Greg Daly
That most Irish people believe the Church should ordain women, as a new poll suggests, shouldn’t surprise anyone. Only two years ago 58% agreed with the proposal when Ireland’s farming community was polled on the issue, while in 2012, according to an Amárach Research poll for the Association of Catholic Priests, a massive 77% of Catholics surveyed backed the idea.
Still, it’s worth taking a closer look at the published findings of the Sunday Independent/Kantar Millward Brown as conducted between July 23 and August 6.
The poll was conducted among a representative sample of 875 adults at 64 sampling points nationwide, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3%.
Strikingly, the poll is a survey of the public in general, rather than Catholics in particular, and with the 2016 census indicating that just 78.3% of the population identify as Catholic, surveys such as this need careful handling: it can be reasonably safely assumed that about a fifth of those who responded weren’t Catholic.
Services
One could go further, of course: even of those answering who identify as Catholic, how many are massgoers? It’s worth considering, especially in light of the Pew Research Centre’s finding that only 34% of Irish adults claim to attend religious services at least monthly or how just 30% of the 3,779 voters surveyed by Behaviour & Attitudes after voting in this year’s abortion referendum said they attended religious services at least weekly, but attempting to play down poll findings on this basis would be unwise.
Pew figures, after all, indicate that 92% of Ireland’s self-identifying Christians claim to be raising their children in their own Faith; looking to the future, it is worth recalling the prediction of Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP, the Dominicans’ onetime Master General, that “Christianity will flourish in the 21st Century if we grasp that the Church is above all the community of the baptised”.
Given this, it is striking that 55% of those surveyed by Kantar Millward Brown agree with Mary McAleese that that the Church does not treat women equally, with only 15% disagreeing, the remainder of those polled being divided equally between those saying “it depends”, and those saying they did not know.
How 55% of people saying the Church does not treat women equally squares with 62% backing the ordination of women priests is unclear – are there those who think women are treated equally, but it wouldn’t hurt to have women priests too?
Either way, women are those most likely to have answered in the affirmative on the above topics, with 60% believing women are treated less well than men in the Church, and 65% believing the Church should ordain women to the priesthood.
While older people appear less likely than younger ones to support female ordination, support for this spans all age groups with just 18% of those surveyed believing the Church’s perennial teaching should be held to. It could be worth asking people whether they understand what underpins Church doctrine around this issue.
Less controversially, as it’s a matter of practice rather than teaching, a full 67% believe priests should be allowed marry, with just 15% opposing this. Given, however, low numbers of new priestly vocations in the West and the increasing visibility of married clergy of Anglican backgrounds across social media, it is difficult to see current practice persisting forever.
Finally, just 19% of those surveyed said they intend to attend a ceremony linked with the papal visit: this suggests that around 670,000 adults from the Republic intend to go to at least one of the Festival of Families, the Angelus at Knock or the Closing Mass of WMOF2018, this figure rising slightly to 23% in the 35-49 demographic. With children from the Republic and both adults and children from the North attending all three of these events, however, this figure seems overrstated, but time will tell.
Be that as it may, it’s striking that of the 81% of people not planning on attending any of the papal events, half intend to follow the ceremonies on television, on the radio, or online, with under a fifth – a mere 15% of the country’s adult population – adamant that they will do no such thing. Ireland might at times seem a cold house for Catholics nowadays, but it seems this isn’t a black-and-white matter.