16th Sunday 2024
Jeremiah 23:1-6; Ephesians 2:13-18; Mark 6:30-34
Oh heck! Jeremiah tells us naught for our comfort or, to be precise, he tells me naught for my comfort, or for the comfort of priests, bishops, or anyone who has pastoral responsibilities in the Church. As you probably know, “pastor” is simply the Latin word for shepherd, so none of us who have shepherding roles can hear Jeremiah’s words without a certain degree of discomfort.
We can hardly deny that the sheep have been scattered. Some time ago, I revisited the area of Barrow-in-Furness known as Old Barrow, where my mother grew up. As a child, on holiday, visiting our Barrow relations, I would be taken to Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s, close to the shipyard, and set among a phalanx of terrace houses and sandstone tenements where the working class employees at the shipyard lived with their families. St. Patrick’s was buzzing, served by three priests, and packed to the doors for Sunday Mass, and later for Benediction.
The shipyard is still there, though admittedly on not quite the same scale as in its heyday. The tenements and terrace houses are still there, though Egerton Buildings, where my grandmother brought up her family of nine in a two bedroom flat, is now nationally notorious as a centre of the drugs trade. St. Patrick’s, however, is no longer there, turned into housing years ago. Of my army of cousins, offspring of my mother’s siblings, though they are fine and generous people, very few retain any connection with the Church.
All over Great Britain—indeed over western Europe—the pattern is the same. We have lost what we might still call the working class, formerly the backbone of the Church in this country. We have also lost the young. In 1990, at St. Mary’s Kells, a parish comprising three council estates on a hill above Whitehaven, I carried out the funeral of an elderly lady. When it came time for Communion, none of her (middle aged) children came forward, because they knew that they were “lapsed”. Their children, on the other hand, came forward, having no concept of “lapsation”. Those children will have young adult children of their own now: I would lay odds that the latter have no contact with the Church.
Is it our fault? Will the Lord pronounce doom for us? Certainly, the abuse crisis has done immense damage, but that is far from being the whole story. I may have quoted before my conversation with a relatively young mother, when I noticed that she and her friends had disappeared from Mass at St. Gregory’s, Preston, in the mid 90s.
“Ey, Debbie, what’s happened? Is it me—something I said or did?”
“Oh no, it’s nothing like that. Well, you know that the blokes never came. Now most of the women have got jobs, and it’s all over my head, so it must be over the kids’ heads. And with all that’s going on in the world, you can’t really believe it, can you?”
I assured her that I could, whilst sympathising with her difficulties. Yet I had always prided myself, perhaps wrongly, on taking account of the capacity for understanding on the part of the people in church when I preached, and the parish provided a well organised Children’s Liturgy of the Word. The Diocese had a thoroughly professional Youth Service, and there had even been Catholic Youth Centres in Blackpool, Preston, Lancaster, and Barrow. We had genuinely tried, and were trying, but it wasn’t working—and isn’t!
What is the issue? A huge amount, I am convinced, is down to changes in society. What we might term “tribal Catholicism” for better or worse no longer exists, as Catholics have assimilated more into the world around them. My parents’ generation saw the parish as the fulcrum of much of their lives: that is no longer the case.
Two developments have struck heavy blows to all the Churches, namely the Sunday Trading Laws and the transfer, if you’ll pardon the pun, of youth football from Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning. Sunday is now much the same as any other day: or, if it differs, it is as a day for pursuing leisure activities. Meanwhile, religion, as a source of cohesion in society, with its practices and its taboos, no longer has a hold on a more materialistic population, which prizes what it sees as “freedom” and “choice” above all other considerations.
What is to be done? “Trying harder” is, I suspect, not the answer. Perhaps, in one sense, we need to try less hard. We need to remember, as the Psalm tells us, that the Lord is our real shepherd. He knows what we need, and our own shepherding is, in the last analysis, not our own work, but a channelling of His Spirit. In His earthly life, Jesus the Good Shepherd called the apostles to “come away and rest for a while”; to take time off from being God; to allow Him to do the work.
If that is not the beginning of an answer, might it be, at least, a clue to the beginning? We must put our focus on God, and on the Risen Christ: we must allow the Spirit to work on us and through us. We may not be very good shepherds, but He is. Let us be more receptive, less convinced of our own ability, and even of the extent of our own responsibility. BUT IF YOU HAVE ANY BETTER IDEAS, PLEASE LET ME KNOW.
