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Post by guillaume on Feb 3, 2010 16:15:40 GMT
Number of seminarists in Ireland : 1972 : 1144 1977 : 1104 1982 : 1116 1987 : 992 1992 : 781 1997 : 386 2002 : 206 2007 : 178Thanks to the VII Council ?
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Feb 4, 2010 8:54:30 GMT
I am not going to ask Guillaume for a source, because I find the figures credible. I would like a breakdown though - whether they are reflective of both diocesan and religious clerical students, what seminaries etc. I suspect the collapse of religious and monastic life in Ireland has a lot to do with the freefall, as there is a pick-up in diocesan vocations (even among religious, the Dominicans are going against the trend).
However, the figures might be more dire - for example the Scottish hierarchy took the decision to send their students for Maynooth, so there are students in Maynooth for about 8 Scottish dioceses too. Are these included in the last figure? If so the decline since 2002 is even more pronounced. But there are other factors we need to know - attrition rate for example. I'll explain - if 75% left the seminary in the 1970s before ordination but only 50% do so now, the figures need not look so dire.
I should say I do not blame the Second Vatican Council for this. There was no notable collapse in the immediate aftermath of the Council. The contrary - a lot of seminaries were still expanding. To take two orders discussed elsewhere - the Irish Dominican province had three large seminaries full to capacity - St Mary's, Tallaght; San Clemente, Rome; and the Irish College in Lisbon (yes this was still open). They had to get volunteers to go to Chicago. The Irish Augustinian Province received 32 clerical novices in 1968. They also had at least a half dozen non-clerical novices. This was just one year's intake. Since then, it has been basically downhill, though the Dominicans are making a slight recovery. I would like to see figures for the bigger clerical orders like the Franciscans and the Jesuits. In the middle 1980s, the Franciscans were still attracting nearly 20 novices a year.
However, to return to the point, I don't blame VII but the disorder which crept into the Irish Church. This wasn't even in the immediate aftermath, but followed later, especially through the late 1970s and 1980s. Since 1992 (Bishop Casey's resignation was a significant turning point) it has been a case of free fall.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Feb 4, 2010 8:56:13 GMT
By the way, happy birthday Guillaume.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Feb 4, 2010 12:10:13 GMT
Agreed. Happy Birthday, Guillaume.
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Post by guillaume on Feb 4, 2010 12:57:05 GMT
I am not going to ask Guillaume for a source, because I find the figures credible. I would like a breakdown though - whether they are reflective of both diocesan and religious clerical students, what seminaries etc. I suspect the collapse of religious and monastic life in Ireland has a lot to do with the freefall, as there is a pick-up in diocesan vocations (even among religious, the Dominicans are going against the trend). However, the figures might be more dire - for example the Scottish hierarchy took the decision to send their students for Maynooth, so there are students in Maynooth for about 8 Scottish dioceses too. Are these included in the last figure? If so the decline since 2002 is even more pronounced. But there are other factors we need to know - attrition rate for example. I'll explain - if 75% left the seminary in the 1970s before ordination but only 50% do so now, the figures need not look so dire. I should say I do not blame the Second Vatican Council for this. There was no notable collapse in the immediate aftermath of the Council. The contrary - a lot of seminaries were still expanding. To take two orders discussed elsewhere - the Irish Dominican province had three large seminaries full to capacity - St Mary's, Tallaght; San Clemente, Rome; and the Irish College in Lisbon (yes this was still open). They had to get volunteers to go to Chicago. The Irish Augustinian Province received 32 clerical novices in 1968. They also had at least a half dozen non-clerical novices. This was just one year's intake. Since then, it has been basically downhill, though the Dominicans are making a slight recovery. I would like to see figures for the bigger clerical orders like the Franciscans and the Jesuits. In the middle 1980s, the Franciscans were still attracting nearly 20 novices a year. However, to return to the point, I don't blame VII but the disorder which crept into the Irish Church. This wasn't even in the immediate aftermath, but followed later, especially through the late 1970s and 1980s. Since 1992 (Bishop Casey's resignation was a significant turning point) it has been a case of free fall. The source is from a book in French quoted in the famous leforumcatholique.org, so we can trust it. I am surprised that you do not see any link between the fall down of religious vocations AND faithfulness of people in Ireland, especially the youth, and everywhere and the VII council. For me it is obvious. Have you ever seen a new mass celebrated by a young priest ? The faster the better, the simpler the better. Regarding seminaries, you seem to forget that traditional seminaries are flourishing. Yet, I agree some orders are successful, as mother Theresa's missionaries of charity. But there is no doubt that the youth are more interested and attracted in a tradi way of celebrating the mass that the new form. Because they want their call to be totally fruitful. In a country like Ireland, where the majority of priests are over 60, same for the faithful, hurt by those scandals, ruined by alcohol and drugs and now economic recession, influence of the medias, spirit of the world, while the catholic church is just falling asleep and most of time ridicules herself by bad liturgy, bad homily, bad teachings, neo protestantism, false ecumenism, brakes on the application of the Mot Proprio Summorum Pontifiicum by the bishops, horrible communication, etc, etc... You tell me how come a young one called will find his way ?
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 4, 2010 13:04:20 GMT
Happy birthday, Guillaume. I'm somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, I suspect that there would have been a decline in Irish vocations even if there had been no Vatican II because of the opening up of alternative educational and employment opportunities, the influence of an increasingly secularised entertainment culture etc. (You can read this as suggesting that many earlier vocations were not fully authentic, or that many authentic vocations were stifled by increased distractions a la Demas "led astray by the lure of the world" who features in one of St. Paul's Epistles; probably a bit of both.) On the other hand, I think the post-Vatican II upheavals contributed to the loss of vocations because there was a loss of confidence about what a priest/religious does, why it is important to be one, etc. Raw figures don't count for much by themselves. One point that does need to be made is that in the post-Vatican II decade it was widely predicted that there would be an INCREASE in vocations as a result of the Council, new seminaries were opened and old ones expanded to prepare for the expected influx, etc. It's quite legitimate to ask why that prediction was not fulfilled.
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Feb 5, 2010 22:12:06 GMT
I would suggest that another cause for the decline in vocations and the fall-off in religious practice was that people in general became better educated and more confident. Many men and women in the religious teaching orders were not well educated. Before Vatican II they got away with repeating what they had learned by rote, which at least had been written for them by intelligent people; within a few years of Vatican II they were no longer properly taught and just started spouting ignorant nonsense. Younger people, with a bit of education and aspirations to being proper intellectuals like foreign people were, with French cigarettes and maybe some sex and all, naturally found them something convenient to reject and define themselves against. Thus we have Fintan O'Toole.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 9, 2010 12:15:35 GMT
In relation to one of Guillaume's points - he gives as an example of deterioration brought about by Vatican II that whenever he sees a young priest say the NO/OF they operate on the principle "the faster the better, the simpler the better". The trouble with this is that it is a matter of notoriety that before the Vatican Council the Tridentine/EF rite was often celebrated in a very rushed manner. I have seen references to a 1950s PP of St. Audoen's (Dublin) who was known as "Flash Harry" because he habitually said 15-minute masses. I remember some years ago seeing an argment about this on a US blog; one participant who attended a dayschool run by a religious order in upstate New York recalled that they used to have 10-minute Masses before classes began (and defended it on the grounds that because of the schoolbus times etc it was not possible to have a longer ceremony). There was indeed a good deal of empty formalism before the liturgical changes, and those changes were meant to address it; the trouble is that the cure has in some ways ended up worse than the disease.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 9, 2010 12:19:31 GMT
Alasdair, I don't think you have quite answered guillaume's point. He argues that even if the falling-off did not begin immediately after the Council, they were nonetheless caused by it albeit with a time-lapse. The problem with this argument is that it can be turned against Guillaume - could it be that they also represent the working-out of problems that were present BEFORE the Council (e.g. authoritarianism, snobbery, provincialism?)
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 9, 2010 12:27:05 GMT
Michael G: a very good point, and I think one which might be summed up in terms of PROVINCIALISM. There was a delusion that Irish society was more self-sufficient than it was or could be, and this led in so many ways to compromises in standards; when we became more exposed to other societies these limitations were cruelly exposed. I'm not sure this is quite the whole story, though, because for some decades earlier many of those aspiring to wider European civilisation looked to European Catholicism (if Fintan O'Toole had been born 10 or 15 years earlier, he might have ended up as Fr. Fintan O'Toole SJ; conversely, if certain clerics had been a decade or two younger they migt have been even more like Fintan O'Tooles than they are, and I think part of their trendiness is driven by a haunting sense that they might have been lured into their vocations under false pretences). It's part of a wider upheaval in Catholicism and indeed in western civilsation, which can't simply be attributed to the Council though the Council was part of it.
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Post by Askel McThurkill on Feb 9, 2010 12:33:09 GMT
The PP in St Audoen's was known as Flash Kavanagh and he said a weekday Mass in the 1950s at 12.45 pm which was over, according to my late father who regularly attended, before 1 pm. I have also heard that Father Kavanagh was quick at confessions - a radio interviewee alleged he heard the confessions of married couples together. I don't know this to be true - I heard it on the radio and it sounds like hearsay - but if true it was inappropriate to say the least, and this is a story rooted in pre-conciliar rigourism.
Two further obs re: Hib's point. I heard of crowds at the High Mass in the Pro-Cathedral on Sunday who would rise en masse and leave when the priest saying his private Mass on the side altar was finished on the grounds they attended Mass (which was true). I also heard of a boys' boarding school in New York State in the same era ( the 1950s), where the boarders observed the SDB fathers saying their private low Masses in the chapel at morning prayer, and put bets on who would finish first. Not very edifying.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Feb 9, 2010 15:24:01 GMT
if Fintan O'Toole had been born 10 or 15 years earlier, he might have ended up as Fr. Fintan O'Toole SJ I think he would be more a fire and brimstone spouting Fr Fintan O'Toole CSsR.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Feb 10, 2010 12:35:10 GMT
I like the image of Fintan O'Toole as a pre-conciliar Redemptorist; he certainly does use his column as a pulpit ;D
I should say I reacted a bit sharply to Guillaume. Of course the Second Vatican Council and, in particular, the manner in which it was applied had an effect on vocations in Ireland. But I believe that several factors came together and combined. Without the Second Vatican Council, there may still have been a falling off anyway.
One factor I would address is the instance of young people being pushed in the direction of priesthood/religious life until just over a generation ago, particularly in rural Ireland. The late poet Michael Hartnett, born West Limerick in 1941, has a story about his first love. His first serious teenage girlfriend broke up with him because her family expected her to become a nun, though they had talked about marriage. The only reason for the break was that she was following her family wishes to enter the convent, which she did not agree with. The woman left her order (I presume Presentation or Mercy) in the 1990s after almost 40 years there and approached Hartnett (who was then separated; he had been married) and broached the question of getting back with him, which he wasn't interested in. It is very clear that this woman did not have a vocation to be a nun, but persevered in a convent for most of her life thinking about her first love. How many more of these were there? I refer to the folk song, 'The Rose of Mooncoin', which contains the lines "Oh, Molly, oh Molly it breaks my fond heart/to know that we two forever must part/I'll think of you Molly where sun and moon shine/on the banks of the Suir that flow down by Mooncoin". The reason the narrator parted forever with Molly, the Rose of Mooncoin, was because she was entering a convent to become a nun.
To draw a conclusion, I believe many people entered seminary and religious life because it was expected of them or because their parents coerced them. I am not saying all these made bad priests or religious, but that this was an unhealthy thing. Matchmaking by parents, for example, was also unhealthy even if someone can show me such couples who spent their lives happily together and I know many couples who came together voluntarily and were anything but happy.
I am not throwing up the point of coerced or forced vocations before the council to refute Guillaume's point, but only to point out it was a factor in the high vocations figures and that it is a very good thing, I hope, if it is gone. But I worry that it is not in the attitude of some trad families towards vocation...
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 10, 2010 13:11:30 GMT
I agree with Alasdair about the existence of forced vocations/social pressures in the earlier period, though I might have a few caveats:
(1) I am not sure that matchmaking by parents was NECESSARILY unhealthy, it would depend on such things as the parents' motivations, the extent to which the child was allowed a degree of choice/autonomy. It assumes a very localised and unchanging society in which people's roles are fairly well-established and people ahve wide networks of relatives and acquaintances (and where, I might add, the family is the main support network and marriage is seen as the passage from childhood to full adult status, so that it is something to which people aspire). Direct coercion (which was pretty common) or total denial of any say in the matter (Canon Sheehan has an unintentionally chilling passage in one of his novels where he depicts a girl being told by her mother to go to Confession because she is to be married next Thursday and she accepts without even asking the man's name, whereupon Sheehan bursts forth into a rhapsody about how much healthier this is than the "emotionalism" and "sentimentalism" of modern courtship) are another matter.
(2) Where in "The Rose of Mooncoin" does it say the girl is entering a convent? I have never heard a verse saying that; the impression I got was that they were parted because the young man was obliged to emigrate, rather than that he was emigrating because she was entering a convent, voluntarily or otherwise. (It's a 1940s Tin Pan Alley ballad rather than a folksong, so I would be surprised if there was a "real" story behind it.)
(3) One issue in relation to the vocations crisis is that the nineteenth and twentieth-century European and North American Church relied to a great extent on vocations drawn from the peasantry and small-town societies of Ireland, Belgium, France, Spain and some other countries. These not only supplied their own countries' needs but provided a substantial "export surplus". The American Church was not producing enough native vocations to meet its own needs even before the Council and with the support of the traditional working-class 'urban ghetto' societies that existed there then. These reservoirs have run dry through a variety of social changes, some of which operated quite independently of the Council (urbanisation, suburbanisation, etc) and a substitute has not been found.
(4) There is I think an extent to which the point about social pressures works both ways. Nowadays there is considerable social pressure AGAINST developing a vocation (a more sexualised and increasingly aggressively secular society, different parental expectations based on smaller families and a greater degree of "investment" in education, the clerical vocation's loss of secular prestige, uncertainty about what it is that priests and religious actually DO given that they have lost so many traditional roles and so much of the traditional teaching about the clerical state/religious life is being called into question even within the Church) and it seems to me that instead of challenging these trends the Church tends to acquiesce in them and even go along with them. I don't think something like the old "minor seminary" system should ever be revived for obvious reasons, but I do think that the Church should be more willing to accept teenagers to try their vocation, rather than telling them to go away/get a degree/make your mind up when you're older, because delaying can amount to a decision in itself, without the person who is making the decision realising what he is doing.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Feb 10, 2010 16:14:43 GMT
I agree with Alasdair about the existence of forced vocations/social pressures in the earlier period, though I might have a few caveats: (1) I am not sure that matchmaking by parents was NECESSARILY unhealthy, it would depend on such things as the parents' motivations, the extent to which the child was allowed a degree of choice/autonomy. It assumes a very localised and unchanging society in which people's roles are fairly well-established and people ahve wide networks of relatives and acquaintances (and where, I might add, the family is the main support network and marriage is seen as the passage from childhood to full adult status, so that it is something to which people aspire). Direct coercion (which was pretty common) or total denial of any say in the matter (Canon Sheehan has an unintentionally chilling passage in one of his novels where he depicts a girl being told by her mother to go to Confession because she is to be married next Thursday and she accepts without even asking the man's name, whereupon Sheehan bursts forth into a rhapsody about how much healthier this is than the "emotionalism" and "sentimentalism" of modern courtship) are another matter. I agree these are not necessarily bad, but the Sheehan quote is frightening. I was analogising between arranged marriages and forced vocations. I only have anectdotal evidence but I did hear of it from a few sources. The Hartnett story on the other hand I heard a radio interview with the poet before he died. Quebec, I imagine, was another such reservoir before the Quiet Revolution. Agreed. I think also in the days of large rural families, parents saw in religious life a way of guarranteeing the physical well being of their offspring. Now the social pressure is going the other way.
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