Greg Daly
Archbishop Jude Thaddaeus Okolo laying his hands on Bishop Tom Deenihan at his Episcopal Ordination in the Cathedral of Christ the King in Mullingar on Sunday.
Pic John Mc Elroy. Meath’s new bishop is looking forward to leading a Church that goes to where people are, writes Greg Daly
Meeting Pope Francis with Ireland’s bishops, just a week ahead of his own ordination as Bishop of Meath, was a touching experience, according to Bishop Tom Deenihan.
“I think we were all touched by the intimacy of the event, certainly, and the sincerity of what he was saying,” Bishop Deenihan tells The Irish Catholic. “I think we were all conscious that this was an 82-year-old man who had arrived from Italy the day before and who had by all accounts a gruelling schedule, in terms of not just the number of significant events he was at, but the level of engagement he had: he met victims the day before, he had the whole range of State visits, he was at Croke Park, and after the Phoenix Park he was en route to the plane – I don’t even know if he got lunch!”
Describing the Pope’s words as kind, encouraging, and understanding, Dr Deenihan says there were several things about the papal address that hit home for him.
“First of all, there was the description of what the role of the bishop should be. He spoke about the role of the bishop as father, and I suppose from my point of view in my own position as the newest bishop in the country, I was certainly struck by that,” he says.
“He did speak about the clash between culture and Faith, and how sometimes they can be opposed, and told us not to be discouraged,” he adds. “He quoted St John of the Cross, about how in the darkness the light of Faith shines purest, and that light will show the way to the renewal of Christian life in Ireland.
“That to me was encouraging, and in a certain way it was consoling too, because here we had the Bishop of Rome, the successor of Peter, understanding I suppose the context in which the Church is working here at the moment,” he says.
Themes from the Irish trip raised in last week’s papal address in the Vatican were striking too, Dr Deenihan notes.
“I think as well that he was very much aware of the context in which priests are working at the moment. In relation to his talk in St Peter’s Square…which the Pope traditionally uses to recap on the previous visit he made, he spoke about the dearth of vocations in Ireland and the reasons for it in terms of the scandals the Church has witnessed in Ireland, which has had an impact on Faith and also has damaged the number of vocations coming forward,” he says, adding that the Pope is clearly aware of how vocational shortages mean an increased workload for clergy, who are “becoming more and more stretched and becoming tired”.
New diocese
Comparatively speaking, he adds, his new diocese is in a better position than others in Ireland. “I’m finding out about Meath myself! I think to be fair our numbers are good, and our age profile is fortunately younger than many other dioceses of the country,” he says.
“For example, I’ll be participating at a priestly ordination for a priest of Meath Diocese at the end of September, and not every bishop would have that experience every year now. Far from it!”
Pointing out that the diocese currently has three seminarians, he adds that he was recently informed that Meath has around 38 priests aged under 50, which runs contrary to the national trend.
“But having said that, there are men who are still working past 75, and there’s a cohort who’ll be reaching 75 in the next number of years,” he continues. “The diocese is growing rapidly, particularly on the eastern side – Ashbourne, Dunshaughlin, Dunboyne, that side of the diocese – and I think some sort of examination of resources is inevitable during the years ahead.
“How that’s going to happen I don’t know. I think I would have to sit down as a bishop with the priests and will have to engage with the deanery conferences because the situation of dioceses such as Meath is that the pastoral needs of, say, Tullamore, are very different from the pastoral needs of Ashbourne,” he says.
Returning to the theme of the papal trip, Dr Deenihan notes that it will have affected people in ways that headlines won’t necessarily reflect. In Croke Park for the Festival of Families, he says the whole evening was a “hugely positive experience” with a “lovely atmosphere”, the testimonies being excellent and one in particular seeming to have chimed with a surprising number of people.
“The media I suppose reported on various aspects of the trip which had to be reported on, but in terms of meeting people – in Mullingar, actually, up to yesterday, and Drogheda – and in terms of speaking to our parishioners on the phone who are in Cork, one of the things that stood out was the testimony of the family from India, about the use of social media when the family is sitting down having meals,” he says.
“That, actually, resonated with a lot more people than [what the] media [was] reporting. Bear in mind that this was the World Meeting of Families,” he stresses. “Family life was the target for this particular trip, and people who weren’t there at all but who watched it on television or maybe even online for all I know, that particular testimony stood out to them – how the whole social media IT technology is actually impinging on quality time when people are sitting at the table.
“People who’d never have met each other or even come across each other have said that to me that that was something that they took with them, and two of them have actually decided now to ban mobile phones from the kitchen table,” he says.
The point, he says, is that people who attended or even watched the events of the World Meeting of Families on television will have picked up on messages that were not necessarily the same as those being generally reported.
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Hardly had the Pope returned to Rome when the Irish bishops’ communications office announced the upcoming episcopal ordination of the then Bishop-elect Deenihan – the announcement that he would succeed Dr Michael Smith as Bishop of Meath had been made in June.
Born in Cork in 1967, Dr Deenihan went to school at the city’s North Monastery Christian Brothers School – ‘North Mon’ to locals. “In terms of my own Faith journey, like many of my classmates at Maynooth I was an altar server,” he says. “I think the trend at the time was that those who were altar servers went to Maynooth immediately after Leaving Certificate, which is not necessarily the trend now. In that sense, even though it’s not too far away, it was a different era.”
He thought of doing other things while in secondary school, he says, but at Leaving Cert his thoughts returned to priesthood, and he started in the National Seminary in Maynooth shortly afterwards.
“After ordination I worked in a few parishes: I worked in Glanmire for three years, and in 1994 Bishop [Michael] Murphy appointed me to the parish of Bantry as a teacher in the vocational school there, and I stayed there for nine years, and enjoyed it, loved it,” he says, adding that “quite a few of the past pupils will be at the ordination in Sunday”.
Bantry links
Appointed to the diocesan education office by Cork and Ross’s Bishop John Buckley in 2003, Dr Deenihan kept up his Bantry links over the years, celebrating baptisms, weddings and – “unfortunately” – funerals.
In 2013 he became General Secretary of the Catholic Primary Schools Management Association, serving until 2016, and has been acting-executive secretary to the Council for Education and to the Commission for Catholic Education and Formation of the Irish Episcopal Conference from 2016 to date.
On the face of it, this might suggest that he has had next to no Meath connections at all, but Dr Deenihan notes that Meath’s Bishop Smith ordained his class in Maynooth to the diaconate in 1990, and that two of his old classmates are still priests of the diocese. Further, he adds, his time in the CPSMA brought him into contact with several other Meath clergy.
“I am a stranger, but not a total stranger. To be fair, I think the vast majority of priests in the diocese wouldn’t know me, and nor would I know them,” he says, explaining that familiarising himself with the diocese is top of his agenda in the coming months.
“The priority for me I think between now and Christmas is getting to know the geography and getting to know the priests,” he says. “And getting to know the different contexts, because as I was saying to you it’s a very large diocese, and because it’s so large and because it comes in to Dublin in many ways there are different contexts throughout the diocese in which priests are working.”
With a Catholic population of 270,000, spread across 69 parishes and 149 churches, Meath is increasingly a diocese of dormitory and satellite towns, which is a phenomenon that poses distinct challenges.
“Meath has a number of hubs, if you like – Tullamore, Mullingar, Navan, Trim, Drogheda or at least the southern part of Drogheda, Kells, Dunshaughlin, Ashbourne, Slane – and the reality is that Dublin is moving out,” he says. “I was out in Mullingar early one morning and the amount of cars at half past six in the morning heading into Dublin was phenomenal.
“I think a lot of the diocese is becoming commuter belt. There are challenges for parish in that, because I think parish thrives as a community and if people are leaving early in the morning and not returning until late at night, it can be much more difficult to build community,” he says.
Such commuter towns are a far cry from the classic ‘rural parish with a GAA club’ that gives a sense of identity that’s easy to tap into, he says.
“That’s much more difficult, and the priests will tell you that, in an area where people are leaving to go to work, where they’re living there but they’re not living there. It becomes much more of a challenge to build that sort of community. The school helps. Various organisations help. And then through the administration of the sacrament, through the event, people good or bad, clever people and wise, connections are built,” he continues.
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Direct efforts to build links with individuals matter too, he adds: “As well as building those connections, with the Church, in terms of the community we need to do something with building relationships with people as well. Sometimes these areas can be lonely because people move into them and they move out of them for work, and they don’t know neighbours.”
The key thing, he says, echoing the kind of comments we’d associate with the Pope, is to be a missionary Church.
“I think it’s about interacting with the community – it’s about getting involved, and becoming part of the community,” he says. “If the community isn’t coming into the Church, it’s about the Church going out into the community. Now, that sounds very cliched, but we have be visible, we have to be present, and we have be meeting people where they’re at. I think in some ways that’s very much Pope Francis.
“You want a situation where the priest is known, where people can come to the priest, or they can come to the Church and are able to make that connection if they need to,” he continues, pointing out parish schools can be useful points of contact.
Commuter towns, however, often have populations that are at best detached from the Church – some are immigrants of non-Catholic background, while others are from the ‘lost generations’ who have come of age since the Church’s abuse scandals came to light in the 1990s, and who have at best a detached relationship with Catholicism. Can they be engaged with?
“There’s two answers to it,” he says. “One surprising thing – or maybe it’s not surprising – is that people who are ambivalent enough about the practice of their Faith still want a Catholic education, or what they perceive as a Catholic education, for their child.
“If you look at a place like Ashbourne, where there are five primary schools: two traditional Catholic schools, a Catholic Gaelscoil, a Gaelscoil that’s multidenominational, and an Educate Together school. Ashbourne has an exploding population, as you can imagine, and something like 60 kids are oversubscribed in terms of pushing to enroll in the Catholic schools,” he says.
“You’d ask why they want to enroll in the Catholic schools when there are other schools there. We have a situation where the Catholic schools, despite an alternative, are oversubscribed. There’s an issue there.”
Dynamic parishes
In addition, he says, more dynamic parishes can go some way to reaching out and reviving Faith.
“A lot of the parishes, I’m discovering, have put on separate programmes for their sacramental reception,” he says. Praising the involvement of parents in such programmes, he says: “The parish is becoming more active, and that’s good, because I think things again are being created. I think the days of people coming to us are gone. We have to go to them.”
It will be some months till next year’s Confirmation season, but Dr Deenihan is already looking forward to it as an opportunity to visit different parishes and meet people across the diocese.
In the meantime, though, he’ll be busy getting used to his new role, with a real highlight of the coming week being the priestly ordination at the end of the month.
“The priestly ordination just four weeks after my own is good because it’s a great sign of hope,” he says. “It’s a reassurance for parishioners that the parish won’t have to suffer from being a priest less in the future, but it’s also a validation for a priest who’s working in a diocese: there are those who are coming after him.”
One way or another, he says, joy needs to be key to the future of the Church.
“I’m just putting together at the moment a few remarks for my own ordination, there’s a quotation there from Pope Francis about joy,” he says. “I think if we’re going to attract people to us, be it parishioners or be it prospective vocations, we have to be joyful. Christ himself when he was calling the disciples said ‘Come and see’. Come and see!”