Greg DalyGreg Daly attends the AGM of the Association of Catholic Priests
For all the fondness for Pope Francis apparent at last week’s conference of the Association of Catholic priests, a sense of the Gospel as a source of joy, as so often proclaimed by the current Pope, was conspicuous by its absence.
On the contrary, the gathering of about 120 members of the thousand-strong organisation in Athlone’s Hodson Bay Hotel was notable for key addresses expressing a profound sense of gloom.
Moygownagh, Co. Mayo’s Fr Brendan Hoban, for instance, one of the organisation’s founders, spoke from his own experience on the theme of ‘A lost tribe: priests at risk’.
Fr Hoban described how he had been ordained 43 years ago, serving as curate under a parish priest who was about the age he himself is now.
“Every time I visited him,” Fr Hoban said, “his house-keeper of over 40 years, Mary Forde, carried out a long practised liturgy with its rubrics hallowed from time immemorial: she took out the china cups, cut the crusts off the sandwiches, handed me a cloth napkin, she left the room and returned discreetly every five minutes to ‘heat up the tea’.”
The young Fr Hoban Hoban expected that when he reached the age of his then superior, his circumstances would be like his. The reality, he said, has been rather different, and not merely in material respects; rather, he said, “the safe, secure, confident clerical world” in which his then parish priest had lived, has “imploded completely”.
‘Infallible’
Gone, he said, is the world where curates, now “an endangered species”, did most of the parish work, and likewise gone is a world where parish priests “took for granted that they were admired, respected and supported by their parishioners”, with their words being seen as “infallible”, their decisions “confident and unquestioned”.
Men who joined the priesthood in this world, Fr Hoban said, often wrote on their ordination card a famous statement by the 19th Century French priest Henri Dominique Lacordaire about just what it is that a priest is called to do. “Forty or 50 years ago, mesmerised by that intoxicating power, we had all the answers to every last one of life’s problems,” he said, adding that with that power came responsibility, leaving many priests of that generation with a deep-seated conviction that the decline of the Irish Church in recent decades is all their fault.
There will probably be few who lament the passing of a world where parish priests were placed on the kind of pedestals Fr Hoban recalls, but at the same time, the concerns he expresses about many of Ireland’s older priests – and the meaning of this for the Irish Church – make for worrying hearing.
With the average age of Ireland’s priests edging ever upwards, priests are nonetheless called on to work longer and harder, running the risk of exhausting themselves as “sacrament-dispensing machines” with little real pastoral engagement with their parishioners.
When pastoral engagement is called for, he continued, it can revolve around complex issues for which elderly priests had never been trained and never expected to have to deal: how should a priest of his generation respond if invited to a same-sex marriage, he asked as an example.
Relations between priests and bishops in some dioceses had broken down, he said, accusing some of the latter of bullying their priests, challenging an episcopal willingness to alert the Garda Síochána even to anonymous allegations against clergy, and blaming the papal nuncio, Archbishop Charles Brown, for his choices of bishops.
Priests can live lonely, isolated lives, he said, without many firm friends, and with hobbies previously embraced as part of a “culture of distraction” being abandoned as isolation closes in; health can suffer in such circumstances, he said, with both physical and mental health being at risk.
He cited rising suicide figures among clergy, and speculated that this masks far wider and deeper realities of depression and despair.
Question
Admitting that the picture he painted would seem negative to some, Fr Hoban said the question really is not so much whether or not it is negative as whether or not it is true. Conceding that he had no solutions to offer, he called for Ireland’s older priests to be cared for, saying that care entails “consideration, acknowledgement, support, encouragement and, above all, respect”, and stressing that “priests who have served the Church for so long deserve no less”.
Fr Hoban may not have had any solutions to offer, but the gathered clergy were not without ideas.
A range of points were made in open session, and although many echoed the Mayo priest’s reports of friction between priests and bishops and his criticism of the papal nuncio, some spoke of priests feeling relevant now, while Fr Michael Kelleher from the Diocese of Cork and Ross thought it important to stress that “what the bishops do is not in isolation”, continuing, “an awful lot of our colleagues agree with what they do”.
A common theme among those who spoke was of the need for a national synod in which the challenges facing the Church can be addressed, with Fr Gerry O’Hanlon SJ arguing that “the future of the Church is a synodal Church – that’s what Pope Francis wants.”
Redemptorist Fr Gerry O’Connor said that a national synod is now the number one priority for the ACP, which intends to keep putting pressure on the bishops to bring this about.
“We can’t make them do it, we can’t organise it ourselves, because for one component of the Church to organise it would undermine the principle of what a synod is about: it’s about all the different parts joining together into a process by which we would set the agenda and the priorities for the Church in the future,” he said, saying the ACP intends “to use every ounce of influence that we can to try and achieve an outcome where there is an the national synod where the voices of laypeople, members of the ACP and other components of the Church come together to make decisions together”.
A second priority, he said, is to create a dynamic within the Church where issues of health, loneliness, isolation, and overwork among priests are taken seriously, and where relations with bishops are improved, claiming that some “dioceses which are experiencing a decline in revenue from collections are saying to elderly priests: we may not be able to care for you in the future”, with this generating huge amounts of anxiety and worry.
Calling for more lay participation and ministry in the Church, the welcoming back into ministry of priests who had been ordained but are no married, and the introduction of a female diaconate, he said, “these are very practical ways that we believe the crisis around an exhausted, demoralised priesthood lacking self-esteem can be addressed, God’s people can get good service, and that the Church can try and have a future”.
Finally, he said, the ACP is committed to being a voice for the Church in Ireland. Citing silence from the hierarchy when Catholic schools are attacked as “exclusive”, religious sisters running hospitals are criticised as” anti-women”, and politicians’ religious faith is presented almost as a reason to oppose them, he asked where the spokespeople for the Church are at such times, he said that in the absence of ‘official’ voices willing to stand up for the Church, “we will continue to play our role in the public square as best we can to present the Vatican II spirit of Church, and have faith engaging with culture, politics, and the needs of the Irish people”.