MORE than half of the Irish Catholic Church’s 26 dioceses failed to respond to Irish Examiner queries about defection rates over the past five years.The 11 that responded – north and south of the border – said they do not keep formal records of defections and the bishops had to estimate how many letters they had received seeking to formally walk away from the Church.
Some of the dioceses said they had no defections in the past five years while others said they had three or four yearly.
Many of the bishops pointed out it was more common for Catholics to "drift away from the Church" rather than go through the process of defection.
A new website, called countmeout.ie has been set up in the past month which provides users with the documentation required to defect from the Church.
The website was established by three young Irish Catholics as they had found it difficult to get information about defections after they began to question their membership of the Church.
The Diocese of Cork and Ross estimated they had two to three defections per year, saying they did not keep such statistics. The Diocese of Cloyne estimate about three or four yearly.
In Down and Connor, the bishop said there was no formal records but they estimate that they have received "maybe three or four letters over the last 15 years expressing a wish to withdraw from the Church".
In Waterford and Lismore, Bishop William Lee said "there were no records of defections and he wasn’t aware of any".
Bishop Brendan Kelly of the diocese of Achonry – Mayo, Roscommon and Sligo – said that defection wasn’t very common with "people usually drifting away from the Church without informing anybody".
"There are no records here to my knowledge of any ‘formal’ requests to ‘leave’ the Church, and there have not been any such since I came here in January 2008," he said.
Father Killeen from the diocese of Cloyne added that it was worth noting that they currently have "about 12 adults in different parishes in the diocese who are enrolled in a programme of preparation to become members of the Catholic Church".
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Disclaimer
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to us or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that we agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Source (IE)
SV (3)