Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast.

I'm Damien Thompson.

Why are so many young Anglicans and Catholics turning to the traditional worship of their churches, rejecting the trendy platitudes of the

boomer generation. That's going to be the theme of an exciting spectator event called

Recovering the Sacred, which will be held at the Church of St. Bartholomew of Great, the oldest

parish church in the city of London, on July the 8th, and we have an outstanding

panel of experts, including the rector at St. Bartz, the provost of the London Oratory, and Oxford's

Regis Professor of Divinity, to discuss this historic shift in theological and liturgical attitudes.

Make sure you book your tickets for it now, because in addition to the

discussion, there will be glorious singing of Catholic and Anglican motets by the renowned choir

of St Bartholomewes. But now, let's hear from two young Christians who have discovered or

rediscovered the liturgical treasures of their own respective churches.

They are James Vitale, who's the very useful head of political economy at policy exchange,

and Georgia Clark, whose director of youth ministry at St Elizabeth of Portugal Catholic Church

in Richmond in the Archdiocese of Southern.

James and Georgia, it's great to have you with us. I mentioned in the introduction that I'm rather

skeptical by claims by the Bible Society that in 2018, just 4% of 18 to 24-year-olds went to church, and now that's

risen to 16%. These figures strike me as bucking the trend, put it mildly, of a relentless

progress of secularisation. And I'd like to look at their methodology, which I think a number of people

are suspicious of. But that said, I do see signs of a revival of what I might call

traditional worship among both Anglicans and Catholics, people who are drawn to services that reflect the heritage of their respective

churches rather than some desperate attempt by those churches to be relevant, which was a sort

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