In Ireland, the priest was once as vital to a village as the pub or the post office. He baptized the babies, buried the dead, and kept the farmers from killing each other.

If the neighbors were at war over a hedge, he’d settle it before Mass and still have time for a fry-up. The priest wasn’t just a man of God but also a referee of rural life — part Joe Rogan in a cassock, part St. Patrick with a whistle. The church bell was the town clock. The confessional was the psychiatrist’s couch. And the parish hall was the beating heart of the community.

You can now 'attend' Mass online, complete with comment sections and buffering hymns. It’s efficient, yes — but as spiritually satisfying as watching someone else eat your dinner.

That Ireland is disappearing. This year, the entire country produced just 13 new priests — barely enough to fill a choir, let alone a nation. The waves of eager new recruits who poured forth from the seminaries are no more, leaving weary veterans to cover half a dozen parishes, driving from one church to the next like overworked delivery drivers of the divine.

What happened? "This is an immense question, requiring a book-length answer," Irish journalist John Waters tells Align, after which he kindly attempts a summary anyway:

The explanations include: Ireland’s history of kindergarten Catholicism; the damage done by simplistic moralization; the liberal revolution; the infiltration of the Catholic clergy; the escalating implausibility of transcendent ideas (a contrived not a naturalistic phenomenon); the moral inversion unleashed by the LGBT revolution; the confusion created by the church leadership for the past 12 years and counting; et cetera.

Irish goodbye

The outlook is bleak. The number of priests in the capital is expected to fall by 70% over the next two decades. Since 2020, only two priests have been ordained in Dublin’s archdiocese.

Across Ireland, the average priest is now over 70, long past retirement age. Some say the Church’s only hope is to let priests marry. It would make more sense than flying in bewildered clerics from Africa, men who can quote Scripture but not survive small talk in a Kerry kitchen.

It’s not that people stopped believing in God (though Ireland’s Catholic population has fallen to just 69%, down from nearly 78% less than 10 years ago). They just stopped believing the Church was worth the effort.

The pews that once held families now hold the few who remember when everyone came. Ireland changed faster than the Church could follow. Confession replaced by podcasts, pop psychology, and Pornhub. It’s a lethal mix of heresy and habit — busy souls, distracted minds, and a generation convinced that salvation can be streamed, scheduled, or outsourced.

Flickering faith

At the same time, people like my mother still light candles. They still bless themselves on long drives. They still mutter prayers when the doctor calls with bad news. Faith is still there; it has just learned to keep its head down. Weddings and funerals still draw a crowd, if only because even the most lapsed Irishman can’t stomach the thought of being buried by a stranger in a suit. The flame is still there, but it’s more a pilot light than a blaze.

The fading of show-up-every-Sunday faith has mirrored the fading of everything that once made Ireland feel Irish. The language is vanishing, the music sanitized, the dances replaced by drill rap and dead-eyed TikTok routines.

Even the local watering hole — the unofficial annex of every parish — struggles to stay open. What’s vanishing isn’t just religion; it’s ritual, the sense that life meant something beyond the week’s wages.

Mass exodus

Technology promised connection but delivered solitude. You can now “attend” Mass online, complete with comment sections and buffering hymns. It’s efficient, yes — but as spiritually satisfying as watching someone else eat your dinner.

Once, the whole community walked to church together, children skipping ahead, neighbors chatting along the road. After Mass came tea, gossip, and maybe even a few sneaky pints. These days, the only communion most share is over brunch — order taken by a Filipino, processed by a Nigerian, cooked by a Ukrainian, and blessed by a middle manager named Ahmed.

In rural towns, churches stand like sentinels — beautiful, empty, and slightly ashamed of their own magnificence. Some have become cafés or concert halls, serving flat whites where once they served faithful whites. It’s called progress, though it feels more like repurposed reverence.

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Photo by DANIEL LEAL/AFP via Getty Images

Let us spray

The same could be said across the pond. In Canterbury Cathedral — the cradle of English Christianity — artist Alex Vellis recently staged “HEAR US,” a graffiti-style art project inviting visitors to ask, with spray-can sincerity, “What would you ask God?”

The answers, splattered across medieval stone, came from “marginalized communities” — Punjabi, black and brown Britons, the neurodivergent, and the LGBTQIA+ faithful. A veritable clown car of the aggrieved, somehow granted front-row parking in the house of God. It was meant as inclusion; it landed as intrusion — like stringing jockstraps across the Vatican altar.

When critics like Elon Musk and U.S. Vice President JD Vance rightly accused the project of desecrating beauty in the name of diversity, Vellis fired back not with argument but with anatomy, accusing his detractors of “small d**k energy.”

Virile virtue

The phrase, unserious on the surface, hinted at something deeper: Both sides — the artist and the church that hosted him — seem afflicted by the same crisis of conviction. The Church, once roaring with moral certainty, now offers apologies to everyone and inspiration to no one. Its critics, meanwhile, confuse provocation for courage. Between them lies a vacuum where virtue used to be.

And this isn’t just an English problem. Across the Christian world, churches of every stripe — Catholic, Protestant, evangelical — have lost their fortitude. Too timid to offend, too eager to trend, they’ve traded conviction for comfort. "Small d**k energy" has gone liturgical.

Even in Ireland, where the Church once thundered with certainty, cowardice now calls the homily. The pulpit peddles activism instead of absolution, politics instead of prayer. No wonder so many stay home. And no wonder young men won’t answer the call. Who wants a life devoid of sex, love, and laughter?

If Catholicism is to last, it needs less talk and more testosterone. The next revival won’t come from a press release but from those who still believe life means something. If the Church in Ireland and beyond wants people back in its pews — and its pulpits — it best man up.