Brendan Hoban: History shows that tradition is not sacrosanct
Western People 23.6.2026
The most compelling question at present facing the Catholic Church in Ireland is the imminent disappearance of what has been a central and fundamental experience of Catholic life for centuries. It is this: in less years that we can count on the fingers of both hands – in other words in less than a decade – the provision of the central form of Catholic worship, the Mass, will begin to disappear, effectively, from Irish life.
This will happen for two very obvious reasons. One is that priests in Ireland are getting older and fewer and the overall number, for many years in free-fall, is now approaching a steep cliff-face. The second is that, extraordinarily, despite the fact that the word ‘crisis’ seems an accurate description to describe our situation there seems to be almost an official policy of ignoring this ‘elephant in the living room’.
Regular readers of this column will know that for many years I’ve traced this decline ad nauseam and I’m very aware that in raising this issue again, I’m covering old ground here and I need to apologize upfront to my regular readers and to crave their indulgence in repeating myself – yet again. I’m very conscious that in repeating myself I’ve become a Cassandra figure warning about the equivalent of the fall of another Troy and nobody is listening.
So, once more with feeling, here goes.
This ‘crisis’ is almost upon us because we are finding it difficult if not impossible to accept what for many are obvious solutions. Let’s put it in the starkest terms.
Without priests there will be no Mass and without Mass there will be no Catholic Church. There could be sufficient priests if we were prepared to countenance changing the present celibacy requirement for male priests and/or ending the present ban on women priests.
While it’s clear that both options are available and support for both is widespread among Catholics, both have been consistently avoided for centuries. But there seems to be no discernible appetite among Catholic Church authorities for belling this particular cat. Indeed the opposite seems to be the case, as the effort to ordain women deacons – what seems little more than a gesture to the central role women could play in Catholic life – has become illustrative of a constitutional incapacity to respond in any substantive way to the growing crisis. While some Catholics including many women see this as indicative of a fundamental prejudice against women – or even that contempt for women that we call misogyny – in Catholicism, authorities sometimes actually compound that diagnosis by self-consciously just looking the other way. There seems to be no prospect of movement as Catholicism seems forever stuck between that rock and this hard place.
So what can we do about it?
The answer seems to be some version of that typical Irish response to sorting impossible dilemmas – ‘very little if anything at all’. But we could ordain married men (as distinct from waiving the celibacy requirement for ordination). And no doubt we will – eventually – before the last priests in Ireland have gone to God. But we’re keeping our powder dry for the moment.
We could welcome back priests who have exchanged the ordained ministry for a lay married life if they wanted to come back but that’s deemed unlikely – even though Pope Benedict in his day extended the same offer to Anglican clergy and indicated in so doing that marriage was not officially regarded as an insurmountable obstacle to ordination.
We could, and no doubt one day we will, ordain women and wonder aloud why it had taken us so long to see what so many are now accepting, including many theologians, that there are no credible theological reasons for banning women from ordination and that women’s ordained ministry has been sacrificed for centuries on the altar of an unwise respect for tradition at the expense of the rights of women and the needs of our Church.
But we are not allowed to go there yet. However, the bones of an approach might be contained in a strategy Pope Francis proposed in 2024 when he appointed a group of theologians to examine the possibility of finding a way of coping with ‘controversial doctrinal, pastoral and ethical solutions’, the ‘hot button issues’ as they are often called – LGBT, women’s ordination, etc. Francis’s death sidelined the impetus of the working party but at last the document has become available.
Probably its most valuable contribution is to chart a shift from what is technically called an ‘aprioristic’ approach to solving difficulties – a reliance on preconceived ideas rather than experience – towards an ‘inductive’ approach which relies on arguing from specific cases to a general rule. The group prefers to call ‘controversial issues’ by the name ‘emerging issues’, an approach that’s close to Francis’ belief that reality is greater than ideas and, implicitly, that in wrestling with difficult realities we learn what it means to be human and to be Church.
It will be interesting to see how Pope Leo will respond to a document, emanating from his hero, Francis, whose path to reform he has very often and very publicly endorsed. It might be expected that the recent positive response to his first major encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) on the difficult question of AI (Artificial Intelligence) may encourage him to find a way towards considering key questions around ordination that have already a secure base in theology and that will allow him to underline the importance not just of past tradition but of the future of the Church. The temptation so often voiced by traditional Catholics is that every tradition is absolutely sacrosanct – it isn’t, of course, as the history of the Church clearly shows us.
The past is not more important than the future – as common sense invariably instructs us.
Brendan, thank you, for your iron clad persistence in putting before us the Crisis of Priesthood, which few want to face. Few want to face it, as so much of the literature and, as the late Pope Francis put out, because clericalism is so deeply embedded in the structures and mindsets of the Church from the earliest centuries. How does one invert the pyramid and live from within the Celtic Circle!?
A document entitled ‘Confronting the Systemic Dysfunction of Clericalism’ (2019) by the USA Association of Priests with Voice of Faithful and lay people, puts out that “Clericalism permeates the entire structure of the Church separating lay people from the clergy” (P5). “The ordained ministers are better than and should rule over everyone else among the People of God” (P5). “Such attitudes are subtle and unconscious” (P7). “An over-deference to the power of the ordained” (P8).
“But while Vat 11 sought to ‘open a window’, it did not directly address the historical structures the Church has borrowed from ancient Rome. The separation of clergy and laity persists, as does the clericalism that holds the culture in place” (P13).
“The ecclesial structure favours and supports clerics (knights, dukes, kings/monsignors, bishops, cardinals)” (P13).
“The fuel of clericalism is in the following order ‘I am an ordained priest, a Christian and a human being’ instead of reversing that sequence” (P16).
I suggest that there is a very strong link between clericalism and our understanding of the Eucharist. In liturgical practice by emphasising the Eucharist solely as a Sacrifice (physically for most of the Mass most priests are ‘tied to the altar’ – see the live cams); we ignore completely that the Eucharist is also primarily a Meal which emphasises that we are all sisters and brothers gathered and fed around a Table. Have you ever seen a mother who prepares a meal, eat first? My mother always was the last to eat. Whilst in our Eucharist, it’s always the priest who eats and drinks first. Clericalism is embedded in the psyche and in the details! There’s no way that one could ordain a woman deacon or a woman priest into this clerically male-dominated world. A total overhaul is required at so many levels in order to face the crisis of the priesthood. As Brendan tells us the predominant attitude is “let sleeping dogs lie”.
The Redemptorists are to be commended in their recent Novena for reflecting on the Synodal theme of “Baptised and Sent Sets out Seven Priorities for Renewal”.
Where is this all going? Thank you Fr.Brendan for warnings and a plea for action on those reforms that are in keeping with the faith and doctrine e.g. married priests. Has Synodality become a listening but not hearing by the Vatican? In essence what is essential now is ACTION not more listening and not hearing.
We need a deep conversation about how many Masses we really need in every parish and diocese.
In Africa and other parts of the world, Mass is celebrated on a Sunday every three months in some parts. But the People of God still gather, listen to the word and pray. Ireland is still over supplied with Masses compared to the global Church. Why can we not be proactive and make decisions about quality of celebration rather than quantity? The Church is too priestcentric. If there were only ten priests left in Ireland the people would still gather and pray. Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there. In the meantime let’s grow the laities ministries.
There is an important Editorial in today’s ‘The Irish Catholic’ paper’ (2 July 2026) “We need to manage the decline to have a future”. It states that the Irish Church does not do managed decline, it never has. It lets the clock run down. And yet managed decline; clear-eyed, chosen rather than suffered; is precisely what is needed now urgently. Bishops were ordained to be priests but got little training that would train them to preside over a managed contraction of a once dominant Church. This is a serious call for the Bishops to prepare a strategic plan for a managed decline in the existing Church in crisis.
The root of the church’s malaise – the inability to focus ‘mission’ – is the preoccupation with internal church problems and ‘managing decline’ – failing to observe in the secular world an even greater crisis and the obvious cause of that.
This is the universal root human problem of self doubt that leads to status anxiety – the pursuit of self-approval through social approval – via achievement and accumulation, the root of grotesque economic inequality, of violence – and now of a global climatic crisis.
Not until bishops observe – and correctly diagnose – this ongoing and parallel world secular crisis can the relevance of the Gospel – and the church’s obvious mission – it’s ‘relevance’ – be clearly seen.
That current world crisis has a simple single cause that was diagnosed in the Gospel: The ‘worldliness’ of the Gospel is simply the ‘status anxiety’ of our own – and every era – the fear we humans have of the judgment of others if we do not compete ‘successfully’.
Until the revelation of the clerical abuse catastrophe torpedoed the church’s own power pyramid we had clerical worldliness in Ireland – at it’s most grotesque Father Ted’s need to win the Eurovision song contest and the ‘Priest of the Year’ competition – a burlesquing of the actual ‘singing’ or ‘trendy’ Irish priest who could get on TV. That neediness for social acclaim was never identified as ‘worldliness’ – the competitive ethos that lies at the root of mass poverty, the ‘upwardly mobile’ society – and now of the scapegoating of immigrants.
An obvious corollary of status anxiety is a desperate fear of shame – and that is what led to the hierarchical hiding of abuse, as well as the scapegoating of the truly unfortunate – young women and children among them.
If Irish bishops had squarely faced the challenge of the Ryan and Murphy reports of 2009 they would have seen that bishops’ fears of loss of reputation exactly matched secular fears of never making it in the competition for social status – and been able more than a decade ago to preach the relevance of the Creed to that problem.
It’s not too late. The church will always be in decline if it cannot see the relevance of its own story to the problem of ‘downsizing’ that every ‘rich’ society on earth is now faced with – beginning with the insight that Jesus faced that same challenge – of ‘overcoming the world’ – and showed us the only gateway through it.
Paradoxically this gathering world secular crisis will soon be the church’s salvation – as more and more people look for alternatives to accumulation and ‘grandstanding’. All we need to do is look outward now, pray – and see the gift we have in Christian faith – and wake up!
Jesus nails the mistake of seeing the value of one’s life – one’s ‘dignity’ – as socially determined – aka ‘worldliness’, aka ‘status anxiety’, aka ‘fear of shame’:
“How can you believe, since you look to each other for glory and are not concerned with the glory that comes from the one God?” (John 5:44)
And promises immortality to those who can put up with social rejection and – by bonding with him – free themselves from this mistake:
“Do you believe at last? Listen; the time will come — indeed it has come already — when you are going to be scattered, each going his own way and leaving me alone. And yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me. I have told you all this so that you may find peace in me. In the world you will have hardship, but be courageous: I have conquered the world.” (John 16:31-33)
Brendan, you wrote that we could welcome back married men who had left the Priesthood to boost declining numbers today.
I thought it was so ironic to read that CORPUS: The National Association for an inclusive Priesthood formed by married former Priests interested in returning to service, disbands in 2024 after 50 years. Why? Aging membership and lack of new members.