"Recusants* and immigrants"

William Oddie, one England’s most perspicacious religious journalists, writes in this week’s Catholic Herald:

 “English Catholics behaved, it could all too easily seem to outsiders, not like members of the Universal Church with a message that was valid for society as a whole, but all too often as though they were offering a kind of chaplaincy for recusants or for immigrants and their descendants”.

 I wonder whether – apart from the recusants – he could not have said the same thing about the Russian (or Greek or Serbian) Orthodox Church in any western European country.

* Recusants were people who remained Roman Catholic throughout the 17^th and 18^th centuries when Catholicism was banned in England. Most of them were from wealthy landowning families, who were allowed to keep Catholic chapels in their private houses. My family name I share with a leading recusant family, which means that in ‘better’ circles they tend to assume that I am Roman Catholic.