Mags Gargan
Irish parishes will need to adjust to the reality that the declining number of vocations to the priesthood here will mean more African priests taking up the mantle, Ireland’s former papal nuncio has said.
Speaking to The Irish Catholic as he prepared to leave for his new posting in Albania, Archbishop Charles Brown said that the decline of the number of priests in Ireland “which will continue to decline, even at a more rapid rate than it is now” means that it is “inevitable one part of the future of the Church in Ireland – and this is only one part and people will misunderstand me if they thought this is what I think is the only part – will be priests from other countries coming to work in Ireland, especially priests from Africa”.
Responsibility
“We already have priests from Africa coming to work in Ireland and others will come,” he said. “Large parts of Africa were evangelised by Irish missionaries and the gift of Irish missionaries to Africa will be repaid in some way by African priests coming back to Ireland.”
Archbishop Brown also said the future of the Church in Ireland will “imply a much greater responsibility for lay people”. “As the numbers of priests decline the positions that will need to be filled by lay people will increase. That will give a different shape, a different image, a different face to Irish Catholicism,” he said.
However, the archbishop said he was “certain the number of vocations to the priesthood will increase in Ireland” although it will “almost certainly not in my lifetime ever reach the numbers it was in the 1950s and 1960s”.
Archbishop Brown said above all else he is convinced “that the Catholic Church has a future in Ireland, that the story of more than 15 centuries of Catholic faith in Ireland is not finished, that is continues into the future”.
Full interview: ‘I carry Ireland in my heart’