Brendan Hoban: Bishop’s youth thesis is not rooted in reality
Western People 17.3.2026.
There has been some media reaction to a recent comment made by Bishop Niall Coll of Raphoe diocese (that’s Donegal, mainly). Until recently Bishop Niall was bishop of Ossory (Kilkenny, mainly) and he was moved back to his native diocese to facilitate the impending merger of Ossory and Ferns (Wexford, mainly).
Bishop Coll was speaking at the launch of a book entitled Transformative Renewal in the Catholic Church by a Catholic theologian John O’Brien – and the bishop had some unusual and unexpected comments to make on young people and on the implications of their changing attitudes to religion to which he attached some significance and, I would suggest, to which he attributed unwarranted credence.
Cynics and the world weary might smile patronisingly at any suggestion that the consistently varying opinions of young people deserved such attention as the young almost by definition can change their minds from Tuesdays to Thursdays. But, in this enlightened age when attentive listening and respecting the views of all the baptised are now central to present church reforms, such a ritual dismissal is now unacceptable – and rightly so.
The following, as I understand it, is Bishop Coll’s thesis. First, young people in Ireland today, he said – those born after 1995 (those under 30 now) who have been dubbed ‘the I-Generation’ – are seeking from the Catholic Church what he called ‘clarity, coherence and tradition’ rather than wanting the Church to adapt to the modern world as Church reformers are currently suggesting. Second, there are groups of young people who would like the Church to go back to the past who, he said, want ‘a solid doctrinal foundation rather than a Church that adapts to modern culture’.
I was surprised both at the content and the confidence of Bishop Coll’s thesis as it is the mirror opposite of the given wisdom of our time. Ask anyone who works with and listens to young people today – for example parents, teachers, youth chaplains – as to what young people are saying and who actually hear them explain the kind of Church that they want to belong to and it’s not what Bishop Coll was suggesting. It’s the very opposite.
Young people in my experience – generally but not always – want a very different kind of Church: a Church that’s accepting of life and culture in the modern world; that respects developments in science; and above all that’s open to change and reform. Most young people, in my experience, are mesmerised by the Catholic Church’s refusal to accept the equality of the sexes and to reject what seems to them as embarrassing strains of misogyny and the present ritual patriarchal diminishment of women.
But to be fair to Bishop Coll, he believes that ‘the I-Generation’ today are changing their views. The problem is that the numbers that are doing so are very small and often these young people are very removed from the perspective of their peers and even sometimes their families. Thus, religion and church become places to take refuge from the world rather than where they can source wisdom and courage to engage positively with life.
Many too have been drawn into the web of social media platforms with similar like-minded contemporaries who affirm them in their fears of the world as well as confirm their belief that a traditional church that existed in the past is a far safer, more secure and more authentic place than engaging with the modern world and searching out a faith that speaks to present day life.
Young people often gravitate to other like-minded traditional peer groups – conservatively-inclined bishops, priests and laity – who share the same perspectives and often promote them through strong religious devotions of the past such as Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and youth pilgrimages – with others more technically engaged with religious influencers, podcasts and YouTube videos.
And out of those bubbles can emanate persistent demands for a church out of sync with the vision of the Second Vatican Council and very much in keeping with what Bishop Coll describes above.
It’s not surprising that such groups often feed on one another, are often dominated by evangelical-minded individuals and that an unusual number of them can be found north of the border. Though few in number and effectively of fringe influence, they are often quoted as emblematic examples of a gathering conspiracy to inflict a pre-Vatican Two Church on an unsuspecting Church.
Bishop Coll’s apparent suggestion that the present officially church-sponsored campaign to introduce synodality into the Catholic Church be replaced by a hybrid involving a coherence with ‘tradition’ seems, with respect, out of kilter with the reforming focus on the introduction of synodality, in Cardinal Grech’s words, ‘at every level of the Church’.
We’ve had synods about synodality. We’ve an ongoing campaign encouraging priests and people to support it. Pope Francis said it was the only way of being church in the third millennium. Pope Leo has agreed and underlined his intention to introduce it. And at present the main focus of the Irish Catholic Church is preparing for a National Synodal Assembly in Meath on October 17 next.
Yet here, it would seem, is Bishop Coll suggesting that Catholic leaders often ‘misread the room’ – in other words implying that they often get it wrong. An unusual plinth for a bishop to find himself occupying in our church when no other Irish bishop has to date raised even an eyebrow of doubt in relation to the present synodality campaign.
It seems to me that he’s placing himself on the wrong side of history in seeming to go against the introduction of the reforms of Vatican Two. And placing it on very shaky foundations – what a small percentage of young people think – isn’t very convincing.
In particular, Bishop Coll’s proposal ‘integrating synodality with tradition’ in order to satisfy a small minority of young people makes no sense and is probably unimplementable – apart from derailing the synodality project entirely.
We can do better than this.
The trouble with the word “synodality” is that it summons up images of “bureaucracy”. But Bishop Coll does seem to play down Vatican II and still more the messy but living image of churchhood that we find in the Gospels and in 1 Corinthians. The influence of international internet bubbles is disquieting, especially when they provide the matrix for the few vocations to the priesthood. The Church Bishop Coll envisages reminds me of the large, youngish, Japanese congregation at the Traditional Latin Mass celebrated once a month a few hundred yards from where I live. Love of hallowed forms and an element of contemplative piety are not, I think, the basis of a new vitality of the whole church. The grand orientations of Vatican II — the church as people of God moving together (with other churches and religions, as Pope Francis urged) toward the Kingdom, recovery of Scripture, and responsiveness to the signs of the times — still require our attention.
It is the deliberate avoidance of systematic and reliable research into the attitudes of young Irish people towards the church – especially since 1994 – that allows Irish bishops to attribute to them whatever attitudes any one of those same bishops might wish. Absolutely no credence should be given to these baseless divinations for that very reason. There can be only one persuasive reason for this failure: the fear that any such research would raise so many questions about the effectiveness of Catholic ‘faith’ schooling as to further empower the secularist lobby that opposes them.
In any given year school leavers in all Catholic schools could easily be surveyed on a range of vital questions – with particular attention to their attitudes towards pursuing a religious vocation. When the ICBC has explained why this has never happened, over many decades of church decline – and ended this self-imposed embargo on actually finding out ‘what young people think’ – individual bishops can be taken seriously when they presume to tell us.
In a blunt statement on Sunday 8th August 2021 the Association of Catholic Priests called the traditional school-centred model of preparation of children for sacraments in Ireland ‘no longer fit for purpose‘:
“The ACP believes that the current model whereby the bulk of sacramental preparation takes place in school, in a partnership involving school, parents and parish, is no longer fit for purpose. This way of doing things has to change. It is the role of the family and parish to nurture faith and introduce children to the sacraments.”
https://associationofcatholicpriests.ie/acp-press-statement-8-aug-2021/
Not even that was sufficient to stir the ICBC into the research and consultation – especially with parents – that was so obviously needed. In the wake of this failure, to read of any Irish bishop making confident statements on ‘what young people think’ is to despair of honesty ever setting in on this issue.
“If it doesn’t make sense, it’s probably not true”! Judge Judy’s oft used phrase sums up for me what is at the heart of young people’s negative perception of religion. My experience of teaching Religious Education in a secondary school for 15 years, and father of 3 boys/young men, leads me to conclude that religious practice, as formulated by the Roman Catholic Church, no longer makes sense to younger generations. They cannot accept that an institution with a medieval world view has anything meaningful to offer them as a foundation for life as they experience it.
I doubt I ever met any young person who was seeking any “clarity, coherence and tradition” from the Catholic Church. It was usually “What planet are they on!” To them, the Church was irrelevant to their lives, except in times of grief or tragedy. Only then did they experience church as community, as an experience of safety & comfort.
I know there are young people who have developed a loving relationship with Christ, perhaps through a loving family or an open-hearted spiritual leader or group. That should not, however, be misinterpreted as a response to the Church as it is constituted. I believe it is perhaps more “in spite of”, rather than “because of”!
There is a growing attitude among the hierarchy of “not an inch”, & an almost Trumpian “if I say it, you can believe it’s true”, beautifully described by Paul Brady in the context of Northern Ireland as “trying to reach the future through the past”.
It did not work there, & it will not work for younger generations (continents to be won for Christ – JPII) until a modern, mature, reformed Church emerges, unafraid to break the shackles of past certainties and speak to the present in a language that just, makes, sense!
The only scientific way to evaluate what young people are thinking is through surveys of their attitudes. One such survey in Northern Ireland suggests that there is an increase in younger people’s interest in religion:https://ionainstitute.ie/what-draws-young-people-to-christianity.
To describe all young people’s attitudes as the same, i.e. little interest in religion isn’t accurate. Our society has normalised what must be the greatest crime of mankind, abortion, the purest of evil, 13,000 murders of the most innocent of human lives each year in all of Ireland, and nobody says anything, it’s normal! Does one think that all young people think this is okay? Of course not, there are plenty who see this modern “culture” for the depravity it brings, likewise the passive acceptance of science denial in the form of trans ideology that a man can change into a woman which is a biological impossibility but is promoted by our government with indoctrination of our schoolchildren with scientific lies. Of all the younger generations, there will definitely be people who clearly see all this, and look for Christian principles, traditions and truth as opposed to accepting the depraved quagmire that modern society has brought us.
The “greatest crime of mankind” was not regarded in that light by pre-1870 moral theologians such as Sanchez and Liguori, and it is not a modern crime but is as old as the hills (for Japan, see William LaFleur, Liquid Life).
“that a man can change into a woman which is a biological impossibility” — well, there are biological females who claim male gender, and vice versa — the distinction between sex and gender is crucial for thinking about this. There are also non-binary people who disclaim either gender, and who may be biologically of male or female sex.
I, for one, believe that killing unborn children in the womb is never justified for any reason, as it is always the deliberate killing of a human being. On the scale we now have, nearly one million abortions per year in the EU, 73 million (WHO) globally per year which outpaces global deaths (63 million), for me and many others this ranks as one of the worst crimes of mankind if not the worst, portrayed with the greatest lie of mankind that this is healthcare.
Sex and gender are, and always have been, synonymous biologically and scientifically. Trans ideology activists promote the fantasy that they are somehow different, but conflate them when it suits to get laws changed (GRA 2015), and to enter female spaces. Each of us is born male or female with XY or XX chromosomes in every single one of the trillions of cells in our bodies. A male who says he is female or vice versa and takes hormones or has surgery doesn’t change anything biologically, not one single cell, and is still 100% their full birth sex that was determined by God, from the moment of conception, not falsely assigned at birth! Non binary is part of the fantasy, the person is still 100% male or female from conception onwards. Saying one can change sex is like saying one can change race, e.g. a white man who identifies as a black man, it doesn’t ever make him a black man, or vice versa, all this is simply the difference between reality and fantasy.
Life can be so complicated and break open our hearts with compassion when we meet people who were born with variations in their chromosomes. These variations happen by chance usually during the formation of an egg or sperm or during early cell division after fertilization. Babies can also be born with both male and female genitalia. A professional I knew lived this cross. Her parents chose to raise her as a girl but she showed masculine traits as an adult. She was teased and taunted.
In 2025 I was told of another such birth. God grant them strength!
I feel the same about a friend who suffers the same problems on the basis of gender dysphoria, and who got her name changed from female to male and who dresses and behaves in masculine style. The scapegoating of trans folk at the moment is worse than odious.
“She was teased and taunted” (MG-B @7). “The scapegoating of trans folk at the moment is worse than odious.” (Joe @8).
A timely reflection in this Holy Week.
https://www.newwaysministry.org/2026/03/29/the-passion-according-to-transgender-people/