First Things: Stephen Daisley – The Death of Catholic Glasgow
October brought the news that Catholics in Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland, had long dreaded. Falling Mass attendance has hollowed out parishes across the metropolis, and a vocations crisis means the archdiocese is projected to have just eight priests by the midpoint of the century. The faithful knew to expect parish closures and mergers. What they were not prepared for was the scale. It fell to Archbishop William Nolan to announce the shuttering of half the parishes in his jurisdiction, conceding there were “too many parishes but too few people.” Such a statement would once have been unthinkable in a city whose Bellahouston Park has hosted two papal Masses in the past fifty years.
It fell to Archbishop William Nolan to announce the shuttering of half the parishes. Where was the consultation, the synodality, the new way of being Church?