The Shropshire Star is reporting that:
"The Rt Rev. Mark Davies delivered the message to more than 1,000 young Catholics and urged them to make a 'clear stand' for their faith after recent Government data which suggest Christians living in Britain will soon become a minority.
The outspoken Shrewsbury bishop told young adults at a five-day prayer festival in Norfolk the results of the last census suggested most Britons would not describe themselves as Christians by 2020.
In a speech to Youth 2000, a movement for Catholics aged between 16 and 30 years, he said a new generation needed to find the courage to offer an “inspirational lead” to their contemporaries.
There are still 41 million Christians in Britain but a recent think-tank warned that 4,000 churches could close by 2020 if congregations continue to shrink at current rates.
Bishop Davies said: 'With more than three million in Rio last month and with more than a thousand in Walsingham this weekend, we might not really feel like a minority but that is what Christians are about to become in this country of ours. By 2020, if the analysis of the recent census is to be believed, most people in this land will no longer identify themselves in any way as Christians. It’s a situation you already know well as young people of 21st Century Britain. A situation which will surely demand of new generations of Catholics a clear stand, an inspirational lead and, as the Gospel reminds us today, a human struggle.'
Bishop Davies has been one of the most outspoken critics of the Government’s plans to legalise gay marriage and used an Easter address to criticise the proposals." See here
In England, Christianity is in crisis. Michael Brown notes that, "In August of 2003 a survey indicated that just eighteen percent of the British public said [they] were practicing members of any organized religion while twenty-five percent said they were members of a world religion (as in new world order, which gets so much of its lift from this country of arcane bankers). In 2006, only thirty-five percent of Brits said they believed in God (less than half the number in the U.S., where belief in some sort of higher power is above ninety percent) and just twenty-two percent of teenagers in one British city survey held belief in a Divinity. Since then the situation has only deteriorated - with the leader of the Anglican Church there warning that Christianity is on the verge of extinction.."
Pope Benedict XVI Emeritus has warned of a growing aversion toward Christianity.
This aversion is now producing its venomous fruit. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky has his character Ivan Karamazov warn that, "As soon as men have, all of them, denied God, man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine Titanic pride and the man-God will appear." How close are we to such a scenario? Archbishop Fulton John Sheen said that, "It does not take a gift of prophecy to see that humanity is presently polarizing and that all men are beginning to fall into the ranks of accepting either the man-god or the God-Man...Dostoyevsky...knew that atheism had to be associated with the destruction of the old society. There was some suggestion that an overplanned or socialistic society had to be the prelude of an atheistic society...
For the man-god to grow in age and wisdom, two conditions must be fulfilled. The heavens must be emptied, and man must be secularized. Both will be achieved by turning freedom into license. Men will be asked to give up God because His Commandments 'enslave' and because our will often runs counter to His. When finally everyone has his own will and does whatever he pleases, then there will be a chaos due to the conflict of egotisms. It will then be necessary for Big Brother, or the state, to organize this chaos into a closed socialist society and the formulas given by the character, Shigalev, the theorist of the Communism to come: 'Having set out from unlimited freedom, I have ended up with unlimited despotism.'"
Enter the Antichrist.
Related reading here.
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