Passionists in Liverpool 8, 1971-2000: a radical praxis of Catholic Religious life

This paper examines the origins, purposes, evolution, and reception of the Passionist Liverpool Inner City Mission (ICM) between 1971 and the early twenty-first century as a radical praxis of religious life for men. Begun by Austin Smith CP and shared by three other members of the Passionist order, the Liverpool ICM was the first consciously post-Vatican II ‘immersion’ or ‘inserted’ project undertaken by a Catholic religious community in Britain.  Sustained for almost forty years, in 1980 the Liverpool ICM was joined in1980 by a second ICM in London (Islington then Hackney).


Defined as small groups of religious men or women living among others in ordinary housing in areas of deprivation, often in inner cities, ‘inserted’ communities took part formally through projects and/or informally as neighbours in the concerns of local people.  The paper will argue that the Liverpool ICM, while influenced by specifically Catholic mid-century movements of the mid-twentieth from outside Britain (worker priests, Liberation Theology and the ressourcement and aggiornamento imperatives of the Second Vatican Council) was seeking to create a form of radical Christian discipleship outside the parochial system and responsive to human needs in post-industrial urban Britain. Without initially understanding the full significance of their choice of Toxteth, the spirituality and praxis of the Liverpool ICM was to be profoundly influenced by its closeness to the Liverpool Black community and its struggle for racial justice before, during, and after the Toxteth Uprising of 1981. In this context the paper will explore the significance of the Passionist’s revision of their founding spiritual insight as ‘solidarity with today’s crucified’.

As a consequence of its vision and its location, the Liverpool ICM was part of contemporary discourses about ‘crisis of the inner city’ in the 1970s and 1980s, including the Church of England’s high-profile and politically charged interventions. The paper addresses the questions of what, if anything, was distinctive about this small Catholic project and why, despite its high profile, its approach remained marginal within the Passionist order and wider Catholic religious life in Britain.  Interviews, witness testimony and archival material build the lived experience of the members of the Liverpool ICM and the evolution of their thinking between 1970 and 2000.

Susan O’Brien is an independent scholar, formerly Head of History at Anglia Ruskin University and currently Chair of the Catholic Record Society Council.  She has published on eighteenth-century evangelical revivalism and post-1800 Catholic history, particularly on women religious. With Carmen Mangion she is co-editor of Volume IV of the Oxford History of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland:  Building Identity, 1830-1913 (2023)

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