The fall (and rise) of Catholic Liverpool

I’m standing in a circular arena mottled with red, blue and magenta light. Above is a huge truncated cone, also dappled like the inside of some immense, multicoloured Rolo. Before me is the 14^th station of the Cross: the dead Christ laid in the tomb, he and his mourners – in this carving – mere husks of twisted metal sinew.

This is the Metropolitan Cathedral, or “Paddy’s Wigwam” — a name that references the historic wave of Irish Catholic migration that indelibly changed this city and the building’s tent-like shape. But I’m not here to admire architecture: I want to find out about the future of the Catholic faith in Liverpool.

Below the carving of Jesus is a book of lined paper where prayers can be written for Pope Francis, who died last week. Some are orisons to Francis: one child asks him to intercede in football practice.

Liverpool’s Catholic diocese is currently leaderless: without either pontiff or archbishop. Bishop Malcolm McMahon resigned last month, and the Most Reverend John Sherrington – whose appointment was one of Francis’ final official acts – will not succeed him until the 27^th of May. McMahon was unavailable for interview; Sherrington did not want to comment before assuming the post. 

So I’ve come to the cathedral, the seat of Catholic worship for a diocese that reaches into Lancashire, Greater Manchester, the Lake District and the Isle of Man and is said to cover almost 500,000 Catholic souls, hoping to speak to mourners for the late pope or perhaps Catholics looking for guidance in this transitional period. However, the people I approach in the pews or patrolling the nave are mostly tourists; some have just come from the great neo-Gothic Anglican cathedral at the other end of Hope Street and want to compare the more modern “Wigwam”.

Liverpool was once known as the most Catholic city in England — as well as “England’s Belfast” due to the strong working-class Protestant presence and an unfortunate period of sectarian clashes. In 1910, journalist and author Thomas Burke wrote: “No city or town in Great Britain, and few in Ireland, contains so many Catholics within its boundaries.” 

Census data doesn’t differentiate between denominations, but 57% of Liverpool respondents in 2021 still identified as Christian, with Knowsley and Sefton returning 64% and 66% respectively. Compare that with Newcastle (43%), Leeds (42%), Sheffield (38%) Birmingham (34%) or Manchester (36%), and it’s reasonable to say Merseyside is still a more Christian area than other Northern cities.

But even here – as in the West more generally – the Church’s influence has waned. That 57% who identify as Christian is a decrease from 71% in 2011. The proportion of residents reporting "No religion" rose from 17% in 2011 to 29% in 2021. 

The changes in the religiosity of this city are striking. In the 1850s, the Liverpool Mercury found that while the established church could not fill its pews on a Sunday, three times as many Catholics attended mass as could be seated. Even by 1982, when Pope John Paul II visited the city, regular attendance at mass was around 150,000; now, it’s more like 25,000. Protestantism has declined, too: in terms of both membership and political influence, even the Orange Order on Merseyside, which once held local politics in a vice, is now more a tangerine.

A former parishioner at St Sebastian’s in Fairfield tells me churches in the area were open all day; now, they’re bolted with rusted locks, without enough parish priests to go around. I visit St Sylvester’s Church in Vauxhall, a Gothic Revival redbrick now overgrown with vegetation and roosting birds. St John the Evangelist in Kirkdale is still in use, but I can’t find a way in. The massive St Anthony’s on Scotland Road is also bolted up when I visit. These were once the most Catholic areas of Liverpool, as opposed to Protestant strongholds like Everton. When St Anthony’s opened in 1833, the first High Mass attracted such immense crowds that Scotland Road was thick with carriages and people trying to get in. 

“Congregations are generally dwindling,” admits Father Neil Ritchie, based at St Philip Neri’s Church near Toxteth. “It’s not at the centre of most people’s lives like it once might have been. But there are green shoots.” For 20 years, Father Neil has been chaplain for the University of Liverpool and LJMU. He admits not being a parish priest has immunised him against the feeling of decline: his flock are students, young and enthusiastic – and then gone again.

I visit St Philip Neri’s on the corner of Catharine Street and Blackburne Place. Inspired by Italian Byzantine churches like St Mark’s Venice, it’s beautiful inside and out, oddly more similar in style  to the nearby Byzantine-Gothic synagogue on Princes Road than most Christian buildings. Scenes in This City is Ours were shot here; Father Neil regales me about recently welcoming Sean Bean and the other cast and crew.

“I think what we provide for young people here is countercultural,” Father Neil says, making me fleetingly think of youthful New York subcultures’ fashionable embrace of the faith. “Young people can come here to play boardgames, play cards, talk ‘til the cows come home, or just be themselves.” He explains how churches used to offer social centres. I think about the Sure Start centre opposite St John the Evangelist, or the Vauxhall Law Centre down the road from St Sylvester’s – secular institutions trying to fill a sacral absence in caring for the local community.

“I always had the awareness of […] the faith,” says Ailisha who moved to Liverpool for university. “But there wasn't an emotional connection for me when I was younger.” Her parish back in India consists of about 2,000 people – paradoxically, “the enormity of it sort of let me miss out on that community” compared to the close-knit group she’s now part of at St Philip Neri’s.

Another member of Father Neil’s young cohort is Joshua. A student, Joshua used to be, incredibly, an Italian Protestant. “Italy does a really good job of enforcing Catholicism,” Joshua says. “There's the buildings, the traditions – people do the sign of the cross before eating, even though they might not know what it means.” The faith’s sparser presence in Liverpool was, counterintuitively, the key to Joshua converting. “Now I want to do my own thing,” he says.

Interested in how immigration has shaped the city’s faithful more generally, I speak to Canon Aidan Prescott, a senior cleric in the diocese. In his 20 years as a parish priest at St Clare and St Hugh in Sefton, “the demographics have changed enormously,” he says. “We’ve seen fewer families, at least Catholic families – a lot of what were family homes are now student accommodation or multiple occupancy.” 

As for people coming from elsewhere, Prescott explains how historically south Liverpool saw a large influx of Nigerian Catholics following the civil war in the late 1960s. He also mentions Ghanaians.

Over the years, there have been stories in the national press about Catholic churches being boosted by the arrival of new Polish worshippers in the country, but Prescott says this has tailed off since Brexit. He mentions a weekly Polish mass when he was at the Metropolitan Cathedral, and says Poles seemed to prefer a mass in their own language, meaning they might have stayed a bit more within their own community than the Nigerian or Ghanaian Catholics. Canon Prescott also mentions Slovenians and other Central and Eastern Europeans who attend St Clare and St Hugh for life events: baptisms, weddings and so forth.

Another Eastern community that’s grown is Ukrainians. I speak with Father Taras Khomych, a priest of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Although in full communion with Rome, Catholics of the Eastern Rite worship differently – like in Orthodox Christianity, priests are allowed to wed, and instead of mass they call services “celebrating the Divine Liturgy”.

Originally from Lviv, Father Taras grew up in the atheist Soviet Union and did not discover his faith until later. In 2012, he moved to Liverpool when his wife got a job teaching at Hope University.

“At first, I celebrated the Divine Liturgy alone, with only my young son giving the responses,” Father Taras tells me. But since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 (Post readers from that period might remember encountering Father Taras then), the Ukrainian population has increased and been galvanised in their identity and faith. At St Sebastian’s on a Saturday, “I now see about 30 people regularly.” At Easter, he says, this rose to three or even four hundred. Some who celebrate are not even Ukrainian – Father Taras mentions a Liverpudlian attendee whose late husband participated in the Eastern Rite.

Another atypical congregation growing on Merseyside is those who practice the Tridentine Mass. Unlike the vernacular Novus Ordo service, which has been standard since the 1960s, the Tridentine liturgy is in Latin. (The abandonment of Latin has, among other reforms, been subject to something between a culture war and a potential schism within the faith, which has flared up in recent years in response to Pope Francis’ perceived liberalism.) 

Only two churches offer the Latin Mass: one in Warrington and another on the Wirral. But their trajectory appears to run contrary to the general declinist mood. “I came here in 2012,” Canon Amoury Montjean tells me of Saint Peter, Saint Paul, and Saint Philomena Shine in New Brighton. Since then, “we have doubled our congregation. And we are attracting mostly young people.”

Counterintuitive? The late Pope Francis, widely credited with bringing younger members back to the church with his personal charisma and “progressive” approach, took steps to restrict the Latin mass out of fear its adherents could idolise tradition rather than worshipping God. What is it about this liturgy that might be attracting more and younger members?

Canon Montjean gives quite a different answer to Father Neil. “Many are seeking beauty,” he says. “As well as a sacred space, and silence.”

This chimes with my experience. In 2017, I began attending services at the “Dome of Home”, as Montjean’s church is called for its massive roof visible even from Liverpool – not out of any resurgent piety but for the cynical reason that I wanted to get married in such a grand building to which I had a childhood connection. But something about the traditional liturgy – alien and incomprehensible as it might have been – resonated.

When it comes to the survival of the Church on Merseyside, there may be truth to both Father Neil’s call for social togetherness and Canon Montjean’s emphasis on beauty and stillness. I speak to a parishioner of St Anne and St Bernard, who wishes to remain nameless. A practicing Catholic in Liverpool since her childhood some five decades ago, she tells me both about her parish priest Father Peter Morgan’s tireless work with poor refugees and the strange emptiness she would feel without the Eucharist in her life. “Both the social and the sacramental elements are equally important,” she says. 

The challenge, Canon Prescott tells me, is always to make the Gospel relevant to Liverpudlians whatever their background, and to build on the “green shoots” mentioned by Father Neil. But that relevance won’t only be determined by the clerics in Liverpool. In Rome, 135 cardinals from around the world will begin meeting next week behind closed doors in the Sistine Chapel to elect the latest successor to St Peter. 

One of those men is Cardinal Vincent Nichols, the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, who was born in Crosby in 1945 and went to St Peter and Paul's Junior School on Liverpool Road. His first church was St. Anne's in Edge Hill and he worked in the Liverpool archdiocese for more than a decade. “Merseyside man with an outside chance of being the next Pope,” was how the Echo put it when they reported the story. 

If that headline seems a little overwrought, Nichols’ presence at Conclave is nevertheless a quiet echo of the power and glory of Catholic Liverpool.

Thanks for reading my story today. I’d love to hear your memories about the role of the Catholic Church in Liverpool and how things have changed over the years. Please click that comment button to join the conversation under the article, and have a lovely weekend.