The Archbishop of Glasgow has said that a listening process is to open over the future of his archdiocese’s churches, with fewer priests and a post-pandemic decline in mass attendance making the status quo, in his view, unsustainable.
In an interview with Ronnie Convery, director of communications for the archdiocese, Archbishop William Nolan announced that the number of deaneries across Glasgow would be reduced from nine to five later this month.
Local communities would be consulted over where the Church’s limited resources were best directed, Nolan said in the interview, published in the March edition of Glasgow’s diocesan newspaper, Flourish.
With around 70 active diocesan priests spread across 88 parishes, and with the archdiocese’s three ordinations this year unlikely to be repeated, Catholics are “going to have to get used to a Church with fewer priests”.
Around 216,000 baptised Catholics live within the geographic boundaries of the archdiocese – amounting to just over a quarter of the total population.
Nolan, who was installed as Archbishop last year, said the Church needed to rethink how best to meet her “primary challenge”, how to “reach out to all”.
Citing the expense of bills, maintenance and upkeep, with some buildings costing up to a million pounds a year to run, he said “we are putting all our money into buildings”.
In contrast, he added, “No-one is coming to me and saying ‘I need a million pounds for evangelisation and youth work!’” As important as buildings are to the Church, Nolan warned, upkeep can’t “come at the expense of spreading the good news”.
In the interview, Convery states that Mass attendance in Glasgow had dropped 31 per cent since the pandemic.
Stephen McGinty, author of a 2003 biography of Cardinal Thomas Winning, estimated in a Times article last month that Sunday Mass numbers across Scotland are “down from about 130,000 in 2019 to an estimated 65,000 to 90,000 today”, a drop of between 40 and 50 percent.
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