Last week, the founder of St Anselm’s Institute in Margate, a Catholic institute that trains foreign priests and religious in evangelisation and leadership, said that the Home Office’s handling of visa applications had amounted to “mental torture” in recent years.
Fr Kofler explained that a Catholic priest was recently refused a visa by the Home Office to study at the institute because he wasn’t married. A nun was also denied entry to Britain because (as a consequence of belonging to a religious order) she did not have a personal bank account. These are regulations which simply don’t work for priests and religious.
The situation has proved so unbearable that after 33 years Fr Kofler is moving his institute to Rome where he believes it will be given more support.
Fr Kofler says: “All our priests and religious are sent to train and go back to their own countries after their studies. I think it’s a total misunderstanding and religious illiteracy from the Home Office. At the age of 82, I am no longer able to work in a situation where my hands are bound due to the Home Office’s inability to function. To work in that mess is not my desire any longer.”
But religious illiteracy is not just confined to the Home Office. In 2010, prior to Benedict XVI’s visit, Foreign Office officials were left red-faced when a mocking memo was leaked in which staff had suggested the state visit could be marked by the launch of “Benedict condoms”.
Other ideas included the pope blessing a gay marriage and opening an abortion clinic during his visit to Britain.
In a report in last week’s Tablet, Major General Tim Cross said that the Foreign Office’s understanding of religion was still inadequate despite the introduction of a religious literacy course by former faith and communities minister Baroness Warsi.
If religious ignorance remains widespread across governmental departments this could be disastrous for the Church.
Former prisons minister Ann Widdecombe believes that Whitehall’s failure to understand religion, and Christianity in particular, presents a growing problem for the Church in England and Wales.
She highlights the Catholic adoption row in 2007, when the government was shocked when adoption agencies chose to close rather than place children with same-sex couples. It showed, Widdecombe says, that officials and politicians “simply didn’t understand Church teaching”.
She adds that the problem was exacerbated by the fact that Christianity is not taught properly in schools. As a result pupils leave full-time education without having had any contact with Christianity and then go on to fill government jobs.
A spokesman for the Catholic Church in England and Wales says that while there is a problem with religious literacy “across the board” and that Whitehall isn’t anti-Catholic, there is at times a lack of awareness about how extensive the Church’s role is when it comes to supporting and serving institutions such as prisons.
“There is an issue with understanding and awareness,” the spokesman says, “but it doesn’t necessarily mean Catholic institutions are under threat.”
In fact, despite the relocation of St Anselm’s and the closure of Catholic adoption agencies, the prognosis for Catholic institutions in England and Wales might be quite good on closer examination.
Professor Stephen Bullivant, who runs the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, points out that a generational shift is occurring.
He says: “Regarding the educated elites from whom one would expect Home Office officials, for example, to be drawn, it’s possible that there’s an interesting generational shift going on.
“Among those aged 45-plus, people who identify as having ‘no religion’ tend to be more likely than Christians to be university graduates (although not more likely of people from non-Christian religions).
“Among the under-45s, however, the non-religious are the least well-educated group (and Catholics have the greatest proportion of university graduates among the 25-34s).”
Bullivant paints a promising picture for the future. “Unlikely though it might seem, secularists might soon be complaining about their being a disproportionately ‘Christian educated elite’ with little irreligious literacy,” he suggests.
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