No other Name

An astonishing little book has just issued from the pen of the English Dominican Aidan Nichols OP.^* In it Nichols argues that the mission of the Church in England should be nothing short of its re-conversion to the Faith.

This is a shocking proposal, the antithesis of the cultural and religious multifariety that now prevails in Her Majesty’s diminished, impoverished, and widely despaired-of English realm.

Each year a swelling tide of sad and sadder Englishmen leave their country for good. Over-taxed, over-regulated, over-scrutinised, the English are fleeing. They leave behind a nation whose families are broken, whose youth is drunk and disorderly, and whose unhappy breed of men no longer vote. The emigrants leave in their wake a government that cowers before its enemies at home while ordering its soldiers to die fighting them abroad: a make-believe John Bull that thunders sovereignty at the EU while reshaping things at home to fit the Brussels model; a government that, unconscious of the irony, has taken Huxley’s Brave New World to be a template for a brave new England. And, as if to bless the madness of the state – which, indeed, is his profession – England’s leading churchman and surrender theologian makes a pronouncement. The Archbishop of Canterbury imagines Islamic shari’a prevailing in parallel with the laws of England: a vision to remind the refugees why they are leaving and to confirm long-settled instincts against the darkening of church doors. Little joy, unfortunately, awaits an Englishman in Provence, Italy, Spain, or Australia. Apart from the weather, the problems are much the same. It would be far better to stay at home, return to Christ, and turn out to vote.

English identity

Nichols prompts this consideration: Merry England was a Catholic England, and England will never again be merry without returning to its traditional roots. There were no “whingeing Poms” in pre-Reformation England. They came after. The gist of Nichols’ argument is that, even now, it is quintessentially English to be Catholic. To restore their identity, to make them happy once more, requires modern, agnostic, melancholic Englishmen to recover their true religious selves.

It is a mighty challenge, and one that the Catholic Church in England is ill equipped to meet. But it is the challenge, and Nichols has been brave enough to make it. His timing is good too. With Englishmen starved by multiculturalism of the oxygen of identity, an intensity of existential angst has been reached in which ancestral Catholic voices might at last be heard.

Naturally this imposes risks for the Church. The chief is persecution by an increasingly secularist state. It will appeal to the threat of domestic Islamic terrorism as the justification for penalising vigorous religious expression, especially Catholic movements of missionary impulse. But then, for the Church, that is its historic experience – an inheritance that it cannot escape. Here in Australia Catholics can be better attuned, perhaps, to these possibilities because of the leadership offered by Cardinal George Pell. His address on 29 April 2008 to the Brisbane Institute essayed how, among other things, the lineaments of a judicially sanctioned oppression of Christians can already be discerned. How much the poorer the English church is for its want of an archbishop in Westminster Cathedral who can speak as clearly! One thing is sure: a Pell would grasp immediately the force of Nichols’ argument. For that matter, people will be found in the most unexpected circles who might also be persuaded by it – Muslims, for example, who otherwise would be repelled (justifiably) by the idea of becoming modern Englishmen. In fact, converting Muslims who live in England might well prove no more difficult than appealing to Englishmen who cannot discern the religious sense of Shakespeare.

Deaf to call

The problem is not, however, the hedonistic Brit or the flinty Muslim soul. The problem is that Western Catholics do not believe any more in the missionary call of the Church. So it is difficult to see – except in the stones – whence new missionaries might be raised up. The harvest is ready, but the labourers have downed tools: their job, they reckon, is not worth doing at any price. Not so, by contrast, in the Coptic Orthodox Church. Here Father Zakaria Botros and his network, a group formed – in large part – of converts from Islam, are doing amazing things.

Father Botros lives in the United States but communicates with the Islamic world through the Internet and satellite television – he appears regularly on al-Hayat, a Cyprus-based, Arabic-language, Christian channel.

Zakaria Botros does not mince words. He is not a professional dialoguer. He is a missionary. His aim is to win converts to Christ and he does so by turning – one might almost say hurling – the Qu’ran against his Muslim interlocutors. The result: converts and a reputation as Islam’s “Public Enemy No. 1”. Most of these conversions are underground conversions since to embrace Christ is apostasy for a Muslim and, in many Muslim countries, punishable by death.

Secret converts

According to Raymond Ibrahim, writing recently in National Review Online and quoting Islamic sources, there are reckoned to be millions of such converts annually to Christianity. It is a claim that finds confirmation on a smaller scale in Italy with the very public conversion of Magdi Allam who was baptised at Easter by Pope Benedict XVI. Allam, a prominent journalist and a deputy editor of Corriere della Sera, wrote in that same paper an open letter to his boss which told of his journey to the Church. In it he refers to “thousands” of Muslim converts living in Italy, but secretly and in fear for their lives. So the conversion of the Muslims is not “Mission Impossible” – and nor, for that matter, is the conversion of England.

The “impossibility” on which Catholic missionary activity has impaled itself during the last fifty years arises not from the people or the societies to be evangelised. It arises from within Catholics themselves and, from want of faith, by getting ensnared in a tangle of cloudily conceived ideas around religious freedom, ecumenism, and inter-religious dialogue. It is not our purpose here to identify and cut free what sound principles might be trapped in these thickets. Suffice it to say that, notwithstanding Kasperesque attempts to tease a salvation for all monotheists from Hebrews 11.6 – “For he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and is a rewarder to them that seek him” – there is no getting away from St Peter’s declaration:

“Be it known to you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth … there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:10-12).

It should be no surprise, then, that when the present successor of St Peter came to compose a new Good Friday prayer for the conversion of the Jews to be inserted in the 1962 Missal (see our story on page 5), he chose to echo Acts 4 rather than Hebrews 11:

“Let us pray also for the Jews.

“May our God and Lord enlighten their hearts, so that they may acknowledge Jesus Christ, Saviour of all men.”

This prayer, combined with his pointedly public baptism of Magdi Allam, sends a definite message to the Church and the World: that salvation is of Jesus Christ and of Him alone and to those who are converted to His Name.

Perhaps the fog that has shrouded the Church so gloomily, and for a half-century, obscuring our sight of its identity and purpose, has begun to lift. The promised new, clear day is both ripe with promise and imminent with danger.

* The Realm: An Unfashionable Essay on the Conversion of England; by Aidan Nichols OP; Oxford: Family Publications, 2008; 160 pp.

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