The Australian Catholic parish is on the verge of extinction, almost 200 people were told recently at the Pastoral Research Office’s (PRO) national conference in Melbourne.
The Beliefs and Practices of Australian Catholics conference was held from February 19 to 22, examining the PRO’s research in the last five years, its implications and how the Church can respond.
PRO director Dr Bob Dixon’s told the ABC’s Religion and Ethics Report on March 5 the low level of Mass attendance in Australia is a situation that is “urgent and severe”.
“Over the years you can see a gradual decline in the percentage of Catholics attending Mass,” he said.
“It’s gone down from when we first measured it at about 18 per cent in 1996 to 12.2 per cent in 2011.”
Dr Dixon said while the change may not sound like much, the decline has been disguised by two main factors – the ageing of the community and the healthy rate of attendance of immigrants.
“Immigrants from non-English speaking countries are better attenders in terms of their rate of attendance than Australian-born Catholics,” he said.
“We could say that Australian-born Mass attenders have declined by one third since 1996.”
Even if migrant communities continue to flourish, the age demographic of Mass attenders means the parish system is in significant danger, according to Dr Dixon.
“Overall, the picture in the parish sector is not particularly healthy,” he said. “The highest age profile is between 65 and 75. In 15 years time a very large proportion of those people will no longer be attending weekly Mass.
“It’s almost inevitable that there will be a continuing big dip in Mass attendance over the next 10 to 15 years.”
While Catholic parishes struggle, Catholic health, education and social service institutions are doing well, Dr Dixon said, although such a situation is not ideal.
“My concern that I wanted to bring to the attention of the Church is that if the current trends continue, we face a prospect where we have healthy institutions without a supporter base, and I don’t think that’s sustainable in the long term,” he said.
“There [are] too many parishes facing, to put it bluntly, extinction.”
Reversing the trend of declining Mass attendance overnight would take something “extraordinary”, Dr Dixon said, unless new ways of viewing parish life were adopted.
“One of the proposals that I floated at the conference was that we look at a whole different way of staffing parishes, from the leadership perspective – in other words, not to automatically make a priest the parish priest,” he said.