DUBLIN’S CATHOLIC archdiocese will soon have barely enough priests to serve its 199 parishes, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has said.
“We have 46 priests over 80 and only two less than 35 years of age. In a very short time we will just have the bare number of priests required to have one active priest for each of our 199 parishes,” he said in Dublin’s pro-cathedral at the weekend.
He was speaking at a Mass on Saturday to celebrate the feast of St Lawrence O’Toole, principal patron of the Dublin Catholic archdiocese, of which he was archbishop from 1162 until 1180.
Last April Archbishop Martin said there were now 10 times more priests over 70 than under 40 in the archdiocese.
In April also it emerged that the number of priests in Tuam Catholic archdiocese is set to fall by 30 per cent over the next four years, leaving most parishes there with just one resident priest.
Meanwhile, writing in the Furrowmagazine last June, Fr Brendan Hoban, parish priest at St Muredach's Cathedral, in Ballina, Co Mayo, said of his own Killala diocese that "in 20 years' time there will be around eight priests instead of the present 34, with probably two or three under 60 years of age".
He said “the difficult truth is that priests will have effectively dissappeared in Ireland in two to three decades”.
In his Saturday homily Archbishop Martin said that “the future will require different structures and different planning. Parishes will have to work more closely with each other and share facilities. The number of Masses will have to be rationalised. Some of these changes will cause pain”.
Such change will require “renewal and conversion on the part of all. Change in the church is never just about new structures”, he said.
It was “too glib to think that change in the church will come about primarily through debate in a secular environment about church discipline. This is all the more so in the light of the fact that more and more today the terms of the debate – especially concerning marriage and conjugal morality – have different meanings in society and in the church,” he said.
The diocese had “to repent for the failings of its own members who betrayed their mission of shepherd. Shepherds have failed through a sheer lukewarmness, through negligence, through lack of real commitment to Jesus and his message. The abuse of children is a heinous crime, especially when it was perpetrated by those entrusted with the mission of the Good Shepherd.
“The church and its institutions must repent, but that repentance must result in renewal and in a renewal which may not produce conformity and symbioses with the thought patterns of the day,” he said.
