Ths letter was originally to be read on Low Sunday - 3 April. Plans were changed with the death of the Holy Father.
My dear people of Arundel & Brighton
There was a report a few weeks ago from the British Association of Undertakers (or someone like that - I ought to know, because they send me their magazine). It spoke about the most popular music for funerals these days. The results would not surprise anyone who'd been to a number of funerals recently. Among the favourites were Robbie Williams singing Angels (reassuringly hinting at a belief in the supernatural) and Frank Sinatra singing My Way (unreassuringly hinting at modern society's emphasis on individualism and even selfishness). We seem to be better off in this country than we might be: there seems to be a tendency in Germany to go for 'Heavy Metal', such as 'Like a Bat out of Hell'. It makes Frank Sinatra sound pious.
All this raises the awkward question of what is appropriate music at funerals, but now is not the time to go into that. One traditional hymn that still remains a favourite, however, (alongside The Old Rugged Cross) is the well-known Abide with me, with its particularly haunting musical cadences and pleading words of consolation -
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.
What strikes me as especially interesting about this hymn is the sentiments it expresses about the times in which it was written. It was written by an Anglican Vicar called Henry Francis Lyte and is dated 1847, the year of his death. The manuscript was given to his daughter just after he preached his final sermon in Brixham, Devon. Curiously, the version in our modern Catholic hymn books misses out three verses.
What intrigues me is the sentiment of the second verse.
Change and decay in all around I see,
O thou who changes not, abide with me.
Presumably, if 1847 was the year of Henry Lyte's death, then he may have been making a personal observation about his own frailty and mortality - change and decay was what he would have been going through. The verse begins with the words
Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day.
But what of the world outside? And what of the Church?
The period of the mid 1800s would have been quite significant for the Catholic Church, certainly, in this country. 1829 had seen the passing of the Catholic Emancipation (or Relief) Act, enabling Catholics to take public office for the first time since the Reformation. The famines in Ireland and the development of the railways and canals in England saw great numbers of Irish Catholics coming over here and swelling the ranks of English Catholics enormously. In 1850 we saw what we call the Restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy, when Catholic bishops were allowed to organise their Church once again into dioceses.
Certainly for the Catholic Church it was far from a period of 'change and decay', but instead heralded a period of growth that was quite unprecedented and would reach a peak in the early 1960s in Britain's post-war boom. In 1962 or so, we see the highest recorded figures for Catholic baptisms, confirmations, marriages, ordinations, Mass attendance and numbers of priests.
And from then on it has been declining, all of it. All those numbers have dropped. The question, however, is what is the reality? What has been the true picture? The Catholic historian Judith Champ has suggested (or even stressed) that the peaks of the early 60s were a 'blip', that the growth recorded up to then was something not only unseen until then, but almost freakish, related as much to what was going on in society after the war as to what was going on in the Church. It is interesting that civil marriages also peak at that time, and have been in decline ever since.
In other words, we can deceive ourselves that there was a 'golden age' of the Church to which we can somehow return. We can't. We can't re-create the conditions that gave rise to it, and we can't become distracted from facing the present challenges of our own time. These are not just challenges about numbers or so-called 'secularism' and a 'godless society'. They are personal challenges, the difficulties that I myself face and you face. We face them together, and more courageously because it is together.
The Sunday after the Lord's resurrection, the disciples were huddled in the upper room, afraid, tense, uncertain, lost - all the things we might say or ourselves. But then into their midst comes the Lord Jesus with his wonderful greeting of peace.
Heaven's morning breaks and earth's vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.
With my prayers and best wishes for you all.
Rt. Rev. Kieran Conry
Bishop of Arundel and Brighton
