A group name COW.
I started out googling Gen Alpha.
That led me to Cult of the Dead Cow
And then to COW, and their second album Daddy Has A Tail!
Anyone else been down a hole lately?
Have I ever. I started writing this as an Interesting Random Fact, but gave up on it because I feared it might start some religious argument, which is absolutely not what I intend. But I think it might be safer to post it in this thread (for which I thank you)..
We’ve just got back from a short break in county Kerry, Ireland, catching up with friends there. We’re not religious, but they are, so on Sunday morning they went off to mass whilst we amused ourselves elsewhere. Mass was performed (we were told) by an African priest they had never seen before, who commented that there were currently no catholic priests in training in Kerry. At which point a trip down a rabbit hole beckons…
(A lot of what follows relies on google AI, for which I apologize, but I just don’t have time to track down the sources at the moment.)
So far as I can tell, there are actually two priests in training in Kerry, and 77 in Ireland as a whole. It typically takes 6 or 7 years to train in Ireland, so we’re talking about an average of slightly more than 10 ordinations in Ireland per year (13 this year).
There are slightly more than 2000 active catholic priests in Ireland. If we assume, say, a 40 year career, then 50 new priests per year are required to maintain numbers, about four times as many as are being ordained, I’ve seen this referred to as Ireland’s Vocational Crisis.
Careers may be longer than my estimate (but it would only make a minor difference). The average age of a priest is currently around 70 (!!). 15% of priests are over age 75; 2.5% are under age 40.
Weekly Mass attendance, which stood at 91% in 1975, was down to 36% in 2016 according to figures from the Irish census.
Google AI says that 31% is the current figure.
It all strikes me as remarkably rapid change. Let’s just say that Ireland is becoming a less religious and a more secular society.
j