BY the end of the summer, 16 new ‘families of parishes’ will be invited to a follow-up meeting to discuss the future direction of the diocese of Cork and Ross.
Fr Tom Hayes confirmed that the diocese has recently taken on a person who is going to be entrusted with facilitating those meetings.
The appointment follows on from a gathering held in Rosscarbery, last Saturday, at which Julianne Stanz, who is a retreat leader and consultant on catechesis and evangelisation, spoke of how change affected parishes in the US.
She was speaking to 160 people from 25 parishes in West Cork about her experience of change within her own parish, and how community leadership responded to that change.
‘People came away with a sense of hope and possibility,’ said Fr Hayes, who said it is only in the last decade that there has been a dramatic change in parishes in the dioceses.
‘People are struggling with that,’ he said. ‘Parishes were used to having their own priest and some – two decades ago – might even have had two or three priests,’ he said. ‘Now, some of them have no priests at all.’
The fall-off in attendances is another challenging issue, as is the very big percentage of the younger generation who are not connecting with the church at all.
The pandemic too, said Fr Hayes, has had a huge impact on all of society, and is still being felt in parishes. ‘There are still an awful lot of people who haven’t the courage to be involved in their communities, or their parishes, like they used to be.’
According to Fr Hayes, Julianne was saying this is a point of change but it is not a point of end. ‘It’s a point of rebirth and regrowth,’ he said, ‘and the key to that regrowth is when people step up, and own the parish themselves, and build it, and commit to it, and invite others to put life back into the parish with them.’
