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Just after the riots in August, I met Father Darline of the Missionaries of St Francis de Sales. He is from Tamil Nadu, one of the most urbanised and economically dynamic states in India, the local base for many international electronics and telecommunications companies and home to no fewer than 37 universities. Fr Darline himself holds an MSc in psychology and is working towards a doctorate while he is here. Since 2008, he has been undertaking missionary work in England, first in villages around Yeovil and more recently in the Wiltshire market town of Devizes.
I wonder what he made of the savagery on display in the streets of Tottenham. Would he express the same mixture of puzzlement and dismay that David Livingstone had felt when, sent out by the London Missionary Society, he first encountered the thieving Chiboque tribe beyond the Zambezi? ‘I was very struck by what seemed to be a vacuum of ethical values,’ Fr Darline says. ‘It was as if they had no system by which to judge what they should do, or not do. You would see someone presented with the opportunity to loot a shop and it was like watching a cat on a wall — will it jump this way, or that? In many cases it seemed there had been an absence of any ethical dimension in upbringing or education.’
Of the various characterisations of the rioters that we have been offered over the past two months — ranging from ‘just common criminals’ to ‘victims of deprivation’ — Fr Darline’s picture of them as moral imbeciles, whose anomie stems from neglect on the part of parents and teachers, is surely the most convincing. The fuzzy ethics that secular society has substituted for Christian moral precepts simply do not equip many young people to resist the temptation to nick a plasma TV.
The marginalisation of Christian moral teaching within education and the secular tone of almost all public discourse comes as a shock to this Indian priest. ‘India is a very religious society. There are many different religions and a religious way of seeing how the world permeates the culture, so I do find England very different,’ he explains. He says that the churches should speak out more and have a stronger voice in the national conversation. ‘I see secularism as a challenge,’ he says. ‘I feel I should do something.’
But unlike David Livingstone, today’s missionaries cannot sit down with tribal chiefs and simply settle the issue; they have to work from the bottom up. Fr Darline tells me about an initiative by his local church to reach out to a generation of teenagers who had never been exposed to religion in their lives. A good deal of thought went into how to engage them. But all to no avail. On the appointed day, the kids failed to show up.
Consequently, most of this missionary’s time is spent preaching to the converted: celebrating Mass in outlying villages, helping to keep open churches that might otherwise have to be amalgamated for want of clergy. By now, I am keen to discover precisely why Father Darline is here — for there is indeed a papal master plan. Last summer Pope Benedict XVI announced a new Pontifical Council charged with restoring faith to European countries where there has been ‘an eclipse of the sense of God’. Do priests like Father Darline represent the vanguard of what’s called the ‘New Evangelisation’?
I try an indirect approach, asking whether there isn’t enough to do at home. ‘It isn’t that there are too many priests in India or not enough for us to do there. In Tamil Nadu a parish priest will often have three or four Mass centres to look after. And though Catholics account for only a small percentage of the population, the Church provides a huge proportion of healthcare, operating hospitals and clinics; it is involved in social work and, of course, runs a lot of schools. There’s plenty to do,’ he says, ‘but there is a feeling of gratitude towards the West because the faith was brought to us by European missionaries, and a feeling that we should reciprocate.’
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That explains his own motivation, but it doesn’t account for why the Catholic bishops have asked him, and many others like him, to come to work in England. For an answer to that, I consulted Father Christopher Jamison, the star of the surprise-hit BBC television series The Monastery. Perhaps hoping he can bring some of that ratings magic to the supply of new priests, the Catholic Church has put him in charge of ordinations in England and Wales.
With one breath Fr Jamison acknowledges that there is a priest shortage at the moment and that foreign priests are being drafted in to help. But with the next breath he points to facts that pose a radical challenge to the standard secularisation narrative that depicts a slow and steady decline in religion over time. ‘In which decade would you guess ordinations were at their highest?’ Father Jamison asks with a discernible teasing edge in his voice. Ignoring the hint, I plump for the 1950s, on the grounds that the next decade saw the contraceptive pill, the sexual revolution and the Rolling Stones, and it would surely all be downhill after that. But as is so often the case with the Catholic Church, the truth turns out to be counterintuitive. The decade when average annual ordinations peaked was, amazingly , the 1980s, supposedly the decade of selfish individualism; while the individual year that set the record for the number of new priests was the year of New Labour’s political triumph, 1997. Numbers have dropped since 2002, but are still higher than they were through much of the 20th century.
That said, England has always relied upon migrant clergy. Through two and a half centuries of oppression and persecution following the Reformation, England was officially designated ‘mission territory’ by Rome. In a sense it has never stopped being so. The church where Father Darline now works was built back in the 1860s by a French missionary from his own order. Since then waves of priests have come over from Ireland, and more recently from Poland.
English Catholics, it seems, are strong on family values and church attendance, but perennially inadequate at vocations. The presence of clergy from India in the shires should, therefore, not be seen as a sign of desperation in the face of secular decline, so much as an example of shrewd resource allocation by a multinational outfit in response to reasonably steady demand in the English market.
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