David Quinn on the surprise findings of anew report
A new survey of priests showed that 57% of them want the rule of celibacy changed. This was certainly the most startling finding of the poll, but there were other, apparently less interesting, nuggets which actually tell us far more about parish life, and the things that really concern priests, than their attitude to the celibacy issue.
A lot of people today probably only have a vague notion of what priests actually do. They know that what they do has something to do with the sacraments - baptisms, weddings, saying the Mass and so on - but after that, they draw a blank. Their main job, as we see it, is to provide a service that adds a bit of ceremony to the big events in our lives, the 'rites of passage', such as births, deaths and marriages.
And it's true. A great deal of what a priest does is wrapped up with the sacraments. But let's turn things around. We have a momentary, passing relationship with a priest when he have to deal with him when we're we planning to get married, or to have our child baptised. But how does he perceive us? What does he think about what we're asking of him, and what does he think about how we behave at these events?
We want him to preside over these moments in our lives with a little dignity spiced with a little friendly informality - but not too cloying mind - and probably a lot of the time we think it isn't really any of his business how we should behave at these events.
However, what the survey, which appeared in The Irish Catholic, reveals is that priests are a bit down about what goes on at events like weddings and funerals. It finds, for example, that a massive 89% of priests think the social aspects of the wedding day now overshadows the sacramental and religious aspect of it. Another 74% disapprove of the practice of funeral eulogies.
What's going on? Let's take funeral eulogies first. Fr Martin Tierney, a parish priest on Dublin's southside, makes the point that often the eulogies - usually delivered by a member of the deceased person's family - are 'inappropriate' in a church setting.
What can he mean? For a start, he says, it is sometimes the case that not a single reference is made to God, religion or Christianity in the eulogy. Only the secular aspects of the person's life get a mention, even if the person was deeply religious, as it is a member of the older, more religious generation, who is being buried. The children often forget that although they don't go to church and have no interest in religion, their mother or father did. Often the eulogy is more a reflection of their own interests than their parents'.
Another problem is that sometimes three or four people in a row will stand up and eulogise the dead person. Often the funeral will take place at the usual 10 o'clock Mass, with many of those in attendance being the usual daily Mass-goers who can only look on politely as endless eulogies about a person they never knew are delivered.
This is the least of it. Last year, when the bishops came out with funeral guidelines, priests told stories of people downing cans of alcohol during the eulogy because the deceased individual was fond of a pint. One cleric said that at a funeral Mass he celebrated, the person delivering the eulogy told the sort of blue jokes more appropriate to a Best Man's speech.
It is this kind of thing that led the Archbishop of Armagh, Dr Sean Brady, to issue an edict a few years back banning lay-people delivering the eulogy during the funeral Mass. The edict applied only to his own diocese and in the main the 'inappropriate' eulogies go on.
Imagine how alienated the priest, who wants to preside over a Christian funeral, must feel when the character of the event becomes much more secular than religious.
It's the same at weddings. At one wedding a piece of poetry was read out instead of the Second Reading. Nonetheless, at the end of the passage the reader still said: "This is the Word of the Lord." The music chosen by couples is also secular in many cases. And this is without mentioning the often extravagant sums of money spent on weddings and the fact that the brides are often half an hour, 40 minutes, even an hour and a quarter late for their wedding as though the priest and his sacristans and the altar servers have no lives of their own.
Obviously the day belongs mainly to the couple but priests often become depressed when the setting in which the wedding takes place is not taken into account at all and they are treated as though they are almost incidental to the event.
There were two other findings in the survey which at first don't seem pertinent to the above but in fact are entirely so. The first found that 72% of priests no longer want to be involved in the management of Catholic primary schools. The second is that 65% of them would prefer if children were prepared for Communion and Confirmation on a Sunday rather than during normal school hours.
In both cases the explanation for the attitude of priests is, at base, the same as it is for their attitude to what frequently happens at weddings and funerals, namely a greatly diminished sense of the sacred on the part of a growing number of people.
Many Catholic schools are now little more than Catholic in name only. Many of the children don't go to Mass because their parents don't. The priests know that in this context their association with the school can be regarded as an unavoidable nuisance which it's best to grin and bear, and which teachers and parents will grin and bear so long as the priest doesn't go all religious on them.
These same non-practicing parents and children then end up changing the sacred character of First Holy Communion and Confirmation just as they do weddings and funerals, turning them into mainly social event. The priests think that maybe it would be best to prepare them for the sacraments at Sunday school because then only the religiously motivated parents would send their children along.
So if you want to know what it is that's really on the minds of priests, it isn't women priests, or the Pope, or even necessarily the rule of celibacy. It is instead the wearying effect of the advance of secular attitudes on their day to day work. Like the rest of us, priests are motivated by, or depressed by, the things they encounter every day. This is what The Irish Catholic survey has confirmed.
Should we be surprised?
© Irish Independent
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/ & http://www.unison.ie/