Greg DalyGreg Daly examines a recent survey of religious belief and practice in the farming community
That articles about a newly released survey of farmers’ social attitudes could bear headlines such as ‘Church faces “huge wake-up call” from survey’ show just how predictable narratives on the Church have become in Ireland’s media over recent years.
The Irish Examiner ICMSA (Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association) Farming Poll investigated a wide range of issues, including religious practice and opinions among the farming community in Ireland.
Conducted by Behaviour & Attitudes and entailing 526 interviews over a three-week period with farm-dwelling adults in the Republic, the poll found that 69% of those surveyed attend Mass each week, 53% said religious services had been cut in their area, and 82% believe priests should be allowed to marry.
Of those who agreed when asked if they thought priests should be allowed to marry, 63% said they strongly agreed with this, just as 58% strongly agreed when asked if they believed there should be women priests.
The Examiner quoted Fr Sean McDonagh of the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) as saying the poll findings should be a “huge wake-up call” for the hierarchy, and also ran as a headline, ‘NEWS: Papal nuncio: Women priests “not in Catholic tradition”’. That the Pope’s representative pointing out a straightforward and well-known fact of Catholic life should be billed as ‘news’ says something rather odd about how newspapers work in Ireland.
In fairness, the poll is genuinely interesting, and though hardly a wake-up call for the Church is a valuable addition to a series of statistical exercises conducted over the past decade or so, whether for the State, RTÉ, the Irish Times, the ACP or others.
Surprising
That 69% of those interviewed said they attend Mass weekly might be a surprising figure to start with, not least because last year’s poll returned a figure 7% lower for the same question.
Allowing that the poll has a 4% margin of error, this suggests that at the very least 3% more farm-dwelling adults are attending weekly Mass now than were doing so a year ago.
Assuming this is correct, why this should be happening is far from clear; some might wonder whether the much-vaunted ‘Francis effect’ is a reality on the ground, while others might speculate that some of our newer bishops are making a difference at a local level, and still others might look to broader sociological factors.
It is also worth considering the 69% figure in light of the exit poll Behaviour & Attitudes conducted for RTÉ on election day in February, which – as Andrew O’Connell pointed out in this paper the following month – included questions on religious affiliation and practice, finding that 74% of farmers surveyed said they attended religious services weekly.
These sort of figures seem obviously incomplete, but they point to a positive reality and – running as they do against what we might expect to be the case – surely call for further investigation. A reported 69% Mass attendance rate certainly deserves better than the headline ‘ANALYSIS: Opinion poll shows half attend Mass every week’.
As ever with polls of this sort, the findings invite all sorts of questions. Unfortunately, the raw data for the poll is not yet available, so analyses at this stage must be limited to published reports, but it is striking that there seems to be a disconnect between two findings that we might expect to be linked.
As noted, 53% of those surveyed said religious services had been cut in their area, and 82% said priests should be allowed to marry, 63% of respondents being strongly of this view. One might assume that these findings are related, given how often married clergy are proposed as a solution to Ireland’s vocations crisis.
However, the findings from Bantry might suggest otherwise. The survey was conducted at seven different agricultural shows around the country, and there is something startling about how just 44% of respondents surveyed at the West Cork show said they believed clergy should be allowed to marry. This figure, cast as “an outlier” in the Examiner’s reporting, is all the more interesting given how Bantry respondents were also more likely than those at any other show to report that religious services had been cut in their area, with 80% of respondents saying this was the case.
National figures
Why are the Bantry results so out of step with the national figures? Is it simply the case that fewer people were surveyed there than at other shows, small samples being all too capable of producing extreme or unusual results? Or is something more significant at work? After all, why would an area that has apparently seen a drastic reduction in religious services be far less willing than anywhere else in Ireland to back a change that might, we are so often told, stem the decline of Ireland’s clergy? Might it be the case that a dramatic reduction in services has forced clergy in the area to do a better job of explaining Church teaching in this area than so often takes place?
Whatever the reason, more research is definitely needed.
While not without value, surveys like these, at least as initially reported, can be highly frustrating: devoid of raw data, exact questions, and tables, it’s hard to look at claims that 80% of farm-dwelling adults believe there should be women priests without wondering how many of the 80% are regular Massgoers.
Opinions
That’s not to doubt the data, merely to say that the data on religious opinions would be more useful if categorised not merely by age and farming type – tillage, dairy, livestock, or others – but by religious life. How many of those surveyed have been exposed to serious catechesis on the contentious issues at any point? How many could explain why the Church teaches what it does? It is, after all, very easy to say one rejects the Church’s teaching, but often rather more difficult to explain the reasons for that teaching.
Categorisation by age, for all that, is interesting, and points to another feature of the modern Church in the West, which is that if religious practice is lower among young Catholics than older ones, so a tendency to think with the mind of the Church is higher, even if nowhere near as high as the Church might like.
This survey fits this picture if we consider the issue of women priests as a bellwether: while just 45% of under 35s attend Mass weekly as compared to 84% of those between the ages of 55 and 64, the age demographic least likely to support women priests is the former group, at 70%, while the group most likely to support the idea, at 87%, is the latter. It would be very interesting to know the percentage of younger Massgoers would back this.
Commenting in the Examiner, Fr McDonagh says “The vast majority of priests are over 64 years of age. How do we minister to teenage boys and girls?”
It’s a fair question, but I suspect the best answers might not be what he’d expect.