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Ireland in Priest crisis

Posted Friday, August 5, 2011

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No Priests

According to today's Derry Journal there will be no men with an Inishowen background ordained to the priesthood this year and there are only 8 in training for the priesthood from Inishowen.

That's actually quite good as there are only 99 men in training for the priesthood in the whole of Ireland and Inishown, at just under 40,000, has a popultion which is less than 1% of Ireland's population.

On that basis they would only be expected to have one person in training going by the national average.

No Exports

It's the first time ever that the number of potential priests in training in Ireland has dropped below that of England and Wales.

Ireland used to produce priests for Britain, the US and all corners of the globe.

Now it is about to experience a major shortage itself.

Fewer

Only 16 men began training for the priesthood last autumn compared to 39 the year before.

In the 1980s that used to be about 150 a year so that's down by almost 90% since then.

In just 17 years, in 2028, the number of priests in Ireland is expected to fall from 4,700 to only 1,500.

That's about one for every 3,000 Cathloics in Ireland.

Crisis

That's a major crisis for the Catholic Church.

Expect to see a lot more priests from African countries here in the future.

Also, expect a lot of parishes to have to priest share if there are only going to be less than a third of the priests there are now.

They could go the way of nuns who have practically disappeared altogether.