A Plan...Small Steps...Yay!

When the diocesan plan “Consultation to Consensus” was presented in January 2019 as an event at Oscott, it addressed a decline that had been taking a hold for the past forty years and longer. I was frustrated because we were asked to write down words to explain our feelings……teasing out what the concerns might be….I thought out loud….get on with the rescue plan please,

In my school days I attended a Catholic secondary school in Birmingham. Not many of my class mates went to Mass, in the earlier 1980’s. I don’t know, but I wonder how many go now, 40 years later.

My experience as a parish priest is young parents come to the presbytery door (or email me) asking for their child to be baptised and they come from a generation or two of lapsed Catholics. They come most of them, (nearly all) because they want to get a place in school.

There are fewer priests, vocations are struggling when lapsed families are the majority.

There are fewer people belonging to a parish and actively being engaged in the life of a parish.

There is a decline. More could have been done to encourage families to get more involved, but even when things were done, people do not graft on to the vine of the parish, why? There is football, shopping, family, sleep, television, computers, other interests that are a priority to families at the weekend, who are asked to come to Sunday Mass, who are asked politely to come to worship, come together as a natural expression of what you do daily.

Is daily prayer something that is done, is reading the scripture something that is done, is a thirst for a knowledge of God part of people’s day to day experience?

I would say not really, and therefore how do we engage three generations of lapsed Catholic’s with the Good News of Christ, who transforms hearts and engages minds? How do we turn the gaze from a comfortable self interest, to the heavens?

Do people know the teaching of the church, do they agree with it? Is being lapsed indifference or is it a case of objecting to the teaching they hear? Or is it a number of factors that cause people to be lapsed.

“I am bored at Mass” I hear now and again. You will be bored if you are not tuned in to faith or if faith is not touching any part of your life.

Here perhaps is the springboard for a plan, working towards understanding and supporting the lapsed. Our lapsed occupy our school buildings…parents, children, families, what makes it more difficult to engage is when the lapsed are teachers in the schools too. A survey to each family attending our schools…asking are you lapsed? Why are you lapsed? What would bring you back!

The plan which has now become a vision, it is a step, an acknowledgement that the decline has to be addressed.

I felt in 2019 that those formulating the plan were like people sitting in a closed room working out how to put out a fire that was raging outside, and meanwhile the fire is rapidly approaching the door. In the corner of that room there are fire extinguishers idle and unused. As the fire licks the door frame, the people still talk about how to put out the fire, while the fire extinguishers remain in the corner.

What are the fire extinguishers? And how can we employ them.

Not enough priests

Many lapsed, school full while not so many occupy the pews in church

Honesty is the starting point if any plan will succeed.

Please don’t say something is wonderful when quite clearly it is not.