It’s time for the Catholic Church to reassert itself

SINCE I’m among the almost 70% of the population who ticked the Roman Catholic box in the 2022 census, I went to Mass in our local parish church on Easter Sunday morning. And, perhaps like many others who ticked the box, I’m afraid I am of the fairweather, ‘à la carte’ variety and hadn’t set foot inside a church since Christmas.

So I was astonished, then, when the priest looked around and marvelled at the wonderful attendance. On an average Sunday, he said, he could count the number of worshippers ‘on the fingers of one hand’. He was delighted that so many had come to celebrate the biggest date in the Church calendar, he said, and hoped that we’d all come more often. I left that morning with a bottle of Easter water and the best of intentions but, for one reason or another, haven’t been back since.

Hypocritically, I guess, I’ve just been hoping that everyone else kept up their attendance because, again like the rest of the 70% in that census result, I value the place the Catholic Church has in Irish life and would hate to see it diminish any further.

Scandals

I also realise, though, that with Sunday attendances in single figures, even in Dublin with its one million baptised Catholics, the outlook for the Church in this country is not promising.

The challenge currently facing the Irish bishops, then, is not how to get us occasional attendees in for the big events – it’s how to keep us coming back on the ordinary Sundays.

With the First Communion and Confirmation season starting, the churches will again be full as the so-called ‘bouncy castle Catholics’ use the ceremonies as the focus for shopping sprees and lavish parties. And, let’s be honest, the same is true of the couples who’ll be marrying in churches across the country in the coming months, and the parents who’ll be asking priests to baptise their babies before they and their guests head off for a day’s celebrations.

Not that I’m in a position to criticise these ‘à la carte’ Catholics, of course, having had all my own kids christened in that same old church, where they also made their First Communions and Confirmations. The scandals in the Catholic Church have long been blamed for the decline in Mass attendances, but if that’s the only explanation, then why are people still willing to engage with their faith at all? Why do they describe themselves as Catholic, why do they turn to the Church for comfort and ritual in a bereavement, why do they still attend to mark Christmas and Easter?

It’s not just out of habit, or for the social outing – I reckon there’s a part of us that seeks the reassurance of knowing that the Church is still there and will be there when we need it. And yet, unless we keep up our own attendance, it may not be.

Just recently, the Catholic Church here basically redrew a couple of ‘constituency boundaries’ in the west, and absorbed the diocese of Killala into Tuam, and Achonry into Elphin.

It makes sense, of course, since Achonry, in Sligo, has just 34,000 baptised Catholics, but it is still a straw in the wind. Vocations have fallen off a cliff, and there simply aren’t enough priests to say Mass in every parish every Sunday, so amalgamating parishes, as well as dioceses, will be the next step. That’ll mean that parish churches will eventually go the way of the village post office, Garda station and pub – no longer central hubs of community life, they’ll be shuttered and closed and services will be provided in centralised locations miles away.

And it’s hard to see how that’s going to do anything other than further reduce attendances: if the Church isn’t physically at the heart of the community, it won’t occupy that metaphorical territory either.

So what is the answer for the Church in Ireland?

Fractured

Like everyone else, I was shocked and disgusted by the revelations of clerical child sex abuse, but that’s not the reason I don’t go to Mass every Sunday.

It simply that the Church doesn’t have the same imperative power that it did when I was a child, when your weekend revolved around Sunday Mass. It seems to me that the Church’s defensiveness and shame, in the face of the scandals, rather than the scandals themselves, are to blame for that diminution in influence. Bishops and priests have become too timid about issuing directives to the faithful on their obligations, because they fear being reminded of how they neglected their own.

Instead of being grateful to us for turning up on Easter Sunday, instead of just hoping that we would come back the following week, there was a time when a priest would have scolded a fairweather congregation, and reminded us that our faith demanded our weekly attendance at the sacrament.

In a fractured and dangerous world, when people are increasingly in need of certainties, and reaching for crazy quasireligious fads to fill the gap, maybe it’s time the Catholic Church in this country stopped cowering, faced its critics and asserted its authority again.