Greg Daly
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin The repeated failure to publish annual clerical changes is having the effect of hiding how the Archdiocese of Dublin is struggling with serious manpower shortages, clergy have said.
2017 will be the second successive year when diocesan changes have not been made public, concealing the extent to which sick and retiring clergy are not being replaced across the diocese.
Late developments in terms of priests falling ill or needing time out had affected the process, one priest told The Irish Catholic.
“There were three or four of those, and all you need is three or four to wreck the whole thing because it has a knock on effect,” he said, adding: “Increasingly we have an aged profile of priests in the diocese and we have guys who are starting to show serious signs of mental and physical burnout, and therefore as early as Christmas and as late as July and August, Archbishop (Diarmuid) Martin’s headache is twisting and turning constantly,” he said.
Shortage
A second priest said the failure to publicise changes is obscuring how bad the diocese’s manpower shortage is.
“It’s very hard to discern what exactly is happening,” he said, adding that declining religious practice has not offset vocational shortages. “The work has increased, insofar as even if people are not coming to Mass every Sunday, or even just once or twice a year, when they die or when they want a child baptised or that sort of stuff, they still come to the parish,” he said.
Complexity
While acknowledging the complexity of clerical changes, another priest described the failure to publicise changes as “irritating”, and damaging to diocesan transparency.
“It doesn’t help what all of us are trying to do is help people be aware that the changing dynamics, particularly in numbers of clergy and appointments of clergy,” he said, adding: “At the moment we don’t have enough priests staffing for the appetite of the people for ministry and service.”
A fourth priest said: “I think people are not aware of how serious it is. If you go through our parishes here and look at the priests, most of them are people are semi-retired.” The diocese, he said, is “going off a cliff”.
No new students entered clerical formation from the archdiocese this year.