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On the face of it, Catholics in Ireland should not be particularly upset that their numbers have shrunk by about 300,000 between 2011 and 2022, as was revealed in the census figures published by the CSO yesterday. According to those figures, self-declared Catholics now make up only 69% of the population, as opposed to 84% a decade ago.
The true figure for “Catholic” – in any kind of meaningful sense – is probably much closer to 35% than it is to 69%. That is based on the fact that in the most recent surveys to measure the number, 35% is about the number of Irish people who consider themselves to be weekly mass attenders. Which means, if both numbers are true, that just under half of all Irish Catholics don’t bother attending mass, which is sort of fundamental to being Catholic.
This is the difficulty with the census figures when it comes to religion: They do not measure religiosity, but identity.
It is this issue of identity that is plaguing our poor blighted policymakers: Yesterday, I wrote about the reasons that the State’s policy of removing schools from Church patronage was going so badly. It was behind the paywall then, but you can have a little bit of it today for free:
Irish people are not “religious” in the traditional sense: Weekly mass attendance is not high. Genuine belief in the almighty and the resurrection and heaven and hell and all of that is on the decline. The proportion of people calling themselves Catholic in the census is slowly falling. Yet note that word: Slowly.
There is still enormous demand for Catholic weddings and funerals. Catholic coming of age ceremonies like communion and confirmation are still in huge demand and seen as important moments. Irish people, or a large number of them, have managed to divorce the beliefs of the church from the rituals of the church, and found that they still quite enjoy the rituals. They may not be devout catholics, but they very much like having a little bit of religion around for when they need it.
One thing that should be abundantly clear is that while traditional religiosity is in significant decline, the human need for meaning and moral clarity is as strong in the Irish as ever: I suspect for example that there is a strong correlation between those who identify as having no religion, and those significantly concerned about Climate Change. That has been identified in studies in other countries, and there is no reason why it would not also be true here. Substituting “Mother Earth” for god and “pollution” for sin provides a moral framework reasonably analogous to anything laid out in the Bible or the Koran; and if anything probably provides more opportunities for the true believer to act out their faith in the real world than any of the older religions do.
What’s also clear I think is that in Ireland views of the Church as an institution and Catholicism as a faith are distinct and separate, but not in the way one might think. If you were to land in Ireland from outer space and read the recent history of the Irish Church, you might expect to find that faith in God was still strong, but attachment to the Church had dwindled. If anything, it’s the opposite.
The Church still commands a significant supermajority of the population who identify with it, at least in name, but only a third or so of the population who take their faith seriously enough to practice it weekly. That suggests that affinity with the Church as a community institution is much stronger than affinity with the Church as a religious institution. It suggests that many amongst the 69% who call themselves Catholic call themselves Catholic in the same way that your correspondent calls himself a customer of Allied Irish Bank: They see it as a service provider, rather than something fundamental to their identity. To many of them it still exists as a place for the community to congregate to mark big occasions, and the prayers and rituals are little more than a familiar cadence rather than something laden with any meaning.
I write advisedly: I am such a Catholic myself.
For this reason, I tend to cringe when I hear talk about the Church needing to “win back the trust” of the Irish people, for it is not, on balance, their trust that it has lost. Nearly 70% of us are still happy to be associated with the Church. The problem is simply that we’re associating with an institution, not a set of beliefs.
The Church’s bigger problem is that it is not supposed to be a community organisation. It is a religious organisation that very often seems to take the religious part of its job entirely unseriously. A Church that is half full of people who think that its prayers are blather, but incense smells nice, is not much of a Church. If it took its job seriously, it should probably consider kicking people like me out altogether: We’re not in the house of worship to worship, but to be comforted by our faith without actually embracing the demands of it. That’s cheating.
Traditionalist Catholics often talk about a Church that is smaller and purer. For what it’s worth, I think they’re right. But for the moment, they’re only getting half what they want. The Church in Ireland is becoming smaller, slowly. But it is decidedly not becoming purer. There are lots of us out there that remain Catholic in name only. It’s us that the Church should be challenging.
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