There was evidence to suggest that "everything is not well amongst the newly ordained", a speaker at the National Conference of Priests in Dublin said last night.
Father Michael Drumm, who teaches theology at the Mater Dei Institute in Dublin, said: "From their lower levels of academic achievement to their stark absence from programmes of on-going formation to their growing conservatism, these guys had better realise that they are in for a bumpy journey."
What the church needed today most of all were people who could articulate the significance of Christian faith and speak a word of healing and hope in a secular but broken world.
The most important development in 20th-century thought was the quantum leap whereby physicists moved from a world of Newtonian certainty to the unpredictable universe of subatomic physics, he said.
"The Irish Catholic Church needs a quantum leap of faith to bring it to new horizons. While holding on to many of the things it holds dear it needs to abandon some old certainties in the embrace of an unpredictable future. If its clergy are not up to this task then they risk being left behind in a lonely ghetto".
The days of "the priestly lone ranger" were numbered, he said. The best priests had always devoted their energies to building community, and that task had not changed. But they would not be "a one-man show" where all power was vested in the parish priest.
He also disputed whether there was a shortage of priests. "There can be little doubt that we had too many priests in Ireland," he said.
In the diocese of Tuam in 1841 there were 105 priests for 400,000 people. Today there were 150 priests there, serving 120,000. In the diocese of Ossory in 1841 there were 88 priests for 220,000 people. Now there were 80 serving 75,000 people.
Referring to celibacy, Father Drumm said there could be "no reversing the insights of psychology or the power of the sexual revolution. We know that life cannot be lived in a humane way without intimacy and friendship, that celibacy can be an escape mechanism from these realities but that it can also be lived in a way which overcomes isolation and fear." But it was the issue of women priests which was the most controversial theological question in the Catholic Church today, he said.
Given the Vatican's rejection of the ordination of women, those, like him, who wished to see the life of women enhanced in the church should look at greater lay participation. This should be expanded to include "parish catechists, family and bereavement counsellors, chaplains for schools and hospitals and prisons".
