THE vocations crisis facing the Catholic Church in Ireland is now so bad even 'The Times' in Britain has cottoned on to it.It carried a report about the crisis, or rather the catastrophe, on Wednesday.
What a come-down for Mother Church.
Ireland once had the highest number of vocations of any country in the world.
Today, nowhere is worse. We are the blackspot of blackspots.
Before getting too carried away however, let's acquaint ourselves with a few facts.
Here's the most important one.
Worldwide vocations are up. Yes, you read that right. Over the last 30 years they have climbed a rather impressive 70pc.
Crisis, what crisis?
There might be a crisis here, but throughout most of the Catholic world they don't even know the meaning of the word.
Of course, most of those vocations are outside the West.
They are to be found in Africa, South America, and Asia.
But there are also plenty of vocations in much of Eastern Europe, with the inevitable Poland at the forefront.
You might put this down to socio-political economics factors rather than spiritual ones and you'd be (sort of) right. But then you could put our abysmal situation down to those same factors.
At the moment, they're working against the Church, but maybe in the future they won't.
However, even in the West there are some bright spots.
Remember, nowhere is worse than Ireland. There are places as bad, but nowhere worse. It's important to say this because we're a parochial lot who think our experience in these matters is universal. It isn't. Not by a long stretch.
Dioceses like Madrid, Paris, Sydney, Perth, parts of Italy are all doing relatively well.
I stress "relatively".
Obviously they have fewer vocations than a few decades ago but compared with here, or even with the very recent past, they're not doing too badly at all.
Here's another thing.
Vocations go up and down.
Between the time of independence and the 1960s, vocations were higher than they were in the 19th century.
I doubt if they'll ever go back to what they were in the middle of the last century, but I also doubt very much if they'll remain as low as they are today.
At this point, the usual cast of characters enter the scene insisting that the answer to the problem is married priests.
This is a bit like telling a worldwide company that it needs to change an otherwise successful business plan because of failure in a given market.
Why should the Catholic Church change its rule on married clergy when vocations are up, and up in a big way, in most parts of the world? It makes no sense.
In addition, it wouldn't solve the vocations crisis here.
No, really, it wouldn't.
While it would ease it somewhat, it wouldn't come even close to meeting the basic need of one priest per parish in the future. In the present climate, it's very hard to see what would achieve that.
If married priests were the answer, then we would expect that churches with married clergy would be awash with vocations. But that is far from being the case.
The Church of Ireland, for example, is doing considerably better than the Catholic Church in Ireland but not nearly as well as 40 or 50 years ago.
In any event, a married clergy have intrinsic problems of their own.
In Britain, for example, married clergy are almost as likely to divorce as the rest of the population.
This is partly because of the peculiar pressures of the clerical life, married or not.
Children of clergy often hate having to be paragons of virtue in their parishes and rebel.
The divorced wives of clergy can find themselves in very difficult financial circumstances because the house in which they lived with their husband is parochial property and does not belong to them.
In addition, a married cleric with a family has a lot less of one very valuable commodity compared with his celibate counterparts -- time.
The rule of celibacy is intended mainly to make a priest or religious more available for service.
We forget that celibacy has a positive side.
The vocations crisis in Ireland and in other parts of the Western world -- notwithstanding the bright spots -- is not the result of celibacy.
The difficulty the other churches have in attracting vocations is proof of that.
The three biggest causes are secularisation, the decline in family size, and a generalised crisis of commitment across the whole of society.
One thing the Church certainly must do is put much, much more effort into promoting vocations.
It ploughs far too much money into maintaining its buildings and not nearly enough into promoting the priesthood and religious life.
It needs to put serious amounts of time, money and effort into explaining to people what the priesthood is, and why it is valuable and fulfilling.
If it can't or won't do this, then it shouldn't be surprised if the priest goes the way of the druid.
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