IT WAS ROUND about Act IV of Don Carlos that I began to realise what a wretched state religion is in these days. (Verdi clearly has this effect on people — it was during Act III that the late Lord Dacre first began to realise that the Hitler Diaries might have been faked.) In the Welsh National Opera production, currently packing them in at the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh, the mob pours on to the stage, demanding tolerance, justice and freedom for the people’s hero, Don Carlos. A riot threatens, until the Grand Inquisitor strikes his cane majestically on the ground and reminds them of their duty to the Catholic Church. At once they fall silent, before embarking on a chorus of enthusiastic support for the policy of rooting out more heretics.

That, I thought, is a Church that had its finger, not just on the people’s pulse, but round its throat. These days, bodily contact of any sort is rare. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey of Clifton, believes that the churches of Britain are approaching terminal decline, and that the last rites could soon be administered. In a lecture this week, he said that membership was declining so fast that if the church were a shop, it would have been declared bankrupt long ago. Unless it reformed from top to bottom, it would become “an irrelevancy in the nation and a club for the old, the resigned and those tired of life”.

Pausing briefly to reflect whether the man who managed the decline of the Anglican Church for 11 years is entitled to pass judgment on the work of his successors, it is nevertheless worth reviewing the data. Whereas in 1851 between 40 and 60 per cent of the population went regularly to church, today that figure is less than 7 per cent. In recent years the trend has accelerated — by 28 per cent in the last 20 years for the Catholic Church, and 24 per cent for the Anglican Church; in Scotland, the fall in congregations has been so dramatic that the once all-powerful Kirk reported recently that it could well be extinct as an organisation within the next 50 years.

How strange that this race for the exit should be taking place against a background of unprecedented social dislocation, where fear of crime and terrorism has grown, the notion of the family appears to be crumbling and there is, as Tony Blair keeps pointing out, a lack of respect for the authority of the State and its institutions. All the signs suggest that what most people lack in their lives is a solid and comforting point of reference, in other words “a very present help in trouble ”. That is what the church is meant to be. The present Archbishop, Rowan Williams, summed it up in a sermon he preached earlier this year in Armagh cathedral, when he said the church should be “a friendly home for a world of homeless people”.

One way he has chosen to convey that has been through an initiative known as “fresh expressions”, which uses the Internet and other people-friendly outlets to spread the word. But it is the word itself and how it is disseminated that ultimately counts. When it comes to grappling directly with the big issues of our time, the churches have been, for the most part, inept. Wary of the media, fearful of the accusation of meddling in politics and reluctant to attract controversy, they seem to have lost the art of direct and clear communication. That may be because they have been diverted by their own schisms, over women priests, homosexuality or sexual scandals. But is also because they have lost the art of plain speaking.

I have read through Dr Williams’s recent speeches and sermons on everything from abortion to terrorism; they are absorbing, thoughtful and intellectually challenging; straightforward they are not. Reading them is like taking part in a long and exhausting journey towards some distant and elusive truth. Most people will have neither the time nor the inclination to join in, and meanwhile the pews grow emptier. Where is the Church when it comes to challenging the Government on civil rights and terrorism; grappling with the issue of drink-sodden town centres; debating stem-cell research and cloning; dealing with anti-social behaviour on our streets; defending — or attacking — multiculturalism; offering that clarity of intent and strength of purpose that is the hallmark of any great churchman?

Those like Richard Harries, the Bishop of Oxford, and perhaps now John Sentamu, the new Archbishop of York, who do not flinch from speaking their minds and who project ideas that can be clearly understood, are few and far between. Where they exist, they fill churches. The late Cardinal Winning in Scotland was one. Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, was another. Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, Dr Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, and now perhaps Peter Owen-Jones, the parish priest from Cambridgeshire, whose TV series The Battle for Britain’s Soul has made such an impact, can be added to the list. It is, however, a small one. What links most of them, apart from plain English, is a willingness to court heresy. Great preachers have always done that, from John Knox, via Cardinal Newman to John (“Honest to God”) Robinson and the Bishop of Durham. They have made trouble, but they have sparked ideas, and they have engaged with the people.

Like Don Carlos and Queen Elizabeth, with their troubling ideas on freedom and justice, they can be dangerous. But they can change things. As one worried courtier puts it in a soaring aria: “They have contracted the same terrible disease: humanity. And humanity, you know, is very contagious.”

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