Priesthood: Reflections on the Synod ‘Working Paper’ I. Priest and Parish

Extract

Then they sang the second verse of the Tantum ergo and Canon O’Hanlon got up again and censed the Blessed Sacrament and knelt down and he told Father Conroy that one of the candles was just going to set fire to the flowers and Father Conroy got up and settled it all right... Canon O’Hanlon stood up with his cope poking up at his neck and Father Conroy handed him the card to read off and he read out Panem de coelo praestitisti eis ....

Sunday evening service in a West Riding town forty to sixty years ago was not very much different from the scene in the church at Sandymount on Bloomsday. For the priests it marked the end of a quite heavy Sunday, the climax of a by no means easy week. Two Masses in the morning with a sermon at each, fasting from midnight perhaps until 1 o’clock, baptisms and children’s service, rosary—or Vespers—or Compline, another sermon, and Benediction. On the Saturday five or six hours’ confessions. In this town as in many others of its kind, from Friday night to Sunday afternoon, all the time left over from church services and absolutely necessary meals and rest, was spent in house to house collecting. The parish priest might reserve to himself the task of counting or he might share it with the curates, thus lengthening the weekend’s work to Monday midday. For some this might be followed by recreation on the golf links and dark murmurings with other clerical companions about the tyranny of parish priests. For the rest of the week, two hours of every day would be taken up with Mass and Office, there would be at least one evening service with a sermon, perhaps a confraternity meeting, instruction of converts (most of them marrying Catholics), a weekly visit to the school, visiting both of the sick and well (the latter being questioned, if necessary, about attendance at Mass and Easter duties). A conscientious priest might use some of the time left over to prepare his sermons.