Urgent action is needed to save the Catholic Church in Ireland, or it will be too late, says prominent columnist, Dr Mark Dooley.Dr Dooley, writing in the Irish Daily Mail on Tuesday, said that, by 2020, there was a real possibility that most parishes in Ireland would be staffed by priests from Africa or Poland.
Pointing out that only 24 seminarians were admitted to Maynooth this year, he said that a proportion of these would drop out.
The remainder would face “a tough, challenging and lonely life”.
Becoming a priest, he suggested, was presented as the least attractive option faced by any school leaver today.
Dr Dooley said it was time for us to support those who made the decision to become priests, instead of marginalising them, and to stop ridiculing and undermining the Church.
While he accepted that the Church hierarchy had behaved with “arrogance” in its handling of abuse cases in the past, he said that the Church was not “congenitally corrupt”.
Instead, it gave comfort and solace to millions. Priests were “a source of pride in many parishes worldwide”.
In Ireland, however, it was a different story. Many priests, especially in Dublin, were either at or near retirement age. And there was a chronic shortage of men coming in to take their places.
Very little support was forthcoming from the lay community, he added.
The solution, he suggested, was to remove the stigma from the priesthood. Young people, he said, ought to be encouraged to think about the priesthood.
The Church, Dr Dooley continued, should wage a vigourous PR campaign to show that the priesthood was a life worth leading.
He went on to say that there were still many priests prepared to give their lives for their parishioners.
“Through the priest, the timeless enters time,” he said. Priests, through the administration of the sacraments, bring us “into direct communion with the Creator”.
Bringing about this new growth would involve lay people “embracing new priests and making them central to community life,” Dr Dooley said.
“It is we who have stigmatised the priesthood, and it is only we who can now renew its respectability”.
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