People in Europe are filled with angst and the Roman Catholic Church is in crisis, the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, said tonight.

In a lecture at Westminster Cathedral, the spiritual leader of more than four million Roman Catholics in England and Wales said the Church in Europe, and in particular in Britain, was in a time of crisis and of "dying and rising".

He described the modern European as a "person of angst", in spite of or perhaps because of the many liberties enjoyed in contemporary western culture. He warned that Europe will "fall into anguish" if it forgets God and loses touch with its Judeao-Christian tradition.

The Cardinal argued that the greatest temptation facing Europe today was not evil but indifference, but he warned that the response to aggressive secularism cannot be aggressive Christianity. One of the main tasks facing the Church was to recall Europe to its "roots in God".

He was speaking on the eve of the launch of his long-awaited "green paper" on the re-organisation of his own diocese of Westminster. Although just one diocese among 22 in England and Wales, the pioneering plans of Westminster, this country's "mother" diocese, to radically change the way it operates in order to cope with the rapidly declining numbers are being watched closely by church authorities throughout the West.

The Cardinal's green paper, which will be introduced to parishioners at Masses this weekend, controversially proposes parish mergers and closures. Parishes will be told that they can no longer assume they will have a resident priest and that they must prepare for this. Lay people will be urged to take a more active role in worship, administration and pastoral care. Numbers of Masses will be reduced and parishes will need to share staff, prayer ministries and even major liturgies, such as organising joining celebrations during Holy Week.

Numbers of priests in Britain are dropping as vocations continue to decline. Some blame the celibacy requirement. In the Westminster consultation, a number of parishioners served by married priests who left the Church of England and went over to Rome after the ordination of women suggested the celibacy requirement should be relaxed. The Cardinal rejects this as a question for Rome and not for the local church.

Church authorities today continue to insist on the celibacy discipline and put the decline in vocations down to increasing secularisation and the reluctance of young people to make lifelong commitments to unfashionable spiritual values.

From 843 priests working in the ministry in Westminster in 1990, the number has fallen to 623 today and is projected to be 471 by 2015, a fall of nearly half in 25 years. Over the same period, the number of Catholics in the diocese has remained steady, replenished in part by immigration. Of 500,000 Catholics living in Westminster, which comprises Greater London north of the Thames plus Hertfordshire, one third, or 150,000, regularly attend Mass. And this year saw a record number of adults, 780, seeking admission to the church through its adult baptism and confirmation programme.

In his introduction to the green paper, the Cardinal urges Catholics to continue to pray for priestly vocations. He says:"There is no reason to lose confidence in the Lord of the harvest who desires to send labourers into His harvest."

The paper warns that the shift in the image of a Catholic parish will need to be "profound" and that parishioners and priests will need to take on a "new mindset" to develop strong lay leadership. It says: "Over the next 10-15 years, the Church in Westminster will need to move away from the idea that the viability of a parish is contingent on its resident priest." A church can no longer be a place where people go to have their own needs met, it says.

It asks parishes to begin considering their options for the future, and whether they wish to be closed down, merged, adopted by a larger parish or "clustered" with one or more other parishes. Precise details of the plan, the result of a diocese-wide consultation by the Cardinal, will be published in the "white paper" at the end of the year.

The Cardinal summed up his concerns in his speech at the cathedral tonight. Referring to the pattern of dying and then rising again that the Church has undergone through the centuries, he said: "In some ways the Church in Europe and in particular the Church in Britain is at such a time now. It is a time of dying and of rising. It is a time of crisis."

He said that by "crisis" he meant a time of decision, uncertainty and change rather than of disintegration. "We live in a rather strange, twilight time. We should not be surprised at the challenges and the nervousness and the fears that face us here in our own country as we look to the future and the shape of the Church to come."

The lecture was the last in the Faith in Europe? series. Previous speakers included Sir Bob Geldof, Lord Patten and Mary McAleese and each talk attracted more than 1,000 people.

Read the Cardinal's speech in full

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