Once upon a time, the annual announcement of priests’ changes – usually in June or July – was one of high points of the summer.
Naturally, it was of particular interest to priests but also to people who feared they might lose their priest – or, maybe, not lose their priest.
Now priests’ changes are limited because there are few, if any, priests to change and as priests grow older and more weary, there is less reason and willingness to move.
Thus, the prevailing trend at present is that instead of the former pattern of regular movement to a different parish every few years, in recent times priests rarely if ever move to a new parish with the result that some have spent anything from 10 to 30 (or more) years serving in the same parish.
Not a good idea, as we know, for priests or parishioners.
However, this year, the recent changes in Tuam diocese seem to have bucked that trend as 13 priests are listed: four retiring (James Walsh, James Quinn, Martin O’Connor, and Martin Long); two going on sabbaticals (Gerard Burns and Eugene O’Boyle); one appointed PP (Seán Flynn); and six others (John Kenny, Tod Nolan, Jose Raju, Nelson Joseph, Michael Tracy and newly ordained Mark Quinn) picking up extra responsibilities.
In difficult times and with the average age of priests now 70-plus, a studied reluctance to move parishes has become both the fashion and the prevailing choice.
In their later years, priests recognise the growing wisdom (or temptation) of not cutting the cord of being comfortably ensconced in one parish for the difficult challenge of settling into a new parish with the often overwhelming stress that represents in old age.
What impels this feeling is that moving parishes no longer has the former impetus of promotion or the possibility that the unease and trouble of a new appointment would be reflected in an increase in salary.
That financial encouragement has disappeared as there is no longer any distinction between ‘good’ parishes (those with commendable financial circumstances) and ‘not so good parishes’ (those with less amenable conditions) as with priests now, regardless of workload or any sense of ‘promotion’ (God help us), there is no corresponding or compensating financial or other benefits.
Unlike Aer Lingus pilots, priests with three parishes or with one parish with five churches earn the same as priests with one parish and one church, so little wonder the latter tend to hang so grimly to that unaccustomed luxury that they render themselves immovable.
Anomalies abound as again, unlike the rest of humankind, there is no expectation that varying responsibilities would be reflected in appropriate recompense.
The present policy of effectively making the least number of changes deemed necessary will not last because it will eventually run into the sand or fall over the emerging and all too predictable cliff-face.
The reason is that, while in some foreign climes there seems to be no shortage of available priests – not true as I’ll show later – that is certainly not true of Ireland where native priests have become (as we say) as rare as hen’s teeth in that there is now a mathematical certainty that in a short number of years the only native priests left in Ireland will be in nursing homes.
What is extraordinary is, not just that the above incredible scenario is now imminent in the Irish Catholic Church, but the studied reluctance to name this particular ‘elephant in the living room’ or to consider possible strategies to provide alternatives to the progressively short road to ‘the last priests in Ireland’.
God knows I’ve been banging on about this for years in this particular soapbox – even in the knowledge that I’m sorely testing my readers’ patience.
But my defence, if defence is needed, is that there is an absolute connection between the provision of priests and the effective ending of a worshipping form of Catholicism in Ireland.
I usually frame it in the following terms: if there is no priest, there is no Eucharist and if there is no Eucharist there is no Church. I think that shorthand is both obvious and irrefutable.
A recent glad pronouncement by an Irish bishop is that this year there has been an increase in enquiries about priesthood over last year’s figures – as if this is a sustainable policy in the long term rather than a sticking-plaster short-term make-believe aspiration.
Here’s one statistic that I continually trot out to place such announcements in proper context.
Question (in a pub or other quiz): how many students are there studying for the priesthood in Dublin diocese which has 199 parishes and over 1.2 million Catholics?
Is it 150 or 100 or 50 or 1?
Anyone who reads this column and who patronises pub quizzes – not a huge constituency I suspect – will know the answer is just one.
Just one!
Yet there’s no mention of what will happen when the cliff-face actually arrives.
Not a squeak from those charged (in church law) with ensuring that there are enough priests.
Nothing, that is, apart from mortifying deflections from reality like an increase in enquiries as if that means anything.
If we’re left counting enquiries – not numbers in seminaries, not reasonable projections about percentages that will be ordained or may later leave the priesthood; if all we can show for vocations to the priesthood is an increase in one year in enquiries then we need to look at other avenues.
Can we even begin to contemplate the obvious questions that are shouting at us for obvious answers?
I said I’d come back to the rumour that there are hundreds if not thousands of priests in Africa and Asia ready and willing to come to Ireland.
That’s NOT the case.
The priest-per-people ratio in Africa is one priest for every 5,200 people.
In Europe, it’s one for 1,700.
Taking from the Third World to benefit the First World, is in every sense really another form of the rich exploiting the poor.