ALL THE RICHES OF HEAVEN ARE THEIRS...
but here on Earth, many priests are now struggling to get paid every month. So just how much do our clergy earn – and can they keep body and soul together?
LIKE most households across Ireland, Fr Donagh O’Meara must carefully try to balance his domestic accounts at the end of each month. There’s the heating oil, electricity bills, food, half his health insurance and, the biggest expense of all, diesel for his car.
‘Oh that’s the big one,’ says the priest, who oversees two parishes in Co. Clare, Miltown Malbay and Mullagh. ‘It’s easily a full tank every week, about €70. It’s all the normal things that everyone does.’ Fr O’Meara is a little unsure of exactly how much he earns or what he gets taxed. He thinks it works out about €25,000 a year.
‘You could round it off on that,’ he says. ‘I pay about €500 in tax a month, I think, and the rest goes into my bank account.’
Last figures gathered for Fr O’Meara’s Diocese of Killaloe show that parish priests are paid a salary of €24,600 while curates get paid €22,000.
‘I’ll be honest with you, we’re not badly off,’ say Fr O’Meara. ‘On the other hand, you wouldn’t be flaithulach with money and you wouldn’t be able to save anything either. But we’re not doing too badly at all.
‘The big question is about the future and where wages are going to come from then. It’s in free-fall and it’s very hard to know what’s going to happen.’
Indeed, two weeks ago it was revealed that in December, the Diocese of Waterford and Lismore ran out of money to pay the salaries of the 60-odd priests based there. And according to a diocese spokesperson, Fr Liam Power, they had to supplement the shortfall by dipping into parish reserves.
‘There was no money at Christmas and we had to get €5,000 from each parish out of parish funds,’ Fr Power told local radio station, WLR FM. ‘Long term, it’s not sustainable... It’s seriously depleted, that fund.’
It’s hardly surprising the parish fund was so low, as the diocese had already ‘borrowed’ from the pot last September when they found they were too short on cash flow to cover the wages owed.
The problem? According to Fr Power there has been a serious drop in the amount of money being donated by parishioners to help pay for the services of local priests.
Fr Power went on to explain in the radio interview that they are still waiting to see if enough will have been collected to pay the wages that will be due in March. He didn’t sound hopeful.
It would seem the situation in the Diocese of Waterford and Lismore is a familiar one to Church administration bodies all over the country.
‘Well I’m not surprised at all,’ says Fr O’Meara. ‘And you’ll be hearing a lot more of it. A lot of the people who pay into those collections are dying off, that’s the truth of it. A lot of people are anti-Church now, there’s a lot of anger — in fact a whole seam of anger underneath it all.
‘So it stands to reason, down the line, and not all that far off, there’s going to be a big problem with money.’
Fr Power also admitted that recent Church scandals had ‘undermined our credibility and our moral authority’. He added that younger people who attend Mass from time to time for special occasions or funerals are not in the habit of making donations.
Those familiar with Mass will know there are basket collections during the ceremony.
None of this money, however, goes to the priest directly. This cash is gathered for the parish fund, which pays for expenses like utility bills, upkeep of the church itself and other expenses of the parish.
Money to help pay the wages of priests is collected from three to six times a year, depending on which diocese you live in.
Trying to unpick the intricacies of the average income of a priest in Ireland, who for taxation purposes are considered to be self-employed, is hugely difficult as each of the 26 dioceses across the country offers different wages and conditions for their priests.
In 2016, The Irish Catholic newspaper carried out an extensive survey to try and discover exactly how much clergymen are paid and what bonuses or perks they are allowed. The results were complex and confusing, to say the least.
Some gave a base wage, which is then supplemented by increments, depending on years served, and other forms of income like monies raised from officiating at services like funerals and weddings, which are known as ‘stole fees’.
Depending on what diocese you work for, you may be allowed to keep the stole fee, or you may be expected to put a percentage, or all of it into a parish central fund, which is then split between all clergy working in the parish.
Some priests have their car and health insurance paid for, others might get an annual supplement based on the number of families in their parish. Others might get a ‘living allowance’ to help cover things like groceries. Some even get an ‘entertainment allowance’.
The one thing that was very clear from the 2016 survey, is that there is huge variation between each of the dioceses. At the top of the salary list
‘Down the line there’s going to be a big problem’
was the Diocese of Clogher, which includes parts of Monaghan, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Donegal and Louth. The maximum a parish priest in Clogher is allowed to earn annually is €33,960, while curates in the diocese can earn up to €27,480.
These Clogher figures include parish contributions to the priest and also all ‘stole fees’, and each priest must meet all of his personal expenses.
At the bottom of the wage pile is the Diocese of Derry, which takes in parishes in Tyrone, Antrim and the Inishowen peninsula in Co Donegal. There, parish priests and curates get an annual base wage of £8,640 (€10,105).
On top that, however, they get a supplement of £70 (€81.87) for each completed year in the priesthood, paid annually on July 1, to a maximum of 25 increments.
Parish priests get a further payment of £750 (€877) each year, also on July 1. And then the Christmas collection and stole fees are divided equally among the priests of the parish.
There is also a long and very detailed list of things they can charge to parochial funds — ranging from rates and heating, to fridges and vacuum cleaners, to house contents insurance and fixed phone charges. It’s a rather baffling system. ‘It’s very different in every diocese, that’s part of the problem,’ agrees Fr O’Meara. ‘I don’t know why it’s like that. In our diocese, everything was equalised, in that everyone gets the same no matter where you are.
‘In the past, if you were in somewhere like Waterford City, you probably did way better than someone in a rural parish. But they’ve centralised it a bit.’
In Fr O’Meara’s case, he is entitled to perks like getting half his health insurance paid for by the diocese.
‘A parish priest gets a little more than a curate, they have more responsibilities I suppose,’ he says. ‘To be honest with you, there are very few curates now, only in the bigger towns. The days of curates are basically gone.’
Apart from his health insurance benefit, Fr O’Meara, is expected to cover all the rest of his day-to-day living expenses. ‘It does vary from place to place, who gets what,’ he says. ‘So with some of those base salaries being higher than others, a fella in Galway might have his made up by other means. But overall, I’d say you could put a round figure of €25,000 a year — I’d say that’s what the average wage for a priest is these days.
‘Someone in a big town like Ennis might get a little more, by virtue of the fact you’d be doing more weddings and funerals. On average, you’d get about €100 for a funeral and the same for a wedding, or maybe a bit more.’
And do priests pay tax on these payments? ‘I’d say not,’ he says. ‘It’s just given to you.’
Indeed many priests now rely on these extra cash injections.
‘They’re important, yes,’ says Fr O’Meara. ‘A big problem in our job is diesel and cars, that’s a huge expense. You don’t have to pay anything for the parochial house, no mortgage, or anything like that. It’s on loan to you, but you’d pay for everything else, you have to look after it.
‘The big repairs, like if there was something wrong with the roof, the parish would pay for it but the smaller ones, you’d take care of yourself.’
While Fr O’Meara considers himself to be, relatively speaking, ‘not too badly off’, it is very difficult to put any money aside for other big things, like replacing a car.
‘Oh I can’t buy one outright,’ he says with a laugh. ‘You go to the credit union like everyone else.’
Neither can he save for later life — most priests stay working until they are at least 75 years old.
‘Retiring before that is very difficult to do financially,’ he says. ‘The other problem is that they’ve nowhere to go. A lot of dioceses have no provision for you, unless you stay on in the parish house, so then really you’re still on the job.
‘In fact a lot of fellas aren’t going off the job nowadays, they just keep going until they die. There’s no one to follow them. Some people have families who might help them, or leave a house to them.’
What happens if a priest comes into an inheritance?
‘That’s your own,’ he replies. ‘Unless you’re in an order, with the Holy Ghosts or someone, then you’d have to give some of it to the order.’
It would also seem the Church was hit badly by the recession, in more ways than one.
‘Each diocese has a thing they called the benevolent fund, like a pension,’ explains Fr O’Meara. ‘A percentage is taken at source every year, but the problem is there’s so many fellas drawing out of it now. Down the line those funds won’t be worth anything.
‘When the crash came, I know some dioceses had money invested and it all went down. They got caught like everyone else.’
The biggest money problem the clergy has right now, however, is the drop in payments made by parishioners to their collections.
‘People who were paying into the priest collections are dying out, it’s that simple,’ he says. ‘The other problem is the money that’s going into the baskets at the weekly Mass, some people think it goes to the priests but it doesn’t, it’s for the upkeep of the Church.
‘It might pay for the parish secretary or go towards helping out the local school. For instance, a school near us is building a shelter — they’re near the sea and it’s very windy — so we loaned them some of the money, interest-free. It might and it mightn’t be paid back.
‘I know a lot of people give out about the Church having control over the schools, but on the other hand, a lot of times 15% of a school’s funding will partly come from the parish offices. You see, 85% is paid for by the Department of Education, but the school has to come up with the other 15%.
‘Then in some of the poorer parishes you’ll find a priest is helping out some of the parishioners who might be going through a tough time. There are very different levels of wealth in different parishes, some places in Limerick or Dublin aren’t making it at all. They’re under a lot of pressure.’
In the Diocese of Killaloe, collections to help pay the priests are made ‘five or six times a year’. ‘You do wonder will people fund us down the line,’ says Fr O’Meara. ‘It certainly doesn’t look that way right now.’
One recent move by the Archdiocese of Dublin to try and encourage people to donate more, is the introduction of a card machine in certain churches so people can make a cashless payment.
‘Financial contributions to the Church in Dublin have been in decline for several years for a variety of reasons, including a decline in the number of people attending weekly Mass,’ a spokesperson explained.
They plan to roll out this new card-based ‘Parish Payments System’ in the majority of parishes later this year.
‘This will cover many transactions such as offerings and pilgrimage payments and will enable parishioners to sign up for recurring contributions,’ they said. ‘This will not, however, mean an end to the traditional basket collections at Masses, which will remain in place for the foreseeable future.’
In the meantime, Fr Liam Power will undoubtedly be keeping his fingers crossed as envelopes throughout his diocese are opened over the next couple of months. Having already raided the parish coffers twice in the last six months to pay his priests, it seems likely that particular well is too dry to help once again...
‘You get about €100 for a funeral or a wedding’ ‘Contributions have been in decline for years’