Beyond the impact of slum clearance, a further plausible explanatory hypothesis underpinning improved Protestant–-Catholic relations is that which focuses upon improved inter-church relations. Strong religious and personal relationships developed between the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of the city, Derek Worlock. This relationship has been associated with the growth of ecumenism which eased the religious divide. The second part of this chapter will concentrate on a shift towards secularism and the decline of religious observance and attendant fervour. It is plausible that the churches getting on together helped their congregations get along, although it is just as plausible that denominational tensions declined because people simply stopped believing in God.

When David Sheppard was appointed as Protestant Bishop of Liverpool, in 1975, he was made aware of the ‘long history of sectarian suspicion’, ‘bitterness’, and the ‘violence which lay behind the religious divide in the city’. Such was the divide that as late as 1968 the Prime Minister Harold Wilson, a Merseyside MP, opposed the invitation of royalty to the consecration of the Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral, as the ‘relationships between Protestants and Catholics, though they had calmed down, were too fragile to risk a royal presence at such a public Roman Catholic event’. The following year, Sheppard's Roman Catholic counterpart, Derek Worlock, was appointed Archbishop of Liverpool. Worlock made it his ambition to ‘close the gap between religion and life [in Liverpool], between what goes on in church and what goes on at work and at home’. The ecumenical vision and conduct of Sheppard and Worlock was such that they would become affectionately known on Merseyside as ‘fish and chips’, and in 2008 a bronze commemorative statue of the pair, paid for by public subscription, was unveiled on Hope Street. It is the view of many in Liverpool that these two figures did much to help calm spiritual divisions in the city.