Largest church in Ireland to be demolished, replacement one tenth of the size.

Peregrinus

magicbastarder wrote: »

i see the CoI church in glendalough is closing; how common is such news these days? there seem to have been churches opening in industrial estates quickly enough though, mainly african evangelical ones as far as i can see.

For historical reasons the CofI has a huge oversupply of rural churches. This is partly because it inherited a structure of dioceses and parishes that was built up to serve a much larger population, and partly because there has been signficant demographic change over the centuries; there are many places that have a CofI church but no Catholic church because, by the time the Catholics were (re)establishing their network of parishes in the nineteenth century, changes in land use, etc, meant that the centres of population had moved.

Policy is generally to keep churches open for as long as the local community is willing and able to maintain them. This doesn't mean that the church will have a resident cleric, or even that it will have regular services. But services will be celebrated there, from time to time, even if only three or four times a years. The local community either pay for necessary maintenance work or do it themselves. When a church closes, it's usually because the required maintenance to keep it weatherproof and safe exceeds the capacity of the local community to do it or pay for it.

KingBrian2

This is a sort of thread that would not be out of place in a Fr Ted episode.

Peregrinus

There is no thread into which a Fr. Ted reference cannot be inserted.

pauldla

Peregrinus wrote: »

There is no thread into which a Fr. Ted reference cannot be inserted.

You're right there, Ted.

Zubeneschamali

pauldla wrote: »

You're right there, Ted.

Careful, now.

robindch

Down with that sort of thing.

Walter H Price

jobbridge4life wrote: »

That is demonstrably false. Unbaptised children and children of divergent faiths are accepted, without question, into the overwhelming majority of schools in the country. It has been repeatedly confirmed that the only instance in which a child may be preferred over another on the basis of baptism is where the school in question is over subscribed and has a religious ethos.

The baptism barrier needs to go, without doubt, but putting forward falsehoods like the one contained in the quoted post serves no one.

A friend of mine had his 4 year old baptized last year because she was bottom of a waiting list for a "catholic" (state funded) primary school in Swords last year he was advised by the head teacher that was the best way to get his daughter up the list ... not some rural little backwater but one of Dublin's major suburbs so i would completely dispute that this is a falsehood.

The baptism barrier is affront and belongs in a past we have no right to be proud of

recedite

Walter H Price wrote: »

The baptism barrier

Whats being argued about here is whether it exists in "the overwhelming majority of schools" or just "lots of schools". The fact that it exists in even one single publicly funded school is a scandal. We are supposed to be living in a republic that offers equal rights and opportunities, to all its citizens. Not a theocracy.

JupiterKid

Mass attendance everywhere in Ireland - urban and rural, middle class and working class, has dropped sharply.

This reflects the decline of the power of the church. Even in the 1980s that power was starting to fade - churches built in Tallaght and Blanchardstown are small, modest structures, in comparison to the huge behemoths from the 1930-75 era. The era of the huge church was over 40 years ago.

And now these huge structures become liabilities, with costs to maintain and heat far in excess of what can be afforded.

The Finglas West church demolition is just the first. There will be more to come.

On a final note, many churches built in the 19th century are beautiful structures. Most of the mid 20th century ones are not.

bobbyss

Peregrinus wrote: »

Nothing so prosaic. The title commemorates the victory of the Holy League over the Ottoman navy at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.

I see. That's interesting. It is quite an unusual name for a church-celebrating military victories in far flung places. Usually churches are called our Lady of the Assumption / Little Flowers etc etc.

You would wonder who has the naming rights, as it were, to churches. I assume it is the church authorities but you would wonder at the rationale for naming that church. Donnycarney church, by the way, was Charles Haughey's final resting place

lawred2

Was at a funeral in Crumlin recently.. Now that church could have housed an A380.

Must be impossible to fill

magicbastarder

i popped into our local church - our lady of victories - yesterday, was passing by and had never been in it before. would make a good gig venue; they should repurpose it instead of demolish it, should they ever consider the option.

recedite

Good idea, although that was actually the original purpose, in a way. A priestly gig.
But there's probably more money now for the parish if they sell most of the site for housing development and build a smaller yolk for themselves in one corner.

robindch

Said it before. Saying it again now. And, no doubt, I'll go to my grave saying it. But the key- and pedal-boards of a well-tuned, well-voiced organ in a cavernous cathedral and resonant acoustic, with 32-foot reeds and flues roaring their mightiest, are always a substitute for bad sex. And, I suspect more often than many organists might like to admit - and one forlornly hopes, to the jealously of everybody who's never tried it - can sometimes be as much fun as the best sex.

I, probably alone amongst atheists, will mourn the passing of massive, indoor spaces and the means to fill them with a billion frequencies.

Wheeeee!

looksee

I can go along with that argument. As an aside I once heard a steel band - a very very good steel band, a national orchestra of somewhere, can't remember where - play in a cathedral and it was awe inspiring. Among other things they gave a superb rendition of the 1812 Overture and it was solid sound, right up to the roof, almost overwhelming, certainly exciting.

Peregrinus

bobbyss wrote: »

I see. That's interesting. It is quite an unusual name for a church-celebrating military victories in far flung places. Usually churches are called our Lady of the Assumption / Little Flowers etc etc.

You would wonder who has the naming rights, as it were, to churches. I assume it is the church authorities but you would wonder at the rationale for naming that church. Donnycarney church, by the way, was Charles Haughey's final resting place

It's the church authorities who get to decide who churches will be dedicated to - in the Catholic church, the bishop of the diocese, though I imagine the priest of the parish concerned, who has done all the fundraising and carried through the building project, typically has a couple of suggestions to put to His Lordship for His Lordship's gracious consideration.

In this case, the church was built and the parish was established in the late 60s, carved out of Whitehall parish. The church actually took its name from the Our Lady of Victories Hall, a church hall that had been used for overflow masses; I don't know when that hall was built or named. But the assertive, triumphalist, politically-engaged overtones of a name like Our Lady of Victories were a good fit with the general spirit of John Charles McQuaid's tenure as Archbishop of Dublin.

On a nitpick, Charlie Haughey's last resting place is St. Fintan's Cemetery in Sutton.

c_man

"Obsessed" doesn't even begin to describe you guys!

looksee

c_man wrote: »

"Obsessed" doesn't even begin to describe you guys!

Mod: Possibly true, but your comment does not contribute to the conversation.

Hotblack Desiato

More on this theme:

Some churches should close over manpower gap, says 'Irish Catholic' editor

The Catholic Church in Ireland should close churches in some parishes because it no longer has enough priests to keep them all open, the editor of the Irish Catholic newspaper has said.

Michael Kelly told Newstalk’s Pat Kenny Show on Friday there was an increasing burden of work on fewer and fewer priests with many elderly priests having to "run from pillar to post" to say Mass in difference[sic] churches.

His comments come as census data show the number of Catholics in the State has fallen since the last census in 2011, with Catholics comprising 78.3 per cent of the population in April 2016, down from 84.2 per cent in 2011.

In September just six men began training for the Catholic priesthood at St Patrick’s College Maynooth, believed to be the lowest number in training since its foundation in 1795. There are currently 41 men studying for priesthood in Maynooth.

Mr Kelly said the number of priests in Ireland had fallen by 500 in the past ten years.

"What we’re seeing is that ten years ago a priest might have been parish priest for one parish, now he’s parish priest for three parishes, saying the same number of masses while there are fewer people attending church.

"You have situation quite often of elderly priests running from pillar to post saying three to four masses on a Sunday morning in each church that is about a third full."

Mr Kelly admitted he did not think his proposal would be popular. "Even if people agreed on the need for some churches to close, very few people would agree that it’s their church that needs to close."

Just like divestment is doomed to fail, because nobody agrees that it's their school which should be divested.

Any decision to close a church is one for the relevant bishop.

Earlier this year, the Dublin archdiocese gave the go-ahead for the demolition of one of the largest Catholic churches in the county to make way for a much smaller building.

The Church of the Annunciation in Finglas, north Dublin, which catered for 3,500 parishioners, is being demolished and replaced by a church accommodating 350 worshippers instead. Land freed up by the smaller church is due to be used for social housing.

Peregrinus

Although the two are obviously related, there's a distinction between demolishing and replacing churches, on the one hand, and closing or amalgamating parishes on the other.

In Finglas, the new church may hold only one tenth of the number of congregants that the old did, but it will still need a priest to celebrate mass, and the demolish-and-rebuild measure will do nothing to address the clerical numbers problem.

The Catholic church in Ireland is currently going through a painful process not dissimilar to what happened to the Church of Ireland following disestablishment in the late nineteenth century. As we all know, rural Ireland is well-stocked with rarely-used CofI churches which, nevertheless are still (barely) functioning. The CofI policy seems to be that, as long as there's a local community willing to provide the funding, or the parts and labour, to keep the church building safe and weatherproof, they won't close the church, and there'll be a service celebrated there at least occasionally - once a quarter, twice a year, that kind of thing. And I could easily see something similar happening with Catholic churches.

recedite

Peregrinus wrote: »

The CofI policy seems to be that, as long as there's a local community willing to provide the funding, or the parts and labour, to keep the church building safe and weatherproof, they won't close the church, and there'll be a service celebrated there at least occasionally - once a quarter, twice a year, that kind of thing. And I could easily see something similar happening with Catholic churches.

Interesting point, but I think there is a fundamental difference in the economic model that these two different types of religious parishes are based upon.

The CoI churches were always a sort of plantation church, operating within a hostile market. As such they have a longstanding central investment fund set up to provide the stipend/salaries, and most of the individual churches also had glebe farmlands around them to provide a rental income for the church building. As such they were able to run "at a loss" locally, in economic terms.

RC dioceses on the other have have grown and developed by harnessing the economic power of locals.
The Vatican expects to receive money from abroad, not disburse it, so they are not going to make up for any shortfall.

Basically the CoI as an organisation was designed and built to be able to withstand a neverending recession, whereas the RCC in Ireland has evolved to rely on perpetual growth, more like a Ponzi scheme.

Peregrinus

For a long time the CofI was funded by tithes paid by tenants (of all religions and none). Tithes were local; the tithes collected in the Parish of St Recedite went first of all to that Parish. This system, unpopular for obvious reasons, was changed following the "tithe wars" of the 1830s so that tithes became a levy on rents, collected from landlords. The economic reality, of course, was that the cost of the levy was passed on to tenants, so the CofI was still being supported with funds collected from tenants of all religions but, optically, this was a bit less in-your-face. The total amount of tithes was also reduced at this time by about a quarter.

All this came to a stop with the disestablishment of the CofI in 1871. Existing incumbents received government payments to substitute for the tithe income that they lost, but these were personal to the ministers concerned, ending when they died, retired or resigned. The result was that over the next couple of decades the CofI experienced a huge drop in revenues, and this provoked the crisis that I have already referred to. As ministers in many rural parishes died or retired, no-one could be found to take their place because there was no income stream out of which to pay the replacement.

In response to this the CofI centralised its finances, vesting all its property in the Representative Church Body and using the income to establish a system of salaries for ministers. But the total income was never going to be anything like enough to support a payroll equal to that whch the tithe system had provided, and a huge decline in the number of paid clergy was inevitable (as well as a steep decline in the income of individual clerics) followed. They had to make tough decisions about which parishes they would fund a minister for, and which they would not. Hence the merger of rural parishes and even rural dioceses and the closure or mothballing of many rural (and not a few urban) churches.

Effectively the Catholic church has also centralised its properties and finances - but at the diocesan, not national, level, with all properties being owned by the diocese and the diocese guaranteeing all priests a payment which doesn't depend on the size of the collection in their particular parish. This was done decades ago, SFAIK, and not as a response to the huge declines in attendance (and, presumably, cash-in-the-plate) of more recent years. But, having already been done, it can't now be done again.

The Catholic problem, though, isn't really one of of finances. Yes, they have a financial problem. But (a) they were never as flush with cash as the CofI was under the tithe system, and (b) Catholic priests have never been paid a lot to begin with. The problem is not that they can't afford to pay their priests; it's that they have fewer and fewer priests to pay. So merger of parishes, etc, isn't primarily driven so much by financial pressures as by staffing pressures. That means there is scope to "mothball" little-used churches rather than close and sell them, if the desire is there to do that.

recedite

Presumably there would still be a considerable cost issue in maintaining mothballed church properties though, unless they can be rented out for some other purpose.
So whereas the CoI is used to carrying this at a centralised level, can the RCC now do the same at individual diocesan level?

smacl

recedite wrote: »

Presumably there would still be a considerable cost issue in maintaining mothballed church properties though, unless they can be rented out for some other purpose.
So whereas the CoI is used to carrying this at a centralised level, can the RCC now do the same at individual diocesan level?

Indeed. I'd guess the total cost for damage caused by this weeks storm across the entire RCC property portfolio would be significant for example.

Peregrinus

recedite wrote: »

Presumably there would still be a considerable cost issue in maintaining mothballed church properties though, unless they can be rented out for some other purpose.
So whereas the CoI is used to carrying this at a centralised level, can the RCC now do the same at individual diocesan level?

The CofI doesn't carry this at a centralised level. While the churches are (nearly) all owned by the Church Representative Body, they are mostly not maintained by it. It's up to the local community to maintain the church, keep it weatherproof and safe, keep it insured, etc. If they choose not to do that, or can't do that, then the church is decommissioned, closed and (if feasible) sold or leased.

For the Catholics, it's already the case that maintaining parish churches is a charge, in the first instance, on the parish funds. The parish can apply to the diocese for financial support if they think they have a case, but in the case of a church that's not being used, you'd expect that such applications would be greeted fairly frostily, barring unusual circumstances. Even in the case of a church that is being used, the general response would be "The community should be maintaining this church. If they can't maintain it, maybe it's not viable"?

So far, what we have seen in the Catholic church is parishes being "grouped". So one priest might be appointed Parish priest of three adjacent parishes, say, with one curate to assist him, and between them they minister at all three parishes. But the parishes still exist as distinct canonical entities - each of them has its own territory, its own church and its own finances. The maintenance of each church is a matter for the finances of each parish.

If the problem is purely a shortage of clergy, this state of affairs can continue indefinitely, but of course it isn't. Attendances have fallen, so almost certainly collections in the plate have fallen, and in all probability other collections (e.g. by standing orders and direct debits) have also fallen, though not necessarily by as much. Still, they'll have fallen. And at some point one of the church buildings will need expenditure that the parish cannot afford.

The other parishes grouped with it won't want to pay the shortfall, for obvious reasons. So there's a couple of possibilities:

1. The diocese pays for it.

2. The parish is supressed, and merged into one of the other parishes, or maybe all the parishes in the group are merged into one parish with two or three churches. We now have pooled finances, which of course makes it easier to pay for the repairs that one of the churches needs. But of course a question that has to be asked at this point is whether the best way to spend the limited resources of the one parish is to keep open three churches indefinitely. Maybe two would do?

3. The parish is not supressed, but the church is closed "temporarily" and the parishioners encouraged to attend at neighbouring parishes while a fundraising effort is launched and/or sponsors sought to repair the church.

And no doubt you could think of other possibilities. People's willingness (and ability) to find funds to fix a church will depend on a number of factors, including whether the church is of historical or architectural significance, how close other churches are, how big a congregation it draws, etc, etc. But the bottom line is that parishes are supposed to be self-supporting financially, and if this isn't the case and there's no prospect of it becoming the case the diocese may not feel that the best use of its funds is to tip them into the bottomless well that is maintaining large and little-used buildings. I don't think this calculation changes radically if you change "diocese" to "national bishops conference".

Peregrinus

smacl wrote: »

Indeed. I'd guess the total cost for damage caused by this weeks storm across the entire RCC property portfolio would be significant for example.

They're insured. Once the churches do organise centrally is property insurance, though even then the premiums are paid by the individual parishes.

Hotblack Desiato

smacl wrote: »

Indeed. I'd guess the total cost for damage caused by this weeks storm across the entire RCC property portfolio would be significant for example.

If they were able to insure themselves against paedophilia, they were no doubt able to insure against storms!

kylith

Shame they wouldn't stick a few floors in there and turn it into a hostel for the homeless.

Peregrinus

kylith wrote: »

Shame they wouldn't stick a few floors in there and turn it into a hostel for the homeless.

They're apparently going to construct social housing on the site. You reckon actual housing is too good for the undeserving poor, and they should have to make do with jerry-built hostels?

smacl

Peregrinus wrote: »

They're apparently going to construct social housing on the site. You reckon actual housing is too good for the undeserving poor, and they should have to make do with jerry-built hostels?

Depends on whether one provides immediate accommodation for those with an immediate and urgent need versus a better solution at some point in the future. The choice between a hostel and a proper home is a simple one, the choice between a hostel and a building site with the promise of a home which may well go to someone else is less simple.