspect similar tensions exist within the Kirk, they appear much more muted, probably in part due to the greater weakness of a commitment to liturgical and theological tradition within the Reformed Kirk.
Another big difference is the impact this debate is having on the wider, non-church going community. At the heart of the English debate there seems to be a genuine fondness for an image of a typical rural parish, embodying a village community stretching back over a thousand years. That’s not all there is to the Church of England, of course, but such a symbolic presence seems central to a wider English culture and hence to current debates. In Scotland, it is hard to think of any comparable sentiment. While the Kirk has remained a potent symbol of the past, very often it is a symbol of that which must be abandoned, whether in the hypocrisy of Holy Willie’s prayer, the Calvinist devil of Hogg’s Justified Sinner, or Tom Nairn’s wish for the rebirth of Scotland by strangling the last minister with the last copy of the Sunday Post. If the image of a thousand-year-old parish church embodies English village culture, the image of a new kirk standing next to the battered ruins of its abandoned mediaeval predecessor rather more accurately typifies Scotland. The Kirk, semper reformanda, is always on the verge of reforming itself out of existence: perhaps it is finally going to succeed. As a result, although there is some and hopefully increasing debate about church closures in Scotland, that debate and any regrets about those closures, seem more muted and more confined to the hobbyists of religion or heritage than in England.
There’s probably a lot more to be unpacked here, perhaps about the lack of any conservative movement in modern Scotland which retains an attachment to the past and is willing to argue for that attachment as a key element in human flourishing. But where does all this leave the Catholic Church in Scotland? Although it shares with the Church of England a territorial parish system which covers the entire country, in practice, it can act rather more like a gathered congregation, with little attempt to reach out beyond the Catholic (even if only nominally Catholic) community. Moreover -and this I think is radically different from most Protestant churches- Catholics tend to see themselves more as Catholics than just as a member of a particular parish community. To sum up, Catholics tend to focus within the existing Catholic community for mission opportunities, while having a commitment that is primarily towards the Church as a whole rather than to an individual parish.
Milbank’s fundamental analysis of how the Church of England can resist secularism lies at the end of her article:
‘[A]bove all, we need a mode of re-enchantment in our ecclesial life whereby we open ourselves again to the beauty and power of our traditions and find treasures old and new to offer to a needy world.’
That’s probably a sentiment that Scottish Catholics should adopt wholeheartedly. But even if that sentiment in interpreted as a commitment to some sort of full blown liturgical and theological orthodoxy and orthopraxis, there’s little evidence that such a path does much in terms of numbers: it might bring some people in and it might keep rather more in once they’re in, but I see little likelihood, particularly in Scotland which seems in public discourse drugged increasingly on slogans of being progressive and modern and opposed to the mysterious Druidry of the British State, that such appeals to tradition and enchantment and beauty will bring or keep many in. It’s odd that a country which once played such a major role in the invention of Romanticism as an artistic and intellectual movement now seems committed to a much more fantastic view of itself as somehow beyond all that.
I suspect that, at least in the foreseeable future, all churches will have to go on dealing with an increasingly secularised modernity, whatever we do. Within that scenario, it is probably worth making a sharper distinction between what will bring people in and what will keep them in. And the answers to those separate questions need not be the same: reaching out to where people are (as in the emerging church) might bring them in; a full-blooded commitment to some version of tradition in worship and theology (as in the inherited church) might enrich them enough to keep them in. Steven Bullivant’s study of numerical decline in Catholicism, Mass Exodus, is essential reading here: what that study seems conclusively to show is that sudden radical change in practice (in this case, the sort of radical changes that occurred after Vatican II, particularly in the liturgy) have driven away existing Catholics without bringing in new ones. Insofar as I have any suggestions for our Scottish Bishops, faced with a hugely difficult task of both preserving and spreading the faith in secularised modernity, and learning what they can from discussions in the Church of England and the Kirk, it would probably consist in the following:
Avoid grand strategies: no one solution is likely to provide an answer.
Do not destroy what we have: radical change particularly in everyday parish life is unlikely to produce growth but is likely to destroy existing faith and practice.
Consider developing radical approaches to those who are outside Catholicism, perhaps building on Benedict XVI’s ‘Courtyard of the Gentiles’ as a place for dialogue with non-believers. Bullivant’s book shows that in the UK and America, Catholicism has, over the twentieth century, been extremely bad at making conversions. We need to try to get better at that and also get better at making Catholicism at least plausible to the majority of Scots: even if few conversions follow, it would be much healthier for the Church to exist in a climate where there is more appreciation for what we do and why we do it, rather than the current situation where current progressive opinion, having (perhaps) moved on from regarding us as the Italian mission to the Irish, now view us as a coalition of the elderly, sexually repressed and cruel, of which the only good thing to be said is that, shortly, we will disappear.
Stephen Watt