Brendan Hoban has a feel for the telling phrase, the sound-byte that sums up pastoral dilemmas, like “not going to church anymore”, “teenage sex”, “making your own soup”, “neurotic curiosity”, “the grace of eccentricity”, “too many Bodenstowns”. He has the compassion to understand why people say the Church “doesn’t do anything for me” and he also has the courage not to short sell them with an easy way out. He can also critique his own Church. This is a great pastoral book, a book about leadership by one of the prophetic voices in the Irish Church.
233 pp. Published by Banley House. This book is available from Veritas Publications, www.veritas.ie Cathedral Books and Knock Bookshop, or by post from The Pastoral Centre, Ballina, Co Mayo. Price €13.95. Postage €2.
CONTENTS
MAKING YOUR OWN SOUP
A private, individual spirituality that depends on an individual’s resources and the limited narrative of their own experience hasn’t the language or the scaffolding needed to stand its ground or survive in the real world. And what happens is that it either degenerates into some form of self-indulgent ego-tripping or it loses itself in tree-hugging or some such specious nonsense.
* * *
Fr Peter Connolly, Professor of English in Maynooth many years ago, once confided to a friend that, at some point in the future, the practice of the Catholic religion in Ireland could collapse suddenly. What was remarkable about this statement was that it was made in the 1960s, a time when the Catholic Church in Ireland was at the peak of its power and influence: over 90% attended church; seminaries were full; the credibility of bishops and clergy couldn’t be higher; and so on.
When asked why he had arrived at what now seems an extraordinarily prescient and prophetic conclusion, Connolly replied that the Irish are not a sentimental people, ‘once they find something is not useful, they abandon it.’
One of the more obvious things about religious practice in the Irish Catholic Church is that while there has been significant leakage in every age group, young adults are conspicuous by their absence from church now. And if you ask them, why they don’t go to Mass, almost invariably the answer is around their conviction that ‘it doesn’t do anything for me’. It is, to them, not useful.
It’s not that they are, generally speaking, anti-church. In the main, they retain a respect for the religious enterprise and those involved with it; they understand how precious to their parents and to some of their own generation is their religious heritage; and they can see how, as a social imperative, religion helps to sustain important social values. But, it doesn’t do anything for them at a personal level, so they look away.
This decline, if that’s the word for it, follows an almost identical pattern throughout the developed world. It’s happening in Britain, the continent of Europe, Australia and the United States. Bring a group of young adults together in any of these societies, even from family backgrounds where religious practice was a core value, and you find the same thing, a disconnection with the religion of their parents.
And side by side with that, you find an interest in and sympathy with the importance of spirituality. As interest in ‘religion’ diminishes, correspondingly interest in ‘spirituality’ seems to grow. And ask them what they mean by ‘spirituality’ and they will begin by defining it as having nothing to do with ‘religion’ which more and more they seem to define as mere church-going. Spirituality, as they see it, is a sense of connection with God that is different from and separate from what they see happening in church on a Sunday morning: it’s personal, private, free from structures, connecting with ‘where we’re at’.
Some people, parents usually, are relieved and a bit consoled by their adult children’s interest in spirituality, often on the basis that at least the baby hasn’t been thrown out with the bathwater. Parents tend to say that their adult children are ‘good people’, have strong values (especially in the area of justice) and have their own belief in God. And all of that is true.
But my difficulty is that a private, individual spirituality that depends on an individual’s resources and the limited narrative of their own experience hasn’t the language or the scaffolding needed to stand its ground or survive in the real world. And what happens is that it either degenerates into some form of self-indulgent ego-tripping or it loses itself in tree-hugging or some such specious nonsense.
I have a number of difficulties with some of the newer versions of personal spirituality. One is that while it can be talked about at great length, sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. It never actually gets done. Another is that it’s a half-way house to disbelief, in two forms: one is that it suits people who don’t want to name their disinterest and eventually disbelief in God; and, two, it bounces the following generation into disbelief because there’s nothing to hold on to, no language of worship, no sense of ritual, no scaffolding of religion – even to react against. If everyone ends up making their own soup, inevitably the gruel becomes thinner and thinner.
The other great difficulty I have with people doing their own thing in religion – in the sense of the human encounter with the divine – is that the personal becomes isolated from the communal. Faith is a personal journey but religion is, of its essence, about relating to what is outside ourselves – God, other people, the world.
The problem we have now is that the public expression of our religion – worship in church as a community (or Mass on the weekend) – no longer feeds the spirit of a generation operating more and more out of a faithless culture. And we’re left with the young making up their own spirituality on the run.
Which is where Peter Connolly came in. Because the narrative of the past and the scaffolding that sustained it are so out of sync with the needs of a new generation, they are being discarded because they are experienced as of no use. We are failing to open up new avenues into the great Catholic heritage and history will not be kind to us for that omission.
We need to listen to what the young are saying to us through their non-participation. Otherwise they may well be the last generation to have ‘the faith’.
THIRTY SOMETHINGS
There’s a sadness in the thirtysomethings that despite their education, money, lifestyle and resources they sense the need for a spirituality that would put some shape on the lives they lead. They are searching for, indeed hungry for, a meaning that would, as one of them put it, help them to find ‘a place to go to when I realise there aren’t people who can fix things.’ A place where the questions at the heart of life might be reflectively considered.
* * *
Some time ago, in The Irish Times, there was a poem by Gerard Hanberry called Bravado. The poem is a reaction to a conversation with a friend about life, death, the hereafter. Hanberry dismisses his friend’s nonchalance in the face of distant death. When the time comes, his friend suggests, he will ‘invite the good Padre with his mumbo-jumbo to be off with himself’.
Hanberry doesn’t accept this. He tells his friend that ‘they got to you young’ and that as a result he has been humping a ‘rucksack of guilt’ since childhood. When the time comes and his friend is facing the darkness, Hanberry believes, he will be ‘trying to work out some policy for the hereafter’.
You could imagine Gerard Hanberry and his friend having a drink in a pub and the conversation drifting towards the big questions and eventually they find themselves mulling over death.
I don’t know what age they are but I’d bet that they’re in the thirty-something category. They’ve gone to college, married, changed a few cars, did the prescribed gig to Australia (complete with rucksack), came home, got married, bought a house, had a few kids and now find themselves trying to work out what it’s all about. Hanberry’s generation, find themselves, in Hanberry’s phrase to his friend, ‘scanning the ultrasound printout of your own mortality’.
The thirtysomethings are searching for something. They don’t know what it is but they sense that it isn’t what their mothers are telling them they need: believe in God, go to Mass, teach your children to pray, live with the mystery. They are being offered a religion but what they suspect they need is a spirituality.
They find that they are uncomfortable with their parents’ attitudes and values. They react against the accepting, almost credulous approach of their parents – the priest said it so it must be right – as their gut-reaction is to question. They simply don’t believe truths that their parents just accept without reflection.
When they go to Mass they find the ritual formal and unsatisfying. It doesn’t engage them. It is as if it speaks a language they no longer understand. They find too that priests lack the reflective capacity ‘to say something’, to connect with where they are. For a while they persevere out of loyalty to the food of their youth or the promptings of a parent or unease that they may be letting down their children.
But gradually they leave the Church behind, airbrushing it out of their lives, apart from the inconvenience and awkwardness of First Communions or Confirmations. The Church is for them now – in a world where so much seems so relative – still too sharp, too arrogant, too sure of itself. Everything is too neatly packaged and some of it makes no sense. And, with the scandals of clerical child sexual abuse, they have lost faith in the Church’s capacity to reform itself, to learn a different language. So they give themselves permission to defect from its concerns.
Yet, in the small hours, they wonder about life and death and whether they should be giving their children something more substantial than karate or ballet lessons?
There’s a sadness in the thirtysomethings that despite their education, money, lifestyle and resources they sense the need for a spirituality that would put some shape on the lives they lead. They are searching for, indeed hungry for, a meaning that would, as one of them put it, help them to find ‘a place to go to when I realise there aren’t people who can fix things.’ A place where the questions at the heart of life might be reflectively considered.
What they seek is a scaffolding to hold a meaning that they sense is at the heart of life. They have felt the weight and texture of life. They have a keen sense of what it is to be authentic. They know what they are looking for but no one seems to be able to provide it.
On the few occasions they find themselves at Mass they hear poor sermons set in a disorganised liturgy and all it does is convince them that the Church is not the place where they will find what they are looking for. They want a liturgy that speaks to them about the concerns of their lives – and if they could get what they’re looking for they would drive a hundred miles every weekend to savour it.
When, like Gerard Hanberry’s friend, they have a few drinks on them, the thirtysomethings can find themselves dismissing religion and Church as, in Hanberry’s phrase, ‘all that medieval twaddle.’ But in their more reflective moments they realise that you can’t just glibly dismiss centuries of ritual and tradition – anymore than you can justify going off meat for life because the local butcher hasn’t got his act together. Especially when, as the years roll by, they begin to experience the gap the loss of a spirituality opens up in their lives and they begin to suspect that they’re mutating into younger versions of their fathers and mothers.
The thirtysomethings are a lost generation, suspended in an in-between world, happy enough to shed their religious affiliation but perplexed by their ongoing hunger for meaning and a spirituality at the heart of life. And sometimes too, wondering what the loss will mean for them and for their children.
THE LESS RULES THE BETTER
Many Catholics today find themselves living their lives at a distance from the Church. And then when they present themselves to a priest to organise a wedding or to baptise a baby, they can feel vulnerable and uneasy. They know and the priest knows that they don’t ‘practice’ and their antennae are sensitivelytuned into any signal that might be interpreted as unacceptance or even rejection on the part of the priest.
* * *
In The Tablet, Daniel O’Leary, a priest in Yorkshire, England, described an encounter he had with a young Catholic couple from ‘a good Catholic family’ who asked to be married in his church. He had never seen them at Mass so he suggested that maybe he should meet them again to chat about it. He never saw them again and word drifted back to him about the perception in the parish that he was ‘a hard man’. `I now know, in my heart’ he writes ‘that I was wrong’.
I think many priests have instances like that which, in retrospect and in pain, they regret. It could be the tone of voice or a bad day or a casual insensitivity but afterwards you know that you got it wrong and the regret seeps in at the edges.
In recent years, pastoral situations have become more complicated and more problematic for the priest. And priests have to manage them with as much sensitivity and tact as possible: irregular marriage situations, the baptism of children whose parents no longer believe; the reception of Communion in theologically awkward situations; and so on.
Like the politician who once said that in an ideal world the best run hospitals would be ones without any patients, in parish life everything can seem utterly clear in a theoretical sense, but once you begin to apply a rule to real life complexity and confusion can abound.
Parish life comes out of a tradition where rules were everything. Now often we don’t know what to do when the rules don’t seem to make much sense anymore. An understandable knee-jerk reaction is to issue a series of diocesan regulations that govern problematic areas: music at weddings; who can be a sponsor at baptism; panegyrics at funeral Masses; and so.
I’m not too sure that devising a whole shaft of new rules to cover every possible situation is all that helpful at all, apart maybe from allowing the individual priest to blame the bishop.
Rules or more rules or no rules don’t absolve the priest at local level from the difficulty of ‘managing’ each situation as it presents itself. The truth is, that every situation is different and needs to be assessed in conjunction with those involved in a non-contentious and collaborative way. And quoting a rule to defend a position often causes more bother than its worth.
Many Catholics today find themselves living their lives at a distance from the Church. And then when they present themselves to a priest to organise a wedding or to baptise a baby, they can feel vulnerable and uneasy. They know and the priest knows that they don’t ‘practice’ – in the sense of weekly worship – and their antennae are sensitively tuned into any signal that might be interpreted as unacceptance or even rejection on the part of the priest.
What they need is someone who will respond to them in a quiet, accepting mode. What they don’t want is someone quoting the latest regulations at them, which they perceive as yet another obstacle Mother Church has placed in their way. And the result is that, like the couple in Daniel O’Leary’s example mentioned above, they just walk away, with everyone losing out, the couple, their children and the Church, to which in some way they want to continue to belong but are now even more alienated than they were.
The truth of the present pastoral scene is that many who continue to regard themselves as Catholics, who still feel they want to belong to the Catholic family, often have little or no contact with the Church apart from baptisms, weddings and funerals. The result is that these occasions have become central in the life of parishes because how the Church, in the person of the priest, manages such occasions, carries a huge weight.
My own view is that the more we multiply rules and regulations -and I’m not saying that we should have no rules, because we have to have rules – the more unbending we may become. And the more unbending we are perceived to become. Most problems and difficulties can be sorted out if a priest and his parishioners sit down in an accepting, non-judgmental and non-combative context and see what, with a bit of give and take, can be worked out. Rules and regulations never cover every possible eventuality. And, sometimes, the one obstruction to an amenable compromise is yet another rule-book that someone somewhere imagined would be helpful.
Priests are often the first point of contact people have with the Church. And we often get it wrong. Getting it right isn’t about handing us another sheaf of rules but helping us to meet the alienated and disaffected (and not just them) with something of the acceptance and compassion of the carpenter of Nazareth.
I’ve never met a priest yet who regretted that he was too compassionate with his people. I’ve met a lot of priests who regret that they were too strict. And when you talk to them, they (and the rest of us) can relate specific instances which they particularly regret.
Everything works perfectly in theory. Throw a few human beings into the mix – especially if one of them is brandishing a new set of rules and the others expect to be rejected – and everything becomes unstuck. Sometimes we manage things better without too many rules.
Other books by Brendan Hoban are: Personally Speaking (1995), The Lisnagoola Chronicles (1995), Sermons for Special Occasions (1997), A Touch of the Heart (2002) and Change or Decay (2004).
