Brendan Hoban: Church must respond to tsunami of change   

Western people 17.7.2024

Here’s a question: Why is it that a significant percentage of Catholics who no longer attend Mass with any regularity are still happy to financially contribute to the running of a parish, the maintenance of a priest and the upkeep of a church?

Here are some obvious reasons: a sense of community responsibility; a sense of history and tradition; a family loyalty to a parish; and even the inevitable prospect of a future family funeral.

Here’s another reason. Is this unusual confluence – of (on the one hand) a formal rejection of participation in the worship of a parish community and (on the other) an informal acceptance of a less engaged financial connection with the same community – indicative of another unexpressed but clear intention?

As Jeremy Clarkson says on Mastermind, ‘Here’s what I think!’ Bear with me.

Let’s start with the traditional image of bank managers in the past. In the early years of the Irish State bank managers, in their role as guardians of other people’s money and their responsibilities to their bosses, attracted a hostile derision because of what was widely regarded as an undue status that conferred undue authority on them. They were kings of the palace and they delivered edicts from on high with every decision – infallible and unalterable – passing through their hands. In comparison, bank officials were mere foot-soldiers carrying out orders.

Let me hasten to add that I’ve never met such despots as by the time I acquired a bank account the banking world had become just another business that had moved into different times. But I’ve met others in other occupations who comfortably occupied the same role.

Let me start with Parish Priests, a brotherhood with which until recent years I was closely acquainted. Like every other such fraternity we were a mixed crew of wise owls and young fools, saints and sinners and, truth be told, we had a complement of the worst kind of bank manager types.

And bishops too – though hand on heart, I have no personal axe to grind – but from history and by repute, the image of bygone bank managers would not have done justice to some bishops and their sense of self-importance despite their sometimes spectacular unsuitability for their roles.

Add to that some medical consultants, some teachers ­– Principals and others – some Gardaí and Garda Sergeants, and those members of a variety of professional groups who imagine not just that they inhabit by divine right a status way beyond their position and their competence in that the rest of the human race are presumed to hold them in awe.

Most of us in some fashion have endured the mixed benefit of their limitations.

But Irish society has changed. A culture of leadership that accepted control, entitlement and even arrogance has been swept aside in a tsunami of social change in Ireland. And those who imagine that nothing has changed are left high and dry like beached whales left wondering why their world has imploded.

The reality is that such a form of leadership is no longer acceptable in a bank manager, a hospital consultant, a parish priest, a bishop, a Garda or anyone else interested in effective leadership today.

That world of position, status, entitlement and its often toxic products of control and oppression has died in Ireland, even though in some instances it survives the tide of history: in the parish priest who refuses to reveal to parishioners the basic right of knowing how he is spending their money; in the occasional bishop who exerts his authority over his priests by thumping the table; and many others. 

Yet, we have moved very perceptibly from a society that is no longer influenced by authority buttressed traditionally by pretensions of status and entitlement. And it goes without saying that Irish society today has less respect than ever for the often toxic control and oppression that attempt to sustain such past delusions.

We should know – from the hapless British royals desperately attempting to replicate memories of the seventeenth century in an effort to summon up some relevance – that dressing up and appealing to tradition have less and less impact in our changing Ireland but can we read the signals in less obvious ways?

To get back to the question I posed at the top of this piece: Why is it that a significant percentage of Catholics who no longer attend Mass with any regularity are still happy to contribute to the running of the parish, the maintenance of the priest and the upkeep of the Church?

Logically it makes no sense though there are, as I listed above, a number of presenting reasons. Here’s another. More and more I see parishioners continuing to finance parishes whose services they have decided not to use as a statement along the following lines: ‘This is my church, my parish, my heritage, my sense of place, my community and of my confidence in saying that I will be the Catholic that I decide I want to be (and am) and if I don’t find in my parish the respect to which I feel entitled as an adult member of this faith community then I will choose another’.

If our Catholic Church and consequently our parishes continue to disrespect rights and freedoms that are out of sync with standard practices in Irish life today but in sync with the control and oppression of our past then we are effectively inviting parishioners to accept the misogynistic, patriarchal, clericalist culture that is for many simply beyond acceptance – or endurance.

Financial contributions without commitment represent a holding position in expectation of change.