Change overdue in culture of pray up, pay up and shut up.

By Sean O'Conaill

Irish News, Belfast, Nov 6th, 2008

Following the announcement this week of a parish reorganization plan for the Armagh Archdiocese, Sean O’Conaill asks if Irish Catholicism is poised for change...

Change overdue in culture of pray up, pay up and shut up

CLUSTERING of parishes; pooling of resources; new structures and ministries to engage “all parishioners in the task of continuing Christ’s mission in the community”. All this by 2012? Is the diocese of Armagh, and maybe the whole island of Ireland, now approaching the tipping point for the revolution portended in the life of the Catholic Church by the Second Vatican Council of 196265?

“If not now, never!” will be the reaction of many. Lay people of my 1960s’ generation who were enthused by the promise of spring in Vatican II have been deeply disillusioned by the long winter maintained in the Irish Church by authoritarian and clericalist attitudes with deep historical roots.

These were well epitomized by Ireland’s dominant cleric in 1965, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid of Dublin. Returning from Rome to Dublin that year he insisted: “You may have been worried by much talk of changes to come. Allow me to reassure you. No change will worry the tranquility of your Christian lives.”

Inevitably this “tranquility” involved careful maintenance of the closed and secretive clerical system that gave us, by 1994, not only stagnation but the clerical sex abuse disasters.

Incredibly, there is still in Cardinal Brady’s pastoral letter of November 3 2008 more than a hint of this baseless fear that it is the Irish Catholic laity who are least prepared for change. For example, he goes to great lengths to reassure his people that the clustering of parishes will not erode parish identities.

The sad fact is that by dithering over Vatican II for more than four decades the Irish bishops have done far more harm to many Catholic parishes than any clustering could achieve.

This delay convinced many lay people that the clericalist straitjacket would never be removed and the ‘priesthood of the laity’ never realized. We seemed to be doomed to a culture of ‘pray up, pay up and shut up’ forever.

Many a disillusioned Irish Catholic has put aside ancestral hostility to the Reformation as a consequence, and joined Christian traditions that gave more scope to their Christian idealism.

They became convinced their Catholic clergy didn’t really want them to grow up and that other traditions were less hostile to Christian maturity.

This trend is growing at present in my own diocese of Derry, where an explicit promise given by Bishop Hegarty in 2003 to implement a model of collaborative ministry in the diocese has yet to be given the slightest substance.

The coming of relative peace has opened the way for a wide range of Christian evangelical and fellowship churches to make serious inroads into the Catholic community in the diocese. Significantly, the Baptist Church is making steady progress in attracting Catholics, who had no equivalent ceremony of adult commitment for lay people. And many other Catholics who couldn’t overcome their antipathy to the Reformation have simply walked away altogether from worship, strengthening the apparent victory of secularism.

Secular culture may be ideologically opposed to all religion but it provides a friendly enough space for educational, self-help and self-improvement activities of all kinds.

Thus, ironically, while the Catholic Church’s clerical culture has remained rigidly hierarchical and inertial, the secular revolution has made collaboration and re-education routine for lay people in their ordinary lives. So it has also made most of them far more ready to embrace change in their Church than too many of their ageing clergy.

Accountancy, counseling, psychotherapy, medicine, nursing, care of the aged and dying, teaching, business management, 12step expertise – all these and more are skills of obvious application in reeducating and rebuilding local Catholic parishes and communities, yet our Church is still dogged by an attitude expressed by one priest to an acquaintance of mine when (noticing the altar candles were unlit before Mass) he went to the sacristy to ask if he could be of any help. “No,” was the priest’s reply. “This is a one-man show!”

This autocratic inertia is still deeply embedded in the Catholic clerical system through its territorial and hierarchical principles, making bishops and priests solely responsible in their dioceses and parishes.

Canon law, the basic organizational blueprint of the Church, still arguably gives an incoming parish priest the authority to abolish any structure or arrangement that may have been created or permitted by his predecessor.

This is far too great a threat to reform. This fact alone will make many of us pause before investing time and energy in the reforms now mooted in some dioceses.

Why on earth, if there is now a commitment to change, is canon law not revised to require, for example, open elections for parish councils, and scope for decisions by those councils that could not be overruled by an incoming priest of the old school?

The reason is that not all bishops and priests are yet convinced about the need for change. A disastrous attitude of ‘it’ll do me in my time’ has taken hold of too many, so a centralized and clericalist canon law remains a serious obstacle to change.

Too many Catholics never learned that in the first millennium Catholic bishops were actually elected by their people, so Catholic conservatives can too easily maintain that any move towards democracy, for any purpose, would put us on the Gadarene slope to voting for polygamy or Sharia law.

But there is absolutely no reason why the election of a parish council with decision making power (e.g. to build a parish hall or appoint a parish youth leader) should lead to any change in any matter that needs to be decided centrally (e.g. revising the mandatory celibacy rule for priests).

To insist that it will is to be intellectually dishonest and to condemn Catholicism to terminal decline.

For decades we have made the case for the principle of subsidiarity in secular governance, so why opt for an entirely contrary principle in the administration of the Church? Is the future of any diocese or parish in Ireland to continue to lie forever at the mercy of grumpy old men?

Meanwhile secular individualism has clearly gone too far.

Vulnerable people – children, teenagers and senior citizens – too often lack due care and attention. Loneliness, self-hatred, self-harming, sexual and drug-related violence, addiction and depression are rampant.

Secular politics patently can’t address all these problems – especially in an era of economic recession.

TV has become an inadequate distraction from these hard realities.

The Lord who came to give us life “and give it more abundantly” is surely ready to revive our Irish Catholic Church – if we are all ready – and to revive our communities as well.

This is no time for hesitating over changes that should have come decades ago.

It is time for all Irish dioceses to follow, and even to go joyfully beyond, what Dublin and now Armagh have promised.

• Sean O’Conaill is acting coordinator of Voice of the Faithful (Ireland).