Immigration is helping to bring Britain back to its Christian roots and reviving religion in a “weary, western” culture, the country’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric has insisted.
Cardinal Vincent Nichols said an influx of new arrivals was not simply boosting flagging congregations but encouraging the British-born population to rediscover its own “wellsprings of faith”.
He argued that the recent waves of immigration, which have seen the population grow at its fastest rate since records began, would ultimately help strengthen social cohesion, rather than weakening it, because of the ability of faith to bring people of different backgrounds together.
He added that the promotion of so-called “British values” – a key strand of the Government’s drive against extremism – was to too shallow in itself to hold society together.
His comments came as the Catholic Church in England and Wales prepares for a major new drive to spread its message.
Every parish in the country is to set up an “evangelisation” team and devise new strategies to spread the Christian message in the 21st century.
Catholics are being urged to learn from the global success of the Alpha course, the short introduction to Christianity devised by Holy Trinity Brompton, an Anglican parish in London, which has been used by at least 15 million people around the world.
The Vicar of Holy Trinity, the Rev Nicky Gumbel, who met Pope Francis last year, will speak alongside Cardinal Nichols at a special conference, entitled “Proclaim 15” in Birmingham this weekend.
Speaking ahead of the conference, Cardinal Nichols said that despite evidence of decline, Christianity in Britain is now facing a “very opportune moment” with society “tentatively recognising” a need for “something more”.
The 2011 census showed that a decline of 10 per cent - or 4.1 million people - in number of people in England and Wales who consider themselves as Christian in a single decade.
But that figure was bolstered by 1.2 million foreign-born Christians, including Polish Catholics and African evangelicals. The number of British-born people describing themselves as Christian slumped by 15 per cent – or 5.3 million – in the decade before the census.
But Cardinal Nichols, whose Westminster diocese has seen some of the highest levels of immigration in the UK, said it would be meaningless to discount the effects.
“If you 'strip out' immigration you are taking about a place that doesn't exist,” he said.
“It is a false premise to begin to say let’s just to talk about the ‘indigenous British’ who are the Catholics, well, where do you stop?
“We are a mixed race, we are an island and people arrive here from all over the world and they bring different talents and readiness … you can’t separate them you have to take the reality of Catholic life as it is today.
“It is enormously enriched by those who come here … the faith is a huge point of social cohesion, that people from different strata in society and different cultural backgrounds come together.”
He added: “I think there are particular challenges with a weary secularised western culture.
“But I think what is happening is that the energy of Christians in particular coming to a wearied, western secularised culture is giving it new hope and, certainly in the life of the Christian faith, new resilience and enthusiasm.
“And I think it rubs off on us, it rubs off on us weary westerners and we should take great heart from the fact that we are discovering again, under that impetus, some of our own wellsprings of faith.”
He went on: “Our society is tentatively recognising that it needs something more than the comparative shallow soil of our shared public culture.
“It needs something more substantial, more well rooted than some of the 'British values' that we hear spoken of.
“Of course they are good values, if course that are British and of course they are values that belong to many people.
“But we need deep nurturing soil and I think there is a sense that we've lost our way a bit and if we are going to nurture the solidity and the cohesiveness of our society then we have to dig deeper.”