Practicing Christians are now a minority in Britain much like the persecuted Roman Catholic minority after the reformation, two senior clerics said yesterday.
The Anglican Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, and the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Cardinal Nichols, said their respective Churches must put aside their differences and recognise their “common agenda” as society becomes increasingly secularised.
The clerics were speaking after a historic meeting at Hampton Court Palace, home of Henry VIII, where the Chapel Royal celebrated Catholic Vespers for the first time in more than 450 years.
The service was designed to highlight the palace’s musical history as it approaches its 500th anniversary.
According to The Telegraph, Cardinal Nichols, who is de facto leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, said that after being severely persecuted in previous centuries, Catholics now contribute to British life as a “significant minority”, to which Bishop Chartres replied: “We are all minorities now.”
Cardinal Nichols continued, adding that traditional Christian values that people “used to take for granted” are now widely questioned.
Last month, Breitbart London reported how attendance at Church of England services had dropped below one million per week for the first time ever, with only 1.4 per cent of the population now attending England’s established church.
The figures mark a two-thirds decrease since the 1960s, with Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby warning that Britain is becoming increasingly anti-Christian:
“In some parts of the [Anglican] Communion decline in numbers has been a pattern for many years. In England our numbers have been falling at about one per cent every year since world war two…
“The culture [is] becoming anti-Christian, whether it is on matters of sexual morality, or the care for people at the beginning or the end of life. It is easy to paint a very gloomy picture.”
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