Courtney McGrailDeclining vocations coupled with falling Mass attendance may see churches in the Diocese of Limerick unable to offer weekly Sunday Masses in the future, Bishop Brendan Leahy has warned.
Speaking during a wide-ranging interview with The Limerick Leader, the bishop readily acknowledged the scale of challenges facing his diocese in the modern era.
“We are not trying to pretend it isn’t there,” he said of the decreasing priestly numbers.
“One of the things we are doing here is we have moved more clearly towards a team ministry model, that is three or four priests looking after several parishes together. There will be teething problems because it’s new and we have to think it through but we have to move in that direction,” he said.
However, looking further into the future, and one with no appreciable change in vocations, Bishop Leahy said “How can [a priest] be the parish priest of two or three parishes? He can’t keep going with all the work and administration, so we are going to have to reflect on it.”
But, on the specific issue of the celebration of Mass, Bishop Leahy said the reality is that “what we may have is that not every church will have Mass every Sunday, it might be that some churches will have Mass every second Sunday or one Sunday a month.”