How many people attend Sunday worship

Chair of the diocesan budget sub-committee CANON DON CARDY looks at numbers in Essex and East London pews

AT the end of 2007 parts of the national press carried a story that for the first time the number of Roman Catholics at Sunday mass exceeded the number attending Church of England services.

The story originated from results of the 2005 Church Census conducted by Christian Research, an independent organisation, and no doubt was expected to surprise us all. Links were made with
the numbers of immigrants from Eastern Europe.

In 1989 our numbers at worship on a Sunday were also well out-numbered by both our Roman Catholic and Nonconformist brothers and sisters. I therefore found the recent press story rather
unremarkable, although in other parts of England it may have been a surprise.

What interested me the moment I discovered all this back in 2002 was why such a pattern in
Essex? We would all expect Roman Catholic numbers to be high in Liverpool, for example, but
why were both Catholics and Nonconformists so prominent in Essex? A Census conducted by the
Bishop of London, Henry Compton, in 1676 to discover the number of Anglican conformists,
Roman Catholic recusants and Protestant dissenters suggested even then that Essex was the strongest Nonconformist county in the Province of Canterbury.

It is clear that Essex had particular features which led to competition with the Established Church after the Reformation. We were close to the continent and its influence; Bibles, printed on
the continent, could be smuggled through our small harbours; Cambridge University was close at hand and had some strong Evangelical and Puritan colleges.

In 1829 the Catholic Emancipation Act gave back political and civil liberties to Roman Catholics and then from 1845 the Potato Famine in Ireland resulted in many Irish immigrants settling in the industrial centres, including London, and hence Essex.
● An amplified version of this article can be found
at www.chelmsford.anglican.org/didyouknow

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