Culture sometimes demands a softer faith: fewer demands, fewer edges, a version of Christianity slimmed down to fit the culture around them. Aesthetic, rather than ascetic.
“If you’re against the tide, you have to grow strong muscles to swim against the tide.”
Culture sometimes demands a softer faith: fewer demands, fewer edges, a version of Christianity slimmed down to fit the culture around them. Aesthetic, rather than ascetic.
Fr Andy, Pastoral Director at Oscott and once-Parish priest of Harry Clark of the Traitors, suggests the opposite can be seen amongst younger people. “What young people are wanting and looking for,” he says, “is… the “full fat faith”.”
It is a characteristically direct line from a priest who speaks with warmth, candour and the kind of grounded realism that comes from having walked his own winding path back to God. Now Pastoral Director at St Mary’s College, Oscott, Fr Andy is responsible for helping seminarians put formation into practice: overseeing pastoral placements, accompanying men one-to-one as a formation tutor, and helping prepare them for diaconate and priesthood. But before that, he was here as a seminarian himself, training at Oscott from 2002 to 2008. Later came parish life, vocations work, schools, youth ministry, and years of accompanying people in the ordinary mess and grace of Christian life.
His own story is part of what makes his voice so compelling. Raised Catholic, he remembers being struck by the Gospel as a boy. “There was something about Jesus I was really attracted by,” he says. But after the sudden death of his father when he was fourteen, that early faith faltered. He drifted away from church, went to university, and, by his own account, lived “this wild kind of student life.”
Even then, God was not absent. At university, committed Christian friends began to unsettle him in the best sense. One exchange has stayed with him ever since. “He said the two questions were: do you believe in God? I said, ‘Yeah, I do believe in God.’ He said, ‘But do you believe that God loves you?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ So that kind of summed up where I was really.”
Later, while working as an engineer, Fr Andy hit what he simply calls “a depression, hit a low,” and it was there that he sensed the Lord calling him back. He began reading the Catechism, met with a priest, made a long confession, and slowly found himself confronting a deeper question: not simply whether he believed, but what God might be asking of him. The priesthood arrived first as a disturbance, then as a persistent grace. “It just would not go away,” he says. “I was resistant to it, but it was a strong kind of niggle.”
That history matters, because it has left him with a deeply pastoral instinct. He does not speak about young people from a distance, as though faith were merely a problem to be solved or a moral standard to be imposed. He speaks as someone who knows what confusion feels like, what drift feels like, what it is to need mercy and truth at the same time.
That was evident during his years as parish priest in Burnham, where he first knew Harry Clark, now familiar to many through The Traitors and his recent BBC documentary exploring faith. Fr Andy knew Harry between the ages of 11 and 16. “He was an altar server,” he recalls. “His family were a strong family… I always remember him as just being a good lad really.” There is no attempt to overstate it, no effort to turn an ordinary teenager into a pious legend. Rather, Fr Andy remembers “a nice lad really and quite popular, fun-loving presence.”
He also remembers Harry’s generosity. In Burnham, a local effort to support the homeless grew into a parish-wide and community-wide project. Harry was one of the young people who got involved. “He slept out on the street with a whole load of people one night in November,” Fr Andy says, as part of fundraising for the shelter. “That had an impact on him, I think - that kind of practical service. So I kind of know Harry had a heart for that kind of thing.”
What Fr Andy sees in Harry now is not a finished story, but an honest one. “He’s on a journey and he’s open,” he says. “He’s a very likeable guy. He’s very honest and he really is searching.” That, for Fr Andy, is no small thing. In fact, it may be the beginning of everything.
Because if he has one conviction about young people today, it is that many are not looking for a faith of vague comfort or personal branding. They are looking for something solid enough to live by. “We’re in a post-Christian culture and it’s hard to live your faith,” he says. “So the effect of that is that in order to be a person of faith, your faith has to be strong to survive.” In such a culture, a casual Christianity will not last. “If it’s just a bit of your life, it won’t make any difference really.”
And that is why, counterintuitively, the Church’s moral seriousness is no longer only seen as a problem. For some, it is becoming part of the attraction. “What we’re seeing,” Fr Andy says, is that young people are searching for what is “authentic,” for “solid moral principles and teaching that we’re getting from the Scriptures and from the tradition of the Church and lived by the saints throughout the centuries.”
He reaches for a vivid image to describe the challenge. “If you’re going the same way, you can drift off and not really notice too much. But if you’re against the tide, you have to grow strong muscles to swim against the tide.” It is a line that captures both his realism and his hope. Christian faith is not easy, but difficulty is not the same as impossibility. It may even be part of what makes it compelling.
Fr Andy’s advice to anyone beginning to search is as practical as it is spiritual. Do not try to map the whole journey at once. Take the next brave step. “It’s a step at a time,” he says, “but you’re going to have to take a step of courage at some point.” Find people of faith. Speak to a priest. Visit a church. Let the search become relational, concrete, lived.
Because in the end, the deepest question is not whether God can fit into our plans, but whether we are willing to let Him lead. “The saints allow the Lord to drive the car,” Fr Andy says. “It’s like ‘thy will be done,’ not mine.”
For young people weary of drift, that may be exactly the kind of priest they need to hear: one who knows the road is not always straight, but knows too that Christ is worth following all the way.