Priests pray for donations af ter basket shortfall

Basic salary of €21,000

A DONATION shortfall at the Catholic diocese of Waterford and Lismore over Christmas has left administrators with little money to pay priests’ salaries.

It’s understood administrators already had to borrow from diocesan funds to pay the 60-odd priests’ wages last September and had to raise money from parish reserves in December for the last quarterly salary payment.

Now they are waiting for collection returns to see if there will be enough for the next due payment in March or if diocesan funds will have to be used again.

There are three envelope collections each year which are supposed to fund the priests’ salaries, held at Christmas, Easter and in autumn, but the amounts being raised from this have dwindled in recent years.

‘There was no money at Christmas and we had to get €5,000 from each parish out of parish funds,’ Waterford and Lismore spokesman Fr Liam Power said yesterday. ‘Long term, it’s not sustainable... It’s seriously depleted, that fund.’ The parish funding used in December was just to pay the priests’ latest quarterly salary instalment.

Priests in Waterford and Lismore get a basic annual salary of €21,000, and this can be added to by up to €5,000 per year because of allowances for certain ceremonies.

Fr Power was on WLR FM’s Déise Today programme yesterday morning to discuss the issue of using contactless card payments to collect money from parishioners. The customary ‘basket collection’ is used for church maintenance and upkeep and has always been kept separate to the ‘envelope collection’ held three times yearly to pay priests.

However, he said that the envelope money hasn’t been enough in recent times to make up the priests’ salaries. It’s possible that each parish will be set a minimum amount of money to raise to ensure the payments can be maintained.

Fr Power said: ‘Each parish should be contributing enough to the common fund to support its own priests. If not, maybe they would have to contribute from the basket collection.’

He added that ‘over a number of years, it [envelope collection] has seriously depleted’. There are a number of reasons why fundraising from traditional sources is down, he said: a decrease in the number of people attending Mass, and an increase in the number of people who have turned away from the Church – while younger people who do attend Mass from time to time, for special occasions or funerals, aren’t in the habit of making contributions.

He also accepted that scandals within the Church in recent decades had ‘undermined our credibility and our moral authority’ in the last few years.