Parish Pastoral Councils and Community

Abstract

Parish Pastoral Councils and Community Séamus Lillis Viewing Parish Pastoral Councils (PPCs) as community organisations delivers helpful insights into their supplementary relevance to the Catholic Church in Ireland. Community organisations have significant experience to share, a resource which should influence PPCs. In noteworthy ways, the latter find themselves freer to address their concerns than do civic communities, particularly those community organisations that obtain funding from the state. This autonomy augurs well for the future of PPCs. I have been engaging with civic communities since the early 1990s. I gradually came to the conviction that, because I have been privileged to gain insights into how secular communities can organise themselves, I should try to share these learning discoveries with the community that is the Church. To this end I have worked with PPCs in the archdiocese of Dublin and in the Killaloe diocese. The Church itself does not have the monopoly of wisdom and can stand to gain from the experiences of civic communities. My recollection of the pre-SecondVatican Council Church is of the absence of any community dimension. Certainly, a vastly higher percentage of people attended Sunday Mass then. While the priest addressed God in Latin, the congregations prayed individually and independently and – presumably! – in English. Parishes conducted these weekly gatherings and had apparently done so without significant variation since Catholic Emancipation. Parishes individually embodied the dominant core background of competitiveness and inter-parish rivalry in GAA matches, but the perception of a parish as a community had few adherents. I believe that, historically, community itself was not a major feature of Irish society. Some cite the Irish word meithal, or the assembly of neighbours at harvest thrashings and other labour dependent occasions, as evidence of community. This annual gathering to deliver a day’s labour for neighbours at harvest time is not convincing as confirmation of widespread community. Before gaining national independence, community meetings were not encouraged by the powers-that-be. After independence that same policy tended to continue. Studies • volume 109 • number 435 326 A community dimension in government decision-making was largely missing until the last three decades or so.Apolitical preference for centralised government was largely responsible. As recently as the nineties, Tony Varley criticised a dismissive and discouraging stance towards community representatives by the state and particularly by local government.1 Tom Collins suggested that the state’s new-found concern with official community development was motivated by an urgency to engage – however tenuously – with its disaffected citizens. Were it not for official community development schemes, instigated and part-funded by the European Union, the state would find itself at serious odds with such citizens and more prone to become caught up in confrontational and mutually perplexing conflict.2 The state’s endeavours targeted disadvantaged communities. This policy excluded the middle classes, albeit unintentionally; they were not invited to participate in communities. The passage of time has proved that dominance on the part of the public service has continued to be a feature of community development here. This supremacy has resulted in compromising the autonomy of communities that partnered with the state. What is a community? The word ‘community’ is hackneyed. Its synonyms range through ‘public’, ‘citizenry’, ‘neighbourhood’, ‘society’, ‘group’, ‘commune’ and more. Margaret Thatcher’s much resented ‘community charge’ in Britain further diluted the meaning of community. We glibly speak of restoring at-risk, institutionalised people back into ‘the community’, where such community is notional and unaware of any responsibility to care for these vulnerable individuals. Yet community development is reliably depended upon by international agencies such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organisation to promote and deliver progress. The members of civic communities and of PPCs deploy their resources through purposeful conversations about effectively addressing matters of concern to their members. These three fundamentals – resources, discussion and concerns – capture the essence of committed, active communities and PPCs Moreover, concerns must be realistic. I recall working with one urban PPC, where members wished to restore the widespread Sunday observation of fifty years ago. Granted it was an aim, but it lacked any indication of insight into the processes needed to achieve it. Studies • volume 109...