Survey reveals serious and growing split

What the survey reveals is a serious and growing divergence between orthodox Catholic Church teaching emanating from Rome and what the faithful in Ireland actually believe.

The Contemporary Catholic Perspectives survey scotches the notion that Irish Catholics are avowedly traditional and don’t want to contemplate change, finding substantial majorities in favour of married priests and women priests. On a positive note, the survey found that 35% attend Mass once a week and that 51% attend once or more each month. Only 5% never attend Mass.

“This is very a significant number of people attending Mass, higher than in most European countries,” said Fr Sean McDonagh, representing the Association of Catholic Priests at the launch of the survey, conducted for it by Amárach Research, in Dublin yesterday.

Nevertheless, in the 1970s, weekly Mass attendance for Catholics in Ireland was recorded at between 88% and 95%. It dropped below 80% in the latter part of the 1980s. Since the early 1990s, the graph is downwards.

The Council for Research and Development, under the auspices of the Irish Bishops Conference, has conducted a number of surveys on religious values and practice in Ireland.

It noted that the European Social Survey data for 2006 recorded a 56% weekly or more Mass attendance among all Catholics on the island of Ireland. At that time, it was suggested that a new norm of monthly Mass attendance was firmly established for a majority of Irish Catholics.

Four years later, the council’s own study showed that this attendance figure had dropped again and it also revealed a disparity between northern Catholics and their southern brethren. The data from the CRD’s European Values Survey 4th wave, published in Sept 2010, found that among Catholics living in the Republic of Ireland, 45.2% attended Mass on a weekly or more often basis, while the figure for Catholics in the North was 59%. The all-island figure was put at 48%.

The study by the CRD, which had a far wider brief, also looked at confidence in the health, education and justice systems, how politicians, the civil service and the police were viewed, as well as attitudes towards the institutional Church.

Notwithstanding that the Church emerged the winner in the confidence stakes, the figures were hardly laudatory.

In the Republic, confidence in the Church stood at just under 19% while in the North, the figure was 38.5%.

The current survey does not address these issues directly but it does not take much of a leap of faith to extrapolate from the results the widely held belief that ‘faith’ in the Catholic Church here is at an all-time low.

There is, at the very least, a huge gap between the views of laity and the Church authorities.

“On the basis of this survey, what Irish Catholics want is compassion and tolerance rather than the defence of absolute positions; local input rather than central control; a people’s Church rather than a clerical Church,” remarked Fr Bobby Gilmore.

“For the first time in many years, we now have reliable, credible and up-to-date statistics on the practice of Catholics, their attitudes and their opinions. Finding out where we are is always a first step in finding where we want to go.”

The survey is expected to inform the deliberations of the ACP sponsored conference, Towards an Assembly of the Irish Catholic Church, on May 7 in the Regency Hotel, Dublin.