Priest author Brendan Hoban replies to 'Dublin friar'

Below is Brendan Hoban's column, which appears in this week's Western People. It is also posted on the ACP website. It's a nice read, informative, accurate and polite too. A fine piece of writing, indeed, it's brilliant.

Readers will be familiar with the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP). ‘Familiar’, I hear a chorus of voices responding, ‘do you ever stop going on about it?’ Okay, okay, but please indulge me this week because we have been set upon by a Dublin friar and I feel compelled to set the record straight.

We’ve been called ‘a bunch of ageing, disillusioned priests who seem to be always whingeing about what they see as the failings of the church’. What seems to have exercised our critic is our proposal that married men should be ordained to off-set the effective disappearance of priests in Ireland over the next two decades.

Why such a gratuitous attack on the membership of ACP? Well, many believe, when someone has no argument to counter a proposition, personal attack indicates that the debate is conceded. So, in a sense, it could be deemed a compliment of sorts. At the same time insulting and denouncing over 1000 fellow-priests in such sweeping, personal terms, many of them men who have given lifetimes of service to the Catholic Church in Ireland, is hard to take.

Inaccurate too are his claims that public statements from the ACP are the result of the obsessions of the leadership rather than the opinion of the members. Not true. Every year we have an AGM, where the leaders report on the previous year’s activities, where policy is agreed and where leaders are confirmed in their positions. No member of the ACP, if memory serves me right, has objected to any ACP statements, though there are priests who are not members who peddle this false accusation.

Another predictable criticism, made by our Dublin friar and often those who oppose us, is that the ACP is ‘negative’. That’s a word that’s ritually used to dismiss opinions and arguments without actually confronting them. It’s used by those who want our proposals to be dismissed without people considering them. Effectively, it’s a form of censorship. And it’s a form of denial or even fantasy too for those unable to defend credibly the positions they have adopted.

If you can call something or someone ‘negative’ you don’t have to worry about constructing an alternative argument and you don’t have to produce any data to support your position. Even though using the term ‘negative’ is effectively conceding defeat in the argument, interestingly it’s often used when the cupboard of argument is conspicuously empty.

Bishops use the word ‘negative’ to dismiss criticism that’s close to the bone, especially when the criticism can’t be disputed or there are no compelling arguments to refute it. I notice that the Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Charles Brown, used the ‘N’ word too in Knock recently when he dismissed as ‘negative’ those whose opinions differ from his about the Church and the priesthood.

But is it not offensive to priests who have worked 20 or 40 or 50 years in parishes in Ireland to dismiss what they’re saying as ‘negative’ when it’s based on empirical data and those who dismiss it have no alternative workable ideas to offer? Is Peter McVerry ‘negative’? Is theologian Gerry O’Hanlon ‘negative’? Is the respected scripture scholar, the Dominican, Wilfrid Harrington, ‘negative’? 

Are the hundreds of missionaries, who have given lifetimes of committed work on the missions, ‘negative’ if they point out a series of obvious truths about the Irish Church? Or indeed are those of us working day in day out in parishes all over the country ‘negative’ because we point out a series of obvious truths about the Irish Church? Have we not a moral responsibility to speak our truth and break the cycle of silence and fear that has the potential to destroy the Church we have dedicated our lives to serve?

It’s mesmerising that, after all the mistakes the Catholic Church in Ireland has made in the last 30 years, that a sustained effort is now being made to silence those who, with the good of the Church at heart, are asking principled and conscientious questions and proposing workable solutions that will help to sustain the provision of Mass and the sacraments in Ireland.

Is it not reasonable for the ACP to point out, consistently and respectfully, that there are only two diocesan priests under 40 in the 199 parishes of Dublin diocese with a population of over a million Catholics? Is it being disloyal to suggest that the ritual anti-dote for a decline in vocations – prayer and requesting male, celibate men to come forward – is demonstrably not working?

Is it not acceptable to point out that if Church authority keeps dismissing opinions that most people share, then no one should be surprised if that authority loses whatever authority it has left? Ask former Garda Commissioner, Martin Callinan. Ask Pope Emeritus Benedict. Experience tells us that an institution that wants to remain real should unambiguously cherish the critical voices from within.

Change, especially significant change, is difficult and often painful. But the simple and unvarnished truth is that change will have to come if the Irish Catholic Church is not going to melt away.

Five years ago the ACP nailed its colours to the reforming mast of the Second Vatican Council and we will not be deflected from it. There’s no Plan B to offset the decline and we have worked for the last five years at jump-starting a realistic and pragmatic conversation about the future of the Irish Church. Attacks from high up or low down won’t stop us from debating issues that are central to the future life and work of the Church. If we’ve learned anything in the Irish Church over the last few decades, surely it is that shooting the messenger is a failed policy.

The Irish bishops may tell us that our proposals are ‘not feasible’. The papal nuncio may refuse to meet us. Some of the Catholic press, aligned with conservative Catholics fearful of change, may oppose us. But our members, over 1,000 of them, know what’s being said on the ground in parishes and we’re confident that the people, in the main, are with us.

Most importantly, we’re encouraged by Pope Francis, who wants issues of importance to be debated in our Church. He, like us, is committed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. He, like us, is saying that proposals to look at compulsory celibacy should be brought to his desk. And, the obvious truth is that those who are uncomfortable with his policies are uncomfortable with the ACP’s.

Francis is 78, of course – and might be dismissed by our Dublin friar as ‘an ageing, disillusioned priest’ – but he knows the score. I would argue that Francis and the ACP are singing out of the same hymn-sheet, even if others seem determined to drown out our voices.

Note: My latest book, Who will break the bread for us, which deals with the reality and the implications of the vocations’ crisis is now available to download on Kindle from Amazon.com