Sunday…

Interesting post here on Slugger about a symposium on Catholicism hosted by Slugger O’Toole (and part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science).

There’s some stats offered by Dr. Gladys Ganiel, a sociologist of religion from QUB. And these struck me as particularly interesting. I’ve mentioned the issue of Mass attendance before – for one reason or another across the last few years I’ve had reason to attend ‘ordinary’ ones on occasion (it makes for an interesting experience as an agnostic, hovering around at the end waiting to pick up a copy of Alive!). But I find the state that in Ireland (presumably the ROI) attendance is at 36% intriguing. I’d love to see a breakdown of that statistic in regard to urban and rural settings and so on. It seems to me to be very high. At my local I’d often be – at 53 years of age (!), in the youngest 10 per cent of those attending. And I’ve counted less than 100 there Sunday after Sunday in a church which could easily accommodate seven or eight times that number or more.

I’ve heard some middle class parishes see greater attendances, but talking to a friend from Kerry the other day they said attendances were the same where they were and I have the sense that attendances have broadly collapsed nationwide, in rural and urban parishes. So again, I wonder about that 36%.