They filled the pews of Westminster Cathedral and thronged its side chapels. They stood at the back and in the aisles. Some even knelt on the marble floors.
The requiem mass for Pope Francis on Monday evening drew an enormous crowd of locals and tourists alike – the grieving, the pious and the simply curious – to the central London home of the Catholic church in England and Wales.
Although it sometimes runs counter to many visitors’ expectations, metropolitan London is by far the most religious city in Britain due to its status as a magnet for immigrants from the developing world, where religion is stronger than in the West.
Among the English Catholics praying at the cathedral on Monday evening I heard the accents of many Hispanics, Caribbeans, Africans, Southeast Asians whom I took to be Filipinos, Europeans including Italians and French, and even a few from Ireland.
Pope Leo XIV sets out vision for papacy and cites AI as critical challenge facing humanity
The Irish Times view on Pope Leo: continuity and change
‘Bob the Pope’ considered ‘a safe pair of hands’ by Irish priest who knew the new Pope Leo XIV
In a world dominated by loud, divisive politics, the cardinals found an antidote in Pope Leo XIV
The grand, red-bricked cathedral sits in the heart of London’s West End, close to busy Victoria Station. The area was relatively quiet as the mass began at 5.30pm on Easter Monday. Most parking spaces in surrounding streets were taken up by broadcasting vans with satellite dishes.
The broad plaza at the front of the cathedral was stalked in advance of the service by the television reporters who were eager to capture scenes of the grief of Catholics following the death earlier that day of Francis.
Yet, in truth, the atmosphere at Westminster Cathedral was stoic and restrained. This was a mass for an 88-year-old man who had seemed to be near death for months. There was no sense of shock, no ostentatious displays of emotion. Very few appeared tearful.
In recent months, the area around Westminster Cathedral had begun to attract many homeless asylum seekers, most of them younger men who had camped around the plaza and up the side of the cathedral building. They were moved on by local authorities over the Easter period as the church became busy with services.
Now, as people came to mourn a pope who had preached compassion towards immigrants, a few of the asylum seekers appeared to have returned on Monday evening to sit on the steps outside the cathedral. However, they hadn’t re-erected any of their tents by the time I left.
Just inside the door to the cathedral was a memorial shrine to Francis, a large picture of him waving which was surrounded by candles and a splash of yellow and white Easter flowers.
Beneath the picture were hundreds of memorial cards for churchgoers with prayers for the pope in death. These included Psalm 120 – the song of the ascents – as well as the evening prayer of the Canticle of Simeon and a bespoke “Prayer for Francis”.
The cards were professionally printed on high quality material – produced in haste, perhaps, by the Liturgy Office of the Catholic Bishops Conference on Monday afternoon. Or maybe they prepared them in advance in the expectation of what was soon to come.
The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, presided over the mass, which lasted for 90 minutes. Afterwards, tourists and locals queued to sign the four books of condolences for Francis that had been opened down the back of the cathedral.
After the bishops left the scene, many other visitors also queued with little reverence to take selfies at the steps to the altar. London tourism trundles on as always.
The Catholic church, meanwhile, has in recent years experienced something of an unexpected renaissance in Britain, fuelled by increasing mass attendance by Generation Z.
A recent YouGov survey for the Bible Society found that British Catholic churchgoers now outnumber Anglicans two-to-one in the 18-34 year age group. Six years ago, there were 1.5 times more Anglicans than Catholics in this age bracket.
While the number of people in Britain who identify as Christian overall is falling – it dropped below half to 46 per cent of the population at the 2021 census, as the number of non-religious grew – the Catholic church still claims 6.2 million members, even if less than a fifth are regular massgoers.
The church says mass attendances have risen steadily in recent years, although these are still behind pre-pandemic levels. If the trends identified in the YouGov research persist, Catholics across all age groups will soon outnumber Anglican Protestants for the first time in 500 years since the Reformation started by Henry VIII.
The monarchy in recent years appointed the UK’s first Catholic prime minister – Boris Johnson married Carrie Symonds in Westminster Cathedral. High-profile Catholics such as Jacob Rees-Mogg are also prominent on the airwaves. Now an upsurge of youth has injected enthusiasm into the church.
The pope may have died, but the Catholic church in Britain, it seems, remains still very much alive.
