Priest numbers down 51% in Cork and Ross since 2004

The number of diocesan priests in the Catholic district of Cork and Ross has reduced by more than 50% over the past 20 years, and moving forward more parishes will not have their own resident priest, Bishop Fintan Gavin has said.

The diocese, which is geographically the largest in the country, has an estimated population of about 280,000 Catholics, with average weekly Mass attendance of between 30% and 40%.

Cork and Ross currently has 70 priests assigned to its 68 parishes, and those parishes are organised in to 16 groupings, called families of parishes.

Of those 70 priests, 59 were ordained for ministry in the diocese, while the remaining 11 are on loan from other countries, from religious orders, or from missionary societies.

Some 37 of those diocesan priests were under 75 years of age, while 16 of them were under 65.

Bishop Gavin told The Echo that Cork and Ross had 122 diocesan priests in 2004, meaning that with 59 diocesan priests in 2024, their number has reduced by 51.6% over the past two decades.

He said this decline was due to a combination of deaths, retirements, and a decline in vocations.

“Many priests have died, some relatively young, others are now retired after long years of service, and we have not ordained many priests,” he said.

Bishop Gavin said that despite talk of the Catholic Church being in decline, the overall number of people who engage with it is still increasing, especially at what he called key life moments.

In 2023, there were 2,857 baptisms in Cork and Ross, while 3,706 children received First Holy Communion and 3,552 children were confirmed. There were 2,454 funerals in the diocese in 2023.

“They’re huge numbers, there’s huge work goes into supporting those [services], so trying to support that pastorally, sacramentally, is challenging, when you’re trying to preach the Gospel, make disciples, go on mission, which is what the Church is really about,” he said.

Bishop Gavin said that sometimes people come to the Church for a service rather than to have a real engagement and to help build up a faith community. “We’re trying to look at how we can encourage people to get more involved and engaged and to see this as their Church rather than somewhere they come to get a commodity,” he said.

“We’re asking, ‘What’s the parish about? And if we just keep doing that, will we actually have people in the parish?’

“If we’re not engaging, evangelising, getting new members to commit, to be disciples, will we have them in a generation’s time?”

He said the Church was facing several challenges, with those “who have been very faithful and supportive [wanting] to keep what they have — even if it is not sustainable. More parishes will not have their own resident priests. The priests we have cannot sustain an increased workload. We need to find ways to train, support and fund more positions for lay people to work in the Church,” he said.

“We need to encourage vocations to the priesthood.” Bishop Gavin said many good things are happening in Cork and Ross, with “green shoots” recognisable in the high proportion of immigrants wanting to be part of the Church, and he cited growing communities of Brazilian and Indian Catholics in the diocese.

He said there was a new generation of young people discovering the value of a Christ-centred faith, and he said a recent gathering of 160 young people in UCC was particularly heartening.

“We also had 60 young people, from student nurses to secondary school students all help out with our recent Lourdes pilgrimage, so of the 450 that went, 60 were young people, and there was a whole programme of formation and support with them,” he said.