Pope Benedict on the Back Foot

Posted on April 20, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Pope Benedict XVI has just celebrated the fifth anniversary of his accession to office, but his position is coming increasingly under fire in the wake of mounting revelations about the Roman Catholic Church’s complicity in the clerical abuse of children in the past.

No overall public opinion rating of the Pope appears to have been undertaken in Great Britain since we last reported on the matter on this website (‘What do we think of the Pope?’, 26 February 2010).

However, YouGov has inserted a couple of pertinent questions in its online survey of a representative sample of 2,095 adults aged 18 and over between 12 and 14 April 2010. You will find the detailed results, broken down by gender, age, social grade and region, at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/YG-Archives-Pope-12.04.pdf

The first question asked Britons whether it was right for the Pope (when a Cardinal in 1985) to resist the immediate defrocking of a Californian priest with a criminal record of sexually molesting children on the grounds that ‘the good of the universal Church’ had to be taken into account.

91% of respondents condemned the Pope for taking this position and argued for immediate defrocking of a priest under such circumstances. Only 3% considered ‘the good of the universal Church’ was a relevant factor, with 7% don’t knows.

The second question alluded to efforts by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, two prominent atheists, to get human rights lawyers to produce a legal case for charging the Pope, during the forthcoming papal visit to England and Scotland (16-19 September), over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Church.

Just 15% of the sample favoured the Pope being granted immunity from prosecution while in Britain (11% because the Vatican is a state and 4% because the Pope is a religious leader).

79% (with no great differences by demographic sub-groups) contended that the Pope should not have legal immunity (11% because they do not consider the Vatican to be a state and 68% because, whether a state or not, nobody should be above the law). The don’t knows again amounted to 7%.

The 1982 papal visit to Britain by Pope John Paul II excited a fair bit of controversy, but this year’s visit by Pope Benedict XVI looks set to stir up even more hostility. Not only does the scandal of child abuse in the Church look set to run and run, but secularists and humanists are clearly on the offensive (see our post ‘Cyber warfare breaks out over the papal visit to Britain’, 15 March 2010), elements of the Church of England have been stung by the Pope’s surprise announcement of self-governing ordinariates for former Anglicans, while the ‘no popery’ tradition of British Protestantism is not entirely extinguished.

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Quadrant and FutureFirst

Posted on April 10, 2010 by Clive D. Field

Two extremely useful bi-monthly newsletters for anybody interested in religious and social statistics are Quadrant (ISSN 1351-9220) and FutureFirst (ISSN 2040-0268). They are published by Christian Research and Brierley Consultancy respectively and distributed to members of each organization as part of their subscription package. Personal annual subscriptions to Christian Research currently cost £30 and to Brierley Consultancy £18. Every issue of both these newsletters runs to six pages and comprises a mixture of substantive articles and snippets of information, including quite a bit of international data.

The latest issue (No. 8, April 2010) of FutureFirst contains two such global articles, on ‘Muslims and evangelicals’ and on ‘American religion’. Of the Britain-related content, perhaps most interesting is the relatively short piece and accompanying map estimating county church attendance in England in 2010, projected from the 2005 English church census which was conducted by Christian Research. Overall current Sunday churchgoing in England is calculated at 5.7% of the population, but 31 of the 47 counties are below this figure. The lowest percentage is recorded by South Yorkshire and the highest by Greater London, closely followed by Merseyside. Factoring in mid-week attendance brings the national total for 2010 up to an estimated 6.3%.

Distributed with this particular issue of FutureFirst is a six-page supplement on Roman Catholic Church statistics in England and Wales, prepared by Peter Brierley and available for £1.00 from him at The Old Post Office, 1 Thorpe Avenue, Tonbridge, Kent, TN10 4PW. The data in it are substantially abstracted from Tony Spencer’s invaluable Digest of Statistics of the Catholic Community in England & Wales, 1958-2005, Volume 1, which can still be purchased from the Pastoral Research Centre, Stone House, Hele, Taunton, Somerset, TA4 1AJ. Brierley reproduces statistics for the years 1997-2005, adds some later figures from the Catholic Directory and produces estimates for 2010. The topics covered comprise Catholic population, numbers joining the Church, marriages, deaths and mass attendance. There is a general pattern of steady decline. Discrepancies between the Church’s counts of mass-goers and the four English church censuses since 1979 are noted.

The most recent issue of Quadrant is No. 19 (March 2010). This includes features on: the latest church attendance statistics from the Baptist Union and the Church of England; the British Social Attitudes Survey, 2008; the diversity audit of the Church of England; the Citizenship Survey, 2008-09; and the online poll of attendees at Spring Harvest. You can also read more about all these topics in news posts on the British Religion in Numbers website.

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Profile of Roman Catholic Youth in England and Wales

Posted on March 6, 2010 by Clive D. Field

The Catholic Youth Ministry Federation (CYMFed) has recently launched a preliminary report on the beliefs, practices and attitudes of Roman Catholic young people in England and Wales during the course of its first national congress, held in London on 27 February.

CYMFed was set up in 2009 as an umbrella body for 32 Catholic dioceses, religious orders and organizations working with young people in England and Wales. It is endorsed by the Roman Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales.

Entitled Mapping the Terrain: Discovering the Reality of Young Catholics, the eight-page document can be downloaded from:

http://www.cymfed.org/CYMFEDresearchMAPPINGTHETERRAIN.pdf

The report is based upon an online survey administered by nfp Synergy in August 2009 to a sample of 1,000 young people aged 11-25 (but disproportionately aged 15-19) who either self-identify as Catholics (62%) or who attend Catholic schools/come from Catholic families (38%).  

The picture which is revealed is of a stressed and misunderstood generation whose faith is diverse, complex, multi-layered and often unorthodox. The authors of the report rationalize this in terms of ‘the tireless ability of young people to hold conflicting principles in tension’.

Headline findings include:

  • Although believing in God is ranked as an important aspect of being a Catholic by eight in ten, only 35% of self-identifying Catholics and 22% of all Catholics affirm an orthodox belief in a personally involved God
  • Of those aged 15-25 and describing themselves as Catholic, 54% recognize the importance of a Catholic going to mass regularly, but only 37% claim to go to mass or another religious service monthly or more frequently (with 17% never going) and just 16% say that going to mass is important to them personally
  • Commitment to orthodox Catholic beliefs and practices falls sharply across the age bands, with those aged 11-14 being most devout, 57% of whom believe in a creator God who is personally involved in the world, and 64% attend mass regularly  
  • 43% of self-identifying Catholics consider that religions cause more harm than good, 36% that people should keep their religious views to themselves to avoid hurting the feelings of others, and only 22% approve of somebody trying to convert another person to his or her religion
  • 83% of respondents describe the Catholic Church in terms of a cluster of adjectives such as authoritative, boring, cautious, conservative, established, exclusive or traditional

CYMFed has indicated that a fuller report on the survey will be published in autumn 2010, to include comparative national and denominational statistics.

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