2012-08-20    Letters Extra (Tablet) 

Second letter is from www.v2catholic.com UK blogger Chris McDonnell

Background:      Aug 1 article by Chris  

Priestly numbers

Fr Brendan Hoban of the Diocese of Killala has done us all a service (“Stark warnings on Irish vocations shortage”, News from Britain and Ireland , 28 July). He calculates that his diocese will only have eight priests in 2032. 

Projecting the future is not an easy task. We need the services once more of a body like the Newman Demographic Survey which, in the hands of Anthony Spencer, did such useful work in the past. Since the dates of birth of Westminster diocesan clergy are given in the Year Book, it ought to be easy to calculate how many priests will have retired at the age of 75 in 10 years’ time.

But which figures does one rely on? The 2011 Year Book says there were then 415 Westminster diocesan priests. But by 2012 this figure drops to 342. Can there have been 73 deaths and departures in one year? Surprisingly, the number of priests from other dioceses serving in Westminster goes up over the same period from 49 to 107. Why are other dioceses being so generous to Westminster ? Assuming that no priests leave before 75, it looks to me as if there will be in Westminster a total reduction of nearly 70 in the next 10 years. That means there will be about 270 diocesan priests left out of the current ones.

On this basis, parish closures and amalgamations are inevitable. Even to keep the 2012 level, the seminary will have to produce about 10 new priests for Westminster every year. But maths was never my best subject. What we need is a serious demographic study of the numbers and ages of the priests in England and Wales to plan sensibly for the future.

Bruce Kent

London N4

More data needed to understand vocations decline

Bruce Kent's letter last week, (The Tablet, 4 August) raises some very pertinent issues. I undertook an analysis of the Birmingham position twelve months ago, using data available in the public domain from the Diocesan Handbook. It raised some interesting and worrying questions.

When the statistics for birth date, ordination date and number of ordinations per year are examined, there is a very evident and, I would suggest, serious shortfall in recent years.

It would be informative if nationally we were able to obtain similar data from each diocese in England and Wales . Given the crisis that we are facing, with the real possibility of parish mergers, it would be most helpful if someone could undertake this task on behalf of the Bishops of England and Wales and make that data available to the church throughout the country. Planning within each diocese demands a realistic appraisal of the facts based on reliable information.

Chris McDonnell, Secretary of the Movement for Married Clergy
Staffordshire

Bruce Kent writes (The Tablet, 4 August) that "projecting the future is not an easy task. We need the services once more of a body like the Newman Demographic Survey (NDS) which, in the hands of Anthony Spencer, did such useful work in the past".

When the NDS, the goose that had laid so many golden eggs, was killed in 1964 one of the two successor bodies was the Pastoral Research Centre, now a charitable company limited by guarantee. When preparing Vol I of its Digest of Statistics of the Catholic Community of England & Wales, 1958-2005, I computed the age structure of the secular clergy of Westminster at 31 December (seven years), Menevia (six), and Wrexham (five). As an outsider I found this very time-consuming, and the case of Westminster it revealed many anomalies. It should be quick and easy for an insider in the diocesan administration. So when I started work on the Supplement to Vol. I I wrote to all 22 dioceses and asked for their latest age structure figures. Not one was able (and/or willing) to supply them.

So in 2009 and 2010 I started to spend a great deal of time trying to calculate the age structure of the secular clergy of almost half the dioceses, from published and unpublished lists of names with years of birth. The difficulty of the job (for an outsider) is illustrated for Westminster by Bruce Kent. Its 2012 Year Book includes:

• A list of diocesan priests (by year of ordination)

• An alphabetical list of the secular clergy of the diocese (including years of birth and ordination)

• Obituaries of those recently dead

• A daily list of anniversaries of deaths of diocesan clergy, and

• A list of all other priests in the diocese (regulars and secular priests of other dioceses).

Putting all this data onto spreadsheets - not just for one edition of the Year Book but for a usefully long sequence - soon reveals many anomalies: priests suddenly appearing (even after death) or disappearing without explanation, probably as a result of incardination or excardination, quitting the priesthood, Anglican conversions, etc.

Eventually, with Westminster unfinished, and half a dozen other dioceses not started, I put the work aside and turned to another pressing issue, the statistical blackout that followed the re-creation of the Catholic Education Council as the Catholic Education Service, a blackout that lasted fifteen years, 1992-2006 - and was then replaced by the selective publication of Catholic school statistics for 2007 and subsequent years. Both enterprises proved massively time consuming. The second cannot be decentralised, but the preparation of the statistics of secular clergy by age could be - if I had voluntary collaborators willing to struggle with the data for their own dioceses, using a collection of local diocesan directories. At one stage the NDS ad c.200 graduates and professionals working on a voluntary basis. Now (apart from its trustees) the Pastoral Research Centre Trust has one - myself.

Anthony Spencer,  Taunton