Pope Leo XIV is by all accounts an excellent organiser. But, at least in Ireland, an obvious question arises: if he sticks to his stated opposition to what he calls “clericalising women”, what is there left to organise? Here, the pope is a general with lots of grandly arrayed officers, but no foot soldiers.
If you’re my age, the slow vanishing of the clergy is one of those phenomena that happens so inexorably that you can lose sight of their profundity. Even in the 1980s, Bob Geldof could, without too much anachronism, wail on the Boomtown Rats’ Banana Republic: “Everywhere I go/ Everywhere I see/ The black and blue uniforms/ Police and priests.” Now that it is almost as hard to spot a priest on the street as it is to see a cop, even us heathens are at a loss: how can one be anti-clerical when there are no clerics?
In the year of my birth, 1958, the Catholic sociologist Jeremiah Newman (later bishop of Limerick) wrote in The Furrow that the sheer number of men in black in Ireland “has meant that some priests have not enough work to do”. According to statistics he compiled, the country had 5,489 priests – one for every 593 Catholics.
And the production line was still working overtime: Maynooth, Clonliffe and the other seminaries were turning out nearly 350 newly minted clerics every year. Italy had 20 seminarians per 100,000 Catholics; France had 22; the US 26. Ireland had an astonishing 75.
This glut meant that Ireland operated a religious trade surplus on a scale that would have enraged Donald Trump. Newman reckoned there were an additional 5,000 Irish priests serving abroad. If you factor them in, there would thus have been one Irish priest for roughly every 300 Irish Catholics.
Newman expressed the fear that this superabundance might create resentment: “It should also be remembered that it is possible for a brand of anti-clericalism to appear, based on nothing more than the fact that the clergy appear too numerous.”
He need not have worried. In 1972 and 1973, the Jesuit sociologist Mícheál Mac Gréil conducted a pioneering survey of the social attitudes of adults in Dublin. They were asked, among other things, to rank how happy they would be to have a member of a particular occupation as a close friend.
At the lowest end of this scale were drug pushers. At the highest were priests. Second were “members of religious orders”. Similarly, 91 per cent of Dubliners said they would be happy to have a priest as a member of the family, compared with just 81 per cent who said the same for a member of Fine Gael. Dubs in general felt more comfortable with men in black than in blue shirts.
This prestige drew on spiritual power, but also on social omnipresence. Priests were not just everywhere – they were in every part of people’s lives. In his memoir, the then bishop of Derry Edward Daly, best known for ministering to the dying on the streets of the Bogside on Bloody Sunday, described his job when he was a working priest as encompassing the roles of “social worker, marriage counsellor, bereavement counsellor and youth counsellor, as well as attempting to deliver a dozen other services that were not strictly related to priesthood”. He was not exaggerating.
There are still priests who do all these jobs and who are held in very high regard by their communities. But theirs is a dying trade. In 2022, a study for the Association of Catholic Priests found that of the total of 2,116 diocesan priests in Ireland, 299 (almost 15 per cent) were over 75 and still working, while 547 (over 25 per cent) were between 60 and 75. Conversely, just 52 priests (2.5 per cent) were under 40. There will be almost no one left to replace those who are going. Last November, the Dublin Catholic diocese noted that “no priest was ordained for the archdiocese this year and only two priests have been ordained for the archdiocese since 2020”.
You don’t have to be a devout Catholic to sense the pathos of this decline. In 2014, the American priest and writer Donald Cozzens, addressing those who had gathered in the once-mighty seminary at Maynooth to celebrate the jubilee of their ordinations, was brutally frank: “The respect and trust of past years has been mostly shattered. Good people look at us with a wary eye. We want to say, ‘You can trust me. I won’t hurt you, nor will I hurt your children.’ But trust has been broken.” He posed the existential question: “Could you men gathered here at the seminary that formed you possibly be the last priests in Ireland?”
They will not literally be so. There will always be at least some priests. But there has been a profound cultural shift. Colm Tóibín‘s exquisitely poignant story A Priest in the Family turns that phrase, once regarded as a blessing by 91 per cent of Dubliners, into a sorrow that haunts an old woman as she learns that her son has been charged with the sexual abuse of some of his pupils. It is hard to see the old meaning ever being restored.
Except, of course, that it is in another sense not hard at all. Looked at objectively, there are few great problems that have such obvious solutions. The church is like a farmer who complains of a diminished crop while ploughing only one depleted field and leaving the rest of the land fallow. It creates its own dearth by refusing to admit married men or any women to the priesthood.
It may be that the sorrow of “the last priests in Ireland” has no real resonance for the new pope. Perhaps Ireland itself has been mentally ditched from Catholic history as a lost cause that is best forgotten. But if lost causes are so easily discarded, why not do the same for the biggest lost cause of them all: the unique sanctity of the celibate male?
