Brendan Hoban: Priests need to work with their parishioners                 

Western People 6.8.2024

In the light of my reflections last week on the subject of priests’ changes, a reader both commends me for a column I wrote some months back and challenges me to comment on what he presents as a grim reality for priests (and people) in parishes now. 

The column referred to by the eagle-eyed reader presented an unusual scenario that developed in a parish when a popular priest was replaced by a more lethargic, less focused individual and how that transition developed. 

It went something like this.

The popular priest was said to tick all the boxes of expectation that his parishioners could possibly have hoped for. He visited the elderly on a regular basis. He was ‘good with the youth’. He was extraordinarily attentive to those in any kind of difficulty. He immersed himself in family-cum liturgical events like baptisms, weddings and funerals. His engagement with old and young was always appropriate and carefully measured. And, crucially, his sermons were invariably short and to the point. He was often described as ‘a wonderful priest’. 

After many years he was moved to another parish and parishioners soon discovered that his successor had a less active, less engaged and more relaxed style. He rarely turned up at the youth club, because (he felt) he wanted to spend time trying to evangelise rather than entertain the young. He didn’t visit the sick in hospital because that was the role of the hospital chaplain. He didn’t visit homes in the parish because most people weren’t at home during the day. When someone asked him why he didn’t attend parish functions he said he wasn’t ‘a people’s person’. 

Suddenly it dawned on the people that the active buoyant parish ­– orchestrated so deftly and for so long by their previous priest – was at risk from the style of the new incumbent. It became clear that unless there was a determined effort by parishioners to ensure that important services were sustained, parish life would become a pale shadow of what it once was. 

The result was that, through the necessary intervention of committed parishioners, the parish not only sustained services which the people valued but there was a sense that the perceived style of their priest had become a blessing in disguise in that, no matter what priest was appointed to the parish in the future, the active participation of parishioners would sustain whatever services mattered to the people. 

As I said my reader liked the message represented by the tale of two priests. But, he indicated, there was a wider issue involved here and he challenged me to suggest a way of responding to it.

Most priests, he acknowledged, would happily accept the help of parishioners in providing services and in the running of parishes. Events had helped to convince priests of the wisdom of collaborative ministry in today’s world.  But there were exceptions and while the story of the lethargic priest (above) indicated that he was happy to facilitate parishioners’ involvement, a huge problem at present, my reader maintained, is that many priests will simply not allow anything to happen in their parishes that they don’t want and some of them regard anything their predecessors introduced as the first practice to be culled.  

My reader shared his experience with me.
In his parish a priest who has facilitated a wide-ranging lay involvement of his parishioners by delegating a series of pastoral challenges had created a very effective pastoral strategy over many years. This was evident in a fulltime parish secretary, an active children’s liturgy group, a folk choir, a Baptismal team, a finance committee, lay ministry to the sick and housebound as well as an active team of lay readers, Eucharistic ministers, a finance committee and stewards. Unfortunately, he was replaced by another priest who proceeded to undermine these initiatives one by one.

So the folk choir was replaced by congregational singing, which never really happened; the children’s liturgy group was replaced by Father visiting the school; the lay ministry to the housebound was replaced by expanding the First Friday visits; the baptismal team was summarily disbanded and the parish secretary voluntarily handed in her notice ‘because she wasn’t needed anymore’.

Meetings of the Parish Council became paper exercises because ‘the bishop insisted they were to hold them them’ but the priest in his turn informed the members that canon law enshrined their consultative status. So in a short space of time the new priest had effectively reclaimed and reinstituted a una voce scenario whereby the PP had absolute control of every element of parish life. That’s the stark challenge represented by my reader.

Why does this happen? Three reasons, I suspect: (i) personality – some priests are authoritarian by nature, dogmatic in approach and at ease in ‘I’m the boss’ role; (ii) tradition/culture – what Pope Francis calls ‘clericalism’, a long-established sense of entitlement in a role where the priest is king, where women are subservient and where lay people are regarded as second class citizens; (iii) inability to change – a problematic vision of Church where everything remains the same forever and people are deemed to need predetermined spiritual guidance rather than ongoing education or authentic pastoral care.

What some priests don’t seem to get is that many Catholics still want to be part of church, are very favourably disposed to priests who are happy to walk and work alongside them as equals in a respectful relationship of service but anything that smacks of control or authority or disrespect simple turns them off. No amount of pious words disguises disrespect. The simple truth is that what most people want now is a People’s church not ‘Father’s Church’. In our present shape, anything else is both a betrayal of parishioners and a disservice to the Catholic Church.

I suspect that this is an issue that won’t go away.