The number of diocesan priests
in the Catholic district of Cork and Ross has reduced by more than 50%
over the past 20 years, and moving forward more parishes will not have
their own resident priest, Bishop Fintan Gavin has said.
The
diocese, which is geographically the largest in the country, has an
estimated population of about 280,000 Catholics, with average weekly
Mass attendance of between 30% and 40%.
Cork and Ross
currently has 70 priests assigned to its 68 parishes, and those parishes
are organised in to 16 groupings, called families of parishes.
Of
those 70 priests, 59 were ordained for ministry in the diocese, while
the remaining 11 are on loan from other countries, from religious
orders, or from missionary societies.
Some 37 of those diocesan priests were under 75 years of age, while 16 of them were under 65.
Bishop Gavin told
that Cork and Ross had 122 diocesan priests in 2004, meaning that with
59 diocesan priests in 2024, their number has reduced by 51.6% over the
past two decades.
He said this decline was due to a combination of deaths, retirements, and a decline in vocations.
Bishop Gavin said that
despite talk of the Catholic Church being in decline, the overall number
of people who engage with it is still increasing, especially at what he
called key life moments.
In 2023,
there were 2,857 baptisms in Cork and Ross, while 3,706 children
received First Holy Communion and 3,552 children were confirmed. There
were 2,454 funerals in the diocese in 2023.
“They’re
huge numbers, there’s huge work goes into supporting those [services],
so trying to support that pastorally, sacramentally, is challenging,
when you’re trying to preach the Gospel, make disciples, go on mission,
which is what the Church is really about,” he said.
Bishop
Gavin said that sometimes people come to the Church for a service
rather than to have a real engagement and to help build up a faith
community. “We’re trying to look at how we can encourage people to get
more involved and engaged and to see this as their Church rather than
somewhere they come to get a commodity,” he said.
“We’re asking, ‘What’s the parish about? And if we just keep doing that, will we actually have people in the parish?’
He said the Church was
facing several challenges, with those “who have been very faithful and
supportive [wanting] to keep what they have — even if it is not
sustainable. More parishes will not have their own resident priests. The
priests we have cannot sustain an increased workload. We need to find
ways to train, support and fund more positions for lay people to work in
the Church,” he said.
“We need to
encourage vocations to the priesthood.” Bishop Gavin said many good
things are happening in Cork and Ross, with “green shoots” recognisable
in the high proportion of immigrants wanting to be part of the Church,
and he cited growing communities of Brazilian and Indian Catholics in
the diocese.
He said there was a new
generation of young people discovering the value of a Christ-centred
faith, and he said a recent gathering of 160 young people in UCC was
particularly heartening.
“We also
had 60 young people, from student nurses to secondary school students
all help out with our recent Lourdes pilgrimage, so of the 450 that
went, 60 were young people, and there was a whole programme of formation
and support with them,” he said.