Prayer and Pikachu in London

Even airports have more character than the ExCel Centre in East London. There is nothing to do except scan QR codes, eat fast food, or mill around in embarrassment, unless you are attending a convention or something of the sort. The week after Valentine’s Day, the ExCel Centre hosted two major conferences. The first, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Forum, attracted 4,500 anti-progressive types who dressed and talked like management consultants, and were there to discuss vaguely “conservative”-sounding issues with people like Nigel Farage and Jordan Peterson. The second was a Bible conference for which 1,500 people showed up.

This Bible conference was put together by Word On Fire Ministries, a Catholic media organisation led by Mgr Robert Barron, Bishop of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota. For a quarter-century Bishop Barron has been one of the best-known clerics in America, thanks to his frequent appearances on radio and television, as well as (more recently) his YouTube and podcast appearances with Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. Even non-Catholics can listen to Word On Fire podcasts with pleasure: the “Evangelisation and Culture” series in particular is first-rate. Bishop Barron’s gathering was explicitly advertised as an “Evangelisation and Culture” conference; the setting made clear just how urgent it was to address these issues.

The first day of the proceedings fell on the 224th birthday of Saint John Henry, Cardinal Newman, the most beloved of all English saints. 21st February 2025 also coincided with the first day of the European Pokémon International Competitions. Pokémon, a Japanese video game from the 1990s, loses its attraction for most children by the time they turn eleven. But the participants and onlookers in the three-day Pokémon competitions in London were generally men in their late teens or twenties; a fair few had reached middle age. These tended to be irritable-looking, as though waiting to be asked “what is a grown man doing at a Pokémon competition?” Even so, Pokémon enthusiasts outnumbered Catholics at the ExCel Centre by at least five to one.

The conference kicked off on Friday afternoon with a “Jubilee Expo”. Exhibitors ranging from the Catholic Truth Society and The Catholic Herald to Buckfast Abbey set up stalls to hand out pamphlets, sell books and chat generally about their work to conference-goers. The Carmelite Sisters of Our Lady of Walsingham lit up the exhibition hall with their good cheer; a few startlingly young Dominican friars impressed everyone they talked to with their deep, serene prayerfulness; the twinkling eyes and good humour of the Benedictines did nothing to hide the seriousness with which they approached their vocation. A handful of ordinary diocesan priests wandered around the hall making new friends. The whole gathering demonstrated a warmth that one rarely sees between strangers in a place like London: hundreds of faces radiated sincere kindness. Truly these people were a light to the world — except that relatively few of them were young.

Of the fifteen hundred people in attendance at the conference, the majority of heads were grey, bright-white or bald; most people who weren’t clergy or members of religious orders seemed to be around fifty-five years old, and heavily involved in parish life. This was to be expected, perhaps. Word On Fire Ministries is not that well-known yet among ordinary British Catholics. Also, younger Catholics these days tend not to be interested in people like Bishop Barron, whom they perceive as something of a milquetoast. Meanwhile, a great many older Catholics regard him as suspiciously “traditional”, if not reactionary. 

Bishop Barron is caught in the middle of a civil war in the Catholic Church that is difficult to delineate concisely. Broadly speaking, we might identify two main camps, the Traditionalists and the Boomer Reactionaries. 

The Traditionalists are much younger, more consciously orthodox, and visibly Catholic, than their adversaries. They want to renew the Catholic Church to the strength, health and confidence of the era before the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), when a series of ill-advised “reforms” were imposed on the institutional church, precipitating, among other things, the self-destruction of Catholic culture, a collapse in the Church’s authority, the widespread loss of belief among the faithful — and a worldwide molesting crisis that was exacerbated by a relaxation of moral discipline among clergy. Few if any of the Traditionalists were born before the 1970s; perhaps they are not so much “Traditionalists” as “Radicals”.

The Boomer Reactionaries, on the other hand, are not necessarily Boomers, but they believe that the Catholic Church was improved by the reforms of the 1960s; as for the disappearance of the faith in most of the world, the self-immolation of the Church in once-Catholic societies like Belgium, Québec and Ireland, the sheer mediocrity of the Church’s literary, intellectual and artistic culture everywhere, and (of course) the molestation crisis — well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. The Boomer Reactionaries are committed to reforms, whatever the cost. Otherwise, they are in general anti-authoritarian, except when it comes to the absolute authority of Boomer Reactionaries. They want the world to remain frozen in the year 1970, and as far as much of the Catholic Church is concerned, they have had their way for well over half a century.

Part of Bishop Barron’s job is to build a bridge between the Traditionalists and the Boomer Reactionaries. He has his work cut out for him, because both sides simply want war now. Yet Bishop Barron, like the late Pope Benedict XVI, believes that reconciling the participants in this conflict is a task he cannot avoid. His solution has been to demonstrate his openness to Traditionalist theological positions without adopting their aesthetics. Meanwhile he is keen to show the Boomer Reactionaries that he understands their tastes in music, love of comfort, and desperation to be heard no matter what they are saying. Is he succeeding?

The Evangelisation and Culture conference featured a lecture by the renowned theologian Tracey Rowland, and a polite discussion between Bishop Barron and the former Anglican Bishop of Durham, as well as a series of sometimes interesting panel discussions. For many audience members, the discussions were intimidatingly “academic”; others could have done with a little more intellectual substance and theological depth. Also, the adoption of something like American-style Protestant “mega-church” aesthetics for the proceedings was, by anyone’s standards, profoundly unfortunate. 

The ExCel Centre provided stark reminders of just how far the Church has fallen in reach and influence

That said, the “Christian Art” initiative of Fr Patrick van den Vorst, a former Director of Sotheby’s Europe, sounds promising. Unlike most people involved in such endeavours, Fr van den Vorst demonstrably has exquisite taste. You can learn a lot about art by signing up to “Christian art” for a daily reflection on the Gospel accompanied by a meditation on a given painting or sculpture. But how spiritually useful is this endeavour? From a theological point of view it might be too lightweight to be effective — too much culture, not enough evangelisation. 

Perhaps the conference could have used more prayer. Of course there was an opening prayer from the Abbot of Ampleforth, Dom Robert Igo OSB, and an hour of Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament to close the proceedings at the end of the second day; but it is hard to get on your knees and open yourself to God whilst sitting in mega-church-style seats and trying to read a Biblical quotation on a JumboTron video screen. The Boomer Reactionary style of prayer won out at the conference, and nobody on the organising committee seems to have stopped to ask whether such a thing is spiritually useful. Then again, since 1970 Catholics have grown accustomed to mindlessly repeating phrases like “Lord graciously hear us” and being told to think of them as prayers.

The ExCel Centre provided stark reminders of just how far the Church has fallen in reach and influence since the Second Vatican Council. Evangelisation is not merely a matter of advertising or communications: it involves opening an individual soul to the Word of God. The scale of Christians’ current challenge could not be ignored, when there were thousands of hollow-eyed young men attending the Pokémon Competition whose habits and addictions had obviously destroyed their capacity for intimacy with another human being. You could tell them they were wasting their lives; but how could you convince them that you weren’t also wasting yours? Meanwhile, the London Muslim Shopping Festival 2025, also at the ExCel Centre that weekend, seems to have been a roaring success.