David Quinn
Photo: Pixnio / Marko Milivojevic. In the space of just 10 years the number of Catholic weddings taking place in Ireland has fallen by half. If that is not a sign of the times, it’s hard to know what is. But what exactly is it a sign of?
Let’s have a look at the facts and figures before trying to work that out. Last week, the Central Statistics Office produced a report showing the types of wedding ceremonies couples opted for in 2014 compared with 2024. The most striking statistic, as mentioned, is the fall in Catholic weddings from 13,071 in 2014 to 6,425 in 2024.
It means that out of the 20,348 weddings that took place in 2024, only 31.6% were Catholic compared with 59.3% in 2014.
Civil weddings are now the most popular option at 33.1% of the total. But actually, that’s not a big rise compared with 2014 when they accounted for 28%. Therefore, the increase in the number of civil weddings has not made up for the huge fall in Catholic weddings. So, what’s going on? Who is ‘benefitting’ from the big drop in church wedding ceremonies instead?
Change
The answer is a category called ‘other religious’. They now account for around a quarter of all weddings compared with just 0.3% in 1994.
At first, you might assume that the rise in ‘other religious’ ceremonies is due to Ireland becoming much more multicultural. For example, maybe there has been a big rise in the number of Muslim weddings?
But that’s not the case. Only 45 such weddings took place in 2024 compared with 42 ten years before, a tiny increase.
I spoke to a leading Irish Muslim about this last year. I asked him how there could be a big increase in the number of Muslims in Ireland without a big increase in the number of Muslims weddings. He told me that a lot of Muslims have a Muslim wedding ceremony first, and then later a civil ceremony so it is recognised by the State.
Maybe a lot of the ‘other religious’ ceremonies are Protestant? That’s not the case either. In fact, the number of Church of Ireland weddings has dropped by 56% in the last 10 years from 443 in 2014 to 193 in 2024.
Presbyterian weddings have fallen from 81 to 46.
That is, Christian wedding ceremonies are plunging more or less across the board. This is not affecting the Catholic Church only.
So, to return to the question, what are these ‘other religious’ weddings? Well, as revealed in an Iona Institute report from 2024 by Breda O’Brien, they almost all come under a heading that can be loosely called ‘New Age’. The Iona Institute obtained the breakdown of ‘other religious’ from the CSO, and now the CSO itself has published those figures.
The media could not look past the big fall in the number of Catholic weddings or the fact that civil weddings now outnumber Catholic ones”
Under the ‘other religious’ category, we discover that 1,064 weddings were conducted by something call ‘OneSpirit Ireland’. That’s more than five times the number conducted by the Church of Ireland.
Another 985 were conducted by ‘Entheos Ireland’ which was founded by someone who calls herself the ‘Bald Priestess’. The ‘Earth Spiritualist Tradition’ carried out 615.
You may be interested to know that seven were conducted under the heading ‘Pagan Wedding Custom of Handfasting’, while six came under something called the ‘Irish Pagan Tradition’.
If you really want to read the ‘signs of the times’, therefore, this is what you need to be coming to grips with.
Unfortunately (and typically), most of the media could not look past the big fall in the number of Catholic weddings or the fact that civil weddings now outnumber Catholic ones.
For example, a piece in The Sunday Independent by Sarah Breen was headlined ‘Let’s raise a glass to the happy news that Catholic weddings are in decline’. Breen thinks it is all part and parcel of the general decline of the Catholic Church in Ireland and therefore this can only be a good thing.
She mocks Catholic wedding ceremonies saying the “priests can be unpredictable and doddery”, while a “massive statue of a man nailed to a cross wearing a crown of thorns kind of kills the vibe”.
She says, “I have never associated a church with joy”. Maybe that’s because she comes in with the blinkers on? I have seen many happy baptism and Holy Communion and Confirmation ceremonies in church, apart from weddings of course. No-one seemed too distracted by the crucifix.
Analysis
What Breen entirely missed in her analysis was the decline in Protestant ceremonies as well, plus the fact that fewer people are getting married, full stop, plus the fact that a lot are now getting married in ‘New Age’ ceremonies. That is a lot not to spot.
Having laid out the facts and figures more fully than Breen, let’s see what they tell us about the ‘signs of the times’. Yes, they do tell us that ‘organised religion’ is in decline, something that is affecting all the main Churches.
Our marriage rate has now fallen to its lowest ever level (excluding when we were in lockdown)”
But this is not the whole story because we can also see that marriage itself is in decline. Whereas there were 22,045 weddings in 2014, the number had fallen to 20,348 by 2024, and this is worse than it seems because the population has increased rapidly over that same period. In fact, our marriage rate has now fallen to its lowest ever level (excluding when we were in lockdown).
Should we raise a glass to this ‘happy news’ as well? The fact is that when religion declines, so does marriage and so, incidentally, does the birth rate. It’s all connected. If you put your own personal autonomy first, you are less likely to be religious, are less likely to marry and less likely to have children. None of this is ‘happy news’.
Connection
What’s going on with the big rise in ‘New Age’ weddings? A large part of the explanation is that a few years ago, the law was changed to allow weddings to take place in hotels. Hotels now encourage couples to have both the reception and the ceremony in the same place. They make more money that way. The hotels then put the couples in contact with the various New Age organisations.
The fact that so many couples take up the offer obviously means that a lot of them don’t feel much connection with the Church, but it also means they are happy enough to have a ceremony with some kind of religious or spiritual element to it. So Christian ceremonies are not being uniformly replaced by secular ones. The picture is a lot more complicated than that.
‘Spirituality’ is on the rise, while organised religion is in decline”
Those same couples are likely to later have their children baptised, make their First Holy Communion and then their Confirmation. Therefore, it cannot be assumed they are rejecting the Church, per se. It is more old-fashioned ‘a la carte’ Catholicism.
Overall, what we are seeing is a much more ‘mix and match’, individualistic approach to religion. ‘Spirituality’ is on the rise, while organised religion is in decline. I think this is a bad thing overall because current social trends are connected not only to the decline of religion, but also of strong community ties, and, as I say, of marriage, and even having children.
Is this something to be happy about? Absolutely not.