More Practicing Catholics than Anglicans in UK

DarwinSister (currently earning a masters degree in Cool Linguistic Stuff at Oxford) sent along a link to this story from The Times, according to which Catholic mass attendence is now surging well past Anglican Sunday observance in the UK.

Roman Catholicism is set to become the dominant religion in Britain for the first time since the Reformation because of massive migration from Catholic countries across the world.

Catholic parishes will swell by hundreds of thousands over the next few years after managing years of decline, according to a new report, as both legal and illegal migrants enter the country.
It says that the influx of migrants could be the Catholic community’s “greatest threat” or its “greatest opportunity”.

While in some places the Catholic Church has responded positively, in others it has been “overwhelmed” by the scale of the challenge. The growth of Catholicism in Britain comes as the established Church of England and the Anglican provinces in Scotland, Wales and Ireland face continuing, if slow, decline.

Average Sunday attendance of both churches stood even at nearly one million in 2005, according to the latest statistics available for England and Wales, but the attendance at Mass is expected to soar....

Figures for 2005 show that there are 4.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, under one fifth the 25 million baptised Anglicans and double the number of Muslims....

But the head of the Polish vicariate told The Times that the number of Poles in London had doubled since their country’s EU accession to at least 600,000. According to the report, the number recorded attending Mass represents a fraction of the total number of baptised Catholic migrants now in London.

I imagine that this will give the Catholic hierarchy in the UK much the same set of issues to deal with that the US heirarchy has been grappling with in regards to immigration from Central and South America.

Plus it's nice to finally see "Good Queen Bess" and company on the losing side of history...