Ask not what your parish can do for you...

Austen Ivereigh
‘Decline” is a word that the best historians treat with suspicion. Can it be said of Spain, for example, that it declined in the 17th century – if in the 16th century its “rise” was a chimera, or at least a temporary phenomenon?
Or take the “decline in priestly vocations”, one of the factors prompting the planned future reorganisation of the Diocese of Westminster. Statistics that accompany the Green Paper on the diocese’s future, published this weekend, show that the ratio of priests to people is now reaching levels typical of the 1940s. The graph shows a dramatic rise in priest numbers in the 1950s and 1960s, the fruit, in part, of the comingof-age of Irish immigrants – and their plentiful offspring – who had arrived only a generation before. If Westminster is now returning to the priest-to-people ratio of the 1940s, can priest numbers really be said to be in decline – or was the 1950s an exceptional blip?
And what happens when we compare Westminster to other dioceses across the world? Until just a few years ago, the mother diocese of England and Wales had the second-highest ratio of priests to people (second only to Malta), a position sustained, in the 1990s, by a sudden large influx of former Anglican clergy. If there is no comparable influx now, are we in decline – or simply adjusting to the kind of ratios familiar to dioceses with flourishing numbers across the world?
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor’s forthcoming diocesan plan – the so-called White Paper, expected in early 2006 – is not an attempt to manage a decline, but a recognition of the need for adjustment to new realities, among them a shifting, but still buoyant, Catholic population. Almost uniquely among dioceses in England and Wales, Westminster has steady, and rising, congregations – the fruit, in part, of London’s immigration boom. About 150,000 Catholics attend its 214 parishes. But the churches and schools are often in the wrong place: Catholics have moved, for example, from inner-city areas to suburbs. A re-thinking of properties and resources is called for. And then there are those shifting priest-topeople ratios. Every parish must continue to have a priest, but in many he may not, in future, be resident. If he is resident, he may in the future have care of two, even three, parishes.
Not to look this future in the eye would be complacent. Hence the “Graced by the Spirit” consultation, launched by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor in 2003, which asked parishes and deaneries to give their view of what needs to happen in the future. The response was terrific: more than twothirds (74 per cent) of parishes – as well as 19 out of 23 deaneries – furnished summaries of their discussions, which were then collated and analysed in Archbishop’s House. A small group of priests and lay people – under the vicar general, Mgr John Arnold – met to extract from the replies a vision for the future, which we then matched with authoritative Church documents from the Second Vatican Council and the pontificate of John Paul II. The result is a 20-page document which should be compelling reading to anyone concerned about the future of our Church.
Do we envisage – as Freddy Gray wondered in these pages when he last year interviewed my soon-to-be-departing colleague, Sir Stephen Wall – “a dismantled parish system”? We do not. The parish will continue to be the village spring of our Church. But it “will need to be seen no longer primarily as the place where people go simply to have their needs meet”, in the words of the Green Paper, “but where each and every one is challenged to exercise their baptismal calling” – a future in which “parishioners see the maintenance of the daily life of the parish not as the responsibility primarily of the priest but of all”. Belonging to a parish will mean, therefore, each Catholic seeing him or herself as part of the Body, one whose gifts and energies will be needed to build up and maintain our parishes.
The term for this is “lay apostolate”. The Catechism is worth reading on the subject: it speaks of “two participations in the one priesthood of Christ” shared by all the faithful, ordained or not. Ministerial priesthood is ordered to building up the priesthood of all the baptised – and is in turn built up by it. Both need to be exercised. In Novo Millennio Ineunte, Pope John Paul II said the Church needed now to “encourage all the baptised and confirmed to be aware of their active responsibility in the Church’s life”, and spelled out what the lay apostolate means. “Together with the ordained ministry, other ministries, whether formally instituted or simply recognised, can flourish for the good of the whole community, sustaining it in all its many needs: from catechesis to liturgy, from the education of the young to the widest array of charitable works.” This is not, note, “volunteering to help Father”, but hearing the call to leadership and ministry. It means formation in theology, spirituality and doctrine. It means prayer and devotion. It means ministries (and maybe even salaries) which to some extent share in the bishop’s mandate – what are known in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, if not in canon law, as “ecclesial lay ministries”.
But where, then, does a priest’s authority end, and a lay minister’s begin? What is proper to the ordained ministry, and what not? How can lay people take on authority and responsibility without eroding the uniqueness – and the precious ecclesiology implicit in – the Sacrament of Holy Orders? Some of our most intense and interesting discussions in the Analysis Group turned on precisely these questions. They are not easy to answer, and the Green Paper does not attempt to – only to identify this as a discussion which the Church will increasingly need to hold.
One thing, however, is clear from the consultation. Priests are frustrated that more lay people do not shoulder responsibility for their parishes; and many lay people are frustrated that their gifts and abilities are resisted or not recognised. So the Green Paper suggests, gently, that “there is a need for the diocese to invite a more creative and effective reordering of gifts and energy in the Body of Christ, one which embraces the opportunity presented by the awakening of the gifts of lay people which are flourishing in unprecedented numbers and in new ways.” Some will fear this means a new tranche of parish apparatchiks and clericalised laity making life miserable for “ordinary” parishioners. But that is not what the Green Paper points to. It argues for a new emphasis on devotion, on profound liturgies, on recruiting new priests. But is also calling for “ordinary parishioners” to see themselves as extraordinary. It is calling for a new focus on evangelisation and vocation, emphasising the importance of the interior life and the Eucharist. It is calling for everyone, according to their gifts, to take their proper place in the Church through service, worship, and witness. It is calling for a recognition that priests have for too long been lumbered with a mission that just as properly belongs to all the baptised.
There is no contradiction in these objectives. A vigorous lay apostolate – as the movements show – does not undermine priestly vocations, but fosters them. Parishes which share resources with their neighbours might be less parochial, but they are no less parishes. Vigorous small communities do not undermine the single Eucharistic community, but build it up.
The People of God have spoken. And decline is not on their minds.
Dr Austen Ivereigh is press secretary to the Archbishop of Westminster