Brendan Hoban – The last thing the Church needs is more rules  

Western People 23.2.2023

It’s strange how suddenly out of nowhere, something I read more than 20 years ago suddenly crosses my mind. Fr Daniel O’Leary, a priest who worked in Yorkshire was writing in The Tablet, describing an encounter he had with a young Catholic couple who asked to be married in the parish church. He had never seen them before; they didn’t attend Mass they told him; and he decided that he needed to meet them again and chat with them. He never saw them again and word drifted back to him about the perception in the parish that he was ’a hard man’. He wrote, ‘I now know, in my heart, that I was wrong’.

I think many priests, myself included, have experiences like that which, in retrospect and in pain, we regret. It could be a bad day when things go askew and a casual  insensitivity to someone’s happiness or sorrow – even just in the tone of voice – and afterwards you know you got it wrong. Hurt happens and regret seeps in around the edges of the day.

In recent years, the once predictable routine of parish life has given way to more complex problems: irregular marriage situations, requests to baptise children whose parents no longer believe or for unbaptised children to make their First Communions, and so forth. And priests, on a bad day, can struggle to manage them with sensitivity and tact.

Like the politician who once said that in an ideal world the best run hospitals would be the ones with no patients, in parish life everything can seem utterly clear in theory but, once you apply the rule to the complexities of real life, confusion can abound.

Part of the problem is that, in the past in parish life rules were everything. Now often we don’t know what to do when the rules don‘t seem to make much sense anymore. And, in such circumstances the knee-jerk reaction is to make more rules in an effort to close off all emerging loop-holes in the system: music at weddings; who can be a sponsor at a baptism; tributes at funeral Masses; and so forth.

I’m not convinced that devising a whole shaft of new rules to cover every possible situation is all that helpful, apart from allowing priests to blame the bishop.

Rules or more rules or no rules don’t absolve the priest and parish councils at local level from the difficulty of ‘managing’ each situation as it presents itself. The truth is that, even though a usual codicil is that a rule applies ‘except in exceptional circumstances’, that description is often presumed to apply to everyone else but not to me and mine!

The truth is that every situation is different, though some are more easily managed than others and quoting a rule to defend a position often causes more problems than it’s worth. In a diocese, whose name I hesitate to mention, the bishop decided (for a host of credible reasons) to ban concelebrated funeral Masses. This led to all sorts of problems including one famous incident where the bishop directed that the funeral Mass of a mother could only be celebrated by one of her priest sons even though both were standing fully vested in the sacristy.

Nowadays situations are even more complex than they were. Many Catholics find themselves living their lives at a distance from the Church. And when they present themselves to a priest to be married or to baptise a baby, they can feel vulnerable and uneasy. And their antennae can be sensitively tuned into any signal that might be interpreted as rejection.

What they need is someone who will respond to them in an accepting mode rather than someone quoting regulations at them which they may interpret as Daniel O’Leary discovered as ‘a hard man’ or Mother Church placing unnecessary or even punitive obstacles in their way.

My own view is that the more we multiply rules and regulations, the more unbending we become. And, more importantly, the more unbending we are perceived to become.

Most problems and difficulties can be sorted out if priests and representatives of the people on parish councils deal with issues in an accepting, non-judgemental and non-combative context – in short, in a synodal context of listening, discussing, deciphering God’s will and deciding together. Handing down decisions from above by bishops for bishops or priests for priests without pushing them through the sieve of representative Catholics will almost inevitably – especially nowadays – provoke a reaction.

Priests are often the first point of contact people have with the Church and, truth to tell, we often get it wrong. Getting it right is not about devising another sheaf of rules to regulate the alienated and the disaffected (and not just them) but bringing something of the compassion of the Carpenter of Nazareth to the encounter.

I’ve never met a priest yet who regretted that he was too compassionate in his dealings with his people. I’ve known a lot of priests, myself included, who regret that they were too strict.

Everything, including the rule-book, works perfectly in theory. Throw a few human beings into the mix – especially if one of them is brandishing a new set of rules which those to whom they will be applied never get a say in devising – and everything becomes unstuck.

Sometimes we manage things better without too many rules.