Brendan Hoban: Church is still in denial over priest shortage
Western People 23.7.2024
Once upon a time the annual announcement of priests’ changes – usually in June or July – was one of the high-points of the summer. Naturally it was of particular interest to priests but also to people who feared they might lose their priest – or, maybe, not lose their priest.
Now priests’ changes are limited because there are few if any priests to change and that as priests grow older and more weary, there is less reason and willingness to move. Thus, the prevailing trend at present is that instead of the former pattern of regular movement to a different parish every few years, in recent times priests rarely if ever move to a new parish with the result that some have spent anything from ten to thirty (or more) years serving in the same parish. Not a good idea, as we know, for priests or parishioners.
However, this year, the recent changes in Tuam diocese seem to have bucked that trend as 13 priests are listed: four retiring (James Walsh, James Quinn, Martin O’Connor and Martin Long); two going on sabbaticals (Gerard Burns, Eugene O’Boyle); one appointed PP (Seán Flynn); and six others (John Kenny, Tod Nolan, Jose Raju, Nelson Joseph, Michael Tracy and newly ordained Mark Quinn) picking up extra responsibilities.
In difficult times and with the average age of priests now 70-plus, a studied reluctance to move parishes has become both the fashion and the prevailing choice. In their later years priests recognize the growing wisdom (or temptation) of not cutting the chord of being comfortably ensconced in one parish for the difficult challenge of settling into a new parish with the often overwhelming stress that represents in old age.
What impels this feeling is that moving parishes no longer has the former impetus of promotion or the possibility than the unease and trouble of a new appointment would be reflected in an increase in salary. That financial encouragement has disappeared as there is no longer any distinction between ‘good’ parishes (those with commendable financial circumstances) and ‘not so good parishes’ (those with less amenable conditions) as with priests now, regardless of workload or any sense of ‘promotion’ (God help us), there is no corresponding or compensating financial or other benefits.
Unlike Aer Lingus pilots, equivalently priests with three parishes or with one parish with five churches earn exactly the same as priests with one parish and one church tend to hang so grimly to that unaccustomed luxury that they render themselves immovable. Anomalies abound as again, as unlike the rest of humankind, there is no expectation that varying responsibilities would be reflected in appropriate recompense.
The present policy of effectively making the least number of changes deemed necessary will not last because it will eventually run into the sand or fall over the emerging and all too predictable cliff-face.
The reason is that, while in some foreign climes there seems to be no shortage of available priests – not true as I’ll show later – that is not true of Ireland where native priests have become (as we say) as rare as hen’s teeth in that there is now a mathematical certainty that in a short number of years the only native priests left in Ireland will be in nursing homes.
What is extraordinary is, not just that the above incredible scenario is now imminent in the Irish Catholic Church but, the studied reluctance to name this particular ‘elephant in the living room’ or to consider possible strategies to provide alternatives to the progressively short road to ‘the last priests in Ireland’.
God knows I’ve been banging on about this for years in this particular soapbox – even in the knowledge that I’m sorely testing my readers’ patience. But my defence, if defence is needed, is that there is an absolute connection between the provision of priests and the effective ending of a worshipping form of Catholicism in Ireland. I usually frame it in the following terms: if there is no priest, there is no Eucharist and if there is no Eucharist there is no Church. I think that shorthand is both obvious and irrefutable.
A recent glad pronouncement by an Irish bishop is that this year there has been an increase in enquiries about priesthood over last year’s figures – as if this is a sustainable policy in the long term rather than a sticking-plaster short-term make-believe aspiration.
Here’s one statistic that I continually trot out to place such announcements in proper context.
Question (in a pub or other quiz): how many students are there studying for the priesthood in Dublin diocese which has 199 parishes and over 1.2 million Catholics? Is it 150 or 100 or 50 or 1? Anyone who reads this column (and who patronises pub quizzes – not a huge constituency I suspect – will know the answer is just one.)
Just one! Yet there’s no mention about what will happen when the cliff-face actually arrives. Not a squeak from those charged (in church law) with ensuring that there are enough priests. Nothing, that is, apart from mortifying deflections from reality like an increase in enquiries as if that means anything.
If we’re left counting enquiries – not numbers in seminaries, not reasonable projections about percentages that will be ordained or may later leave the priesthood; if all we can show for vocations to the priesthood is an increase in one year in enquiries then we need to look at other avenues. Can we even begin to contemplate the obvious questions that are shouting at us for obvious answers?
I said I’d come back to the rumour that there are hundreds if not thousands of priests in Africa and in Asia ready and willing to come to Ireland. That’s NOT the case. The priest-per-people ratio in Africa is one priest for every 5,200 people. In Europe it’s one for 1,700. Taking from the Third World to benefit the First World, is in every sense really another form of the rich exploiting the poor.
Thank you Fr.Brendan for presenting the true picture of this most distressing situation in the Church in Ireland.
There are a few starting positions which could offer hope for the future:-
1. Allow priests to marry if they so wish.
2. Encourage married deacons and permit them to progress to full ordination as priests, if they so wish.
3. Bring back the ‘worker priests’, men who earn their living in the secular world and support themselves financially and their wives if they are married.
These three approaches would involve major changes indeed, but the situation is critical and can not be put on the long finger.
The long finger has been church policy ever since Paul VI suggested to the 1971 Synod that married men be ordained in cases of pastoral need. The bishops turned down his suggestion.
The long finger has now become the suicide weapon. Indeed it has already plunged into the heart.
“… if there is no priest, there is no Eucharist and if there is no Eucharist there is no Church.”
No. Wherever people share what they have with those who have not, in obedience to the person who founded the Eucharist – THERE is the church.
It is because of the absence of passionate priestly insight into the connection between the Eucharist as ritual and sacrament, and the actuality – or absence – of charity and justice in the external Irish world that the priesthood is dying here.
If ordained priests cannot be interested in Catholic social teaching – and cannot connect the Eucharist with the enveloping secular crisis in Ireland – including climate collapse – they cannot explain or promote the Eucharist to young people either – and that is Irish actuality in 2024. Merely ordaining those who cannot currently be ordained won’t fix that problem.
Back in 2014 Joe O’Leary told me here on this site that most Irish priests have a phobia about theology – and not one other priest contested that. How on earth did that happen?
Imagine waking up in a hospital to be told that everyone there had a phobia about medicine! That’s the Irish ‘field hospital’ – the Irish Catholic Church – right now.
Everywhere else in the western world there are Christian pastors alive to the reality that if ‘salvation’ happens only AFTER we die, no one is interested – and that that is NOT the Gospel. If Irish clergy had any vital vision of the Gospel as salvation NOW, they would be champing at the bit for synodality, not mostly dreading it and opting out.
The basic problem is the hangover of Christendom, a dead ‘satisfaction’ theology of atonement, dating from the High Middle Ages (CCC 615). We have lost all sense of the Gospel as liberation in our own time from all of the evils that weigh us down – especially violence – because St Anselm of Canterbury’s God was violent also, and needed a divine victim. That was not the theology of St Paul, for whom the Resurrection had explained the Crucifixion, and God the Father had revealed himself in Jesus risen from the dead.
Until the Irish Catholic Church has recommitted itself, passionately, to the New Creation that is always on offer in the Eucharist and the Gospel – and understood fully the critical importance of lay commitment to justice in the world outside the chapel – nothing can fix it.
Sean, Maybe I should have contextualised my breezy comment – ‘no priest no Eucharist, no Eucharist no Church’ – by apologising to any theologian who might happen to read it in case their sensibilities might be offended by another example of what you call ‘the absence of passionate priestly insight’ among the Irish clergy.
Might I respectfully and humbly suggest that the phrase I used (above) makes a lot more sense to more people than your apodictic proclamation that ‘the basic problem (with Irish priests) is a dead satisfaction theology of atonement dating from the High Middle Ages’.
Sometimes theologians (including those who present as theologians) do themselves no service by putting lesser mortals in their boxes, especially when denouncing their presumptive theological limitations in dismissive CAPITALS.
Apologies for my capitalisations, Brendan. They were intended simply for emphasis, not to put anyone ‘in their boxes’. (It used to be possible to italicise selected words for emphasis on this forum but the recent site update put an end to that.)
For clarity, you misunderstand me when you interpolate the phrase ‘with Irish priests’ in the sentence ‘the basic problem is a dead satisfaction theology of atonement dating from the High Middle Ages’. I meant that ‘satisfaction atonement theology’ (CCC 615) is a problem not WITH but FOR priests, a straitjacket that is probably largely responsible for the phobia re theology that Joe O’Leary diagnosed ten years ago.
If, in the ensuing decade, there had been any sign of magisterial willingness to acknowledge that problem openly I would be far less impatient, and far less prone to capitalisation.
Finally, please take seriously the argument that unless priests can make the connection between the Eucharist and the justice challenges for lay people in the external Irish world they cannot engage younger generations. It may be true that most of those who currently still attend Mass will understand your argument better than mine, but we are now facing a generational challenge to engage the interest of those who DO NOT come, and that requires a seizing of the synodal opportunity now on offer, to discuss thoroughly all of the challenges that face all of us – outside as well as inside ‘sacred space’.
(The Killala synodal process surely showed that this can happen?)