"The strange death of Protestant England"

. . . read a headline in the Guardian the next day. "Catholicism hasn't been this chic since Bloody Mary burned Rowan Williams's first Protestant predecessor at the stake."

The Daily Telegraph reports British political, social, and several other ramifications of the Holy Father's death here. Although there were counter-balances to the lead quote above. Such as:

Yet the strange death of Protestant England, and what the historian Mark Almond calls "the hollowing-out of the Protestant Succession", is emphatically not the same thing as the rebirth of Catholicism.

Cardinal Hume discovered this when he incautiously talked about "the conversion of England", and then spent the next decade watching his churches empty. Mass attendance will be higher than usual tomorrow, but will quickly revert to its disastrously low level.

A fascinating article. The rest can be found here.

[And a tip of the caubeen to Catholic Church Conservation for the reference.]