Brendan Hoban: Rulebooks tend not to serve priests very well                  

Western People 15^th April 2025

Recently, Bishop Donal Roche, auxiliary Bishop of Dublin, said he was worried that the sacredness of the liturgy is being eroded by, for example, people looking for pop-songs at funeral Masses and wanting to bring up footballs and fishing rods in the offertory procession. They want to construct the funeral Masses as a celebration of ‘Daddy’s Mass’, he says, instead of what it should be, praying for the person who has died. And it’s demoralising priests, he says, who give in because they don’t want to be unpopular by saying No.

I would go a bit of the road with Bishop Roche on this one but not very far. I would suggest that the focus of a funeral Mass is not an either/or situation – as Bishop Roche explains it, either praying for the soul of the deceased or celebrating a life. It’s both and it’s also, crucially, supporting and comforting those who grieve the loss of someone who was a central part of their lives. And, as we know, if we (priests) get it wrong at a funeral it will be remembered forever.

Some years ago, Daniel O’Leary, priest and spiritual writer, described an encounter he had with a young Catholic couple from ‘a good Catholic family’ who asked to be married in his church. He had never seen them at Mass so he suggested that maybe he should meet them again to chat about it. He never saw them again and word drifted back to him about the perception in the parish that he was ‘a hard man’. I now know in my heart, he wrote, that I was wrong.

I think many priests have similar experiences which, in retrospect, we recognise and regret. It could be the tone of voice or a bad day or a casual insensitivity but afterwards you know that, as a priest whose role it is to bring the compassion of Jesus to those who grieve, you got it wrong and the regret seeps in at the edges.

Once it was all so straightforward but now pastoral situations have become more complicated and more problematic for the priest: for example, the baptism of children whose parents no longer believe, the reception of communion in theologically awkward situations; the blessing of particular relationships; and so on.

Many Catholics today find themselves living their lives at a distance from the church. And then when they present themselves to a priest to organise a funeral or a wedding, or whatever, they can feel vulnerable and uneasy. They know and the priest knows that they don’t ‘practice’ in the sense of attending weekly worship – and their antennae are hyper-sensitively tuned into any signal that might be interpreted as rejection on the part of the priest.

What they need is a priest who will respond to them in a quiet, excepting mode. What they don’t need is someone quoting the latest regulations at them, which they perceive as yet another obstacle Mother Church has placed in their way. And the result is that, like the couple in the example mentioned above, they just walk away with everyone losing out – the couple, their children and the church to which in some way they want to continue to belong but are now even more alienated than they were.

The difficult truth of the present situation is that many who continue to regard themselves as Catholics, who still feel they want to belong to the Catholic family, often have little or no contact with the church apart from attending the occasional baptism, wedding or funeral. The result is that these occasions have become central in the life of parishes because how the church, in the person of the priest, manages such occasions carries a huge weight.

Parish life comes out of a past where rules were everything. Now, often we don’t know what to do when the rules don’t seem to make much sense anymore. An understandable knee-jerk reaction is to issue a series of diocesan regulations that govern problematic areas: music at weddings; who can be a sponsor of baptism; eulogies at funeral Masses; and so on.

But rules or more rules or no rules don’t absolve the priest at local level from the difficulty of managing every situation as it presents itself. The truth is, that every situation is different and needs to be assessed in conjunction with those involved in a non-contentious and collaborative way. 

My own view is that the more we multiply rules and regulations – and I’m not saying that you should have no rules, because we have to have rules – the more unbending we may become. And the more unbending we are perceived to become. Most problems and difficulties can be sorted out if a priest and his parishioners sit down in an accepting, non-judgemental and non-combative context and see what, with a bit of give-and-take, can be worked out. Rules and regulations never cover every possible eventuality. And, sometimes, the one obstruction to an amenable compromise is yet another rulebook that somewhere someone imagined would be helpful.

Priests are often the first point of contact people have with the church. And we can get it wrong. I’ve never met a priest who regretted that he was too compassionate with his people but I’ve met a lot of priests who regret that they were too strict.

Getting it right isn’t about handing out another sheaf of rules but helping us to meet the alienated and the disaffected with the acceptance and compassion of the carpenter of Nazareth.

With all due respect to Bishop Roche, these issues need to be addressed at parish level and the person to manage them best is the local priest.