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At Your Service
The Church of the Holy Ghost, Balham, London
by Bess Twiston Davies

I crept out of Holy Ghost after midnight, but the worship was still going strong. Incense billowed upwards near the burning bush, a wooden structure laden with candles; at its apex the Eucharist encased in a gold and glass monstrance. Three hundred or so young people, many teenagers, huddled round.

Tonight, some were scattered through the pews, listening to a sermon on conversion — a fitting theme for the feast of the conversion of St Paul — and the need to repent.

“If we deny the need to repent, we are saying, effectively, that everything is as it should be,” says the priest, Father Stephen Langridge. He gives graphic examples of a fallen world: nation bombing nation, people losing their jobs or houses in the credit crunch, husband turning on wife.

Clear, lucid and packing a punch, Langridge’s sermons are renowned in the diocese. Tonight he invites us to consider how the Gospel — Jesus summoning Simon Peter and the Galilee fishermen to follow him — might apply to us. “You and I are also followers of the Lord and are asked to stay with the Lord, to live a life of holiness, by living with the presence of Christ within your hearts and your mind turned towards the Lord,” he says.

Holy Ghost, an Edwardian church in a South London square, has a lively following. About 1,200 attend weekend Masses, a number which has doubled since Langridge arrived in 1995. “People are looking for something beyond the material salvation the world offers; that offers hope for the future,” he says. “They want to make sense of their lives.”

To this end, Holy Ghost aims to offer “catechesis from cradle to grave” — past courses include marriage enrichment and how to create a Catholic culture in the home. Nine of the 23 young men signed up for a vocations weekend with Langridge today and tomorrow (he is vocations director for Southwark Diocese) attended the three-day Youth 2000 retreat over the new year. “When young people spend time with the Lord they ask what He wants them to do,” says Langridge, who after tonight’s Mass is addressing the young adults’ group in Visitation House across the road. The topic is Charles Darwin and the Culture of Death.

Aided by a snappy slideshow, Langridge explains the real issue that the Roman Catholic Church has with Darwin. Not evolution per se, but the subsequent understanding that “Man is a species in evolution” rather than, as described by the Catholic catechism, that Man is “the pinnacle of creation”, a species unique in having both body and soul. This confers equality on all.

We see quotes from The Descent of Man, Darwin’s 1871 work, which contains what to some modern ears are unpalatable theories on “lesser” races versus “civilised” stronger races. A few slides later we arrive at eugenics — a natural conclusion of thinking that “weaker” human specimens should be gradually eliminated.

It makes for chilling viewing. The questions it raises are awkward, discomforting. Are we so different today in proposing euthanasia for the elderly? For the disabled? And for those seriously ill? The questions linger long after I have departed Holy Ghost.

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