 |
| 19-August-2026 |
The drop in baptisms in Dublin is highest at 40%, and the average drop outside Dublin is 26%. Elphin in the West of Ireland is the only diocese with a slight rise of 1%. The figures are complicated, but only slightly, by three missing dioceses.
Iona concludes that around 60pc of the fall in baptisms is accounted for by declining births and 40% by rising secularism, particularly the number of people who say they don’t belong to any religion.
A more useful headline statistic would first adjust the baptism figures for the fall in births, and lead with the adjusted drop of about 13%.
This also reveals a bigger difference between Dublin and the other dioceses: a drop of about 23% in Dublin compared to about 10% elsewhere. So baptisms relative to births have dropped by more than twice as much in Dublin than outside Dublin.
The report assumes these drops relative to births are all down to secularisation. This likely explains most of it, but it could be a mix of that plus immigration, mixed-religion couples, or other reasons.
The secularisation reflects the weakened impact of the Catholic Church’s evangelisation of Irish culture. As the report concludes, it remains to be seen what happens if and when cultural Catholicism fades as a force in Irish life.
Babies and parents
The report says fewer children aged 0-4 are listed in the census as Roman Catholic: 65% in 2022, down from 78% in 2016. This is slightly lower than the figures for all Roman Catholics.
And it says more children aged 0-4 are listed in the census as no religion or not stated: 24% in 2022, up from 12% in 2016. This is slightly higher than the figures for all with no religion or not stated.
It also notes that the 65% of children listed as Catholic in 2022 corresponds very closely to the 68% of mothers aged 25-39 who identified as Catholic in that year.
But why count only mothers aged 25-39? And why not fathers? Why not measure this: of parents identifying as Catholic who had a child in year X, what percentage of those children were baptised?
In any case, the report concludes that almost all parents who consider themselves to be Catholic still have their children baptised, and that this shows that cultural Catholicism still remains quite strong in Ireland.
The report also claims that the number of Catholics still having their children baptised shows approval of the Catholic Church. But parents who disapprove of the Catholic Church might baptise their children for any number of reasons.
It might be family tradition. It might be to please their parents, who are the child’s grandparents. One partner might approve of the church while the other disapproves. They might want their child to fit in in the only available local school, which is Catholic.
All of the above is the essence of cultural Catholicism, which the report itself invokes to explain why baptism remains relatively popular. But cultural Catholicism does not equate to approval of the Church.
Marriages and schools
The weakest inferences in the report are the assertions about marriages and school choices.
The report says it is simplistic to say that the number of church weddings is in decline simply because of secularisation. If this was the biggest explanation, then why do so many of the same couples who marry in a hotel get their children baptised?
What do we know about the decline in church weddings? In the space of a generation, marriage culture has moved from a traditional religious default to personal choice.
Four in ten Irish marriages are now nonreligious (either Civil Registry or Humanist), while only three in ten are Catholic. Almost beneath the radar, a quarter are now religious alternatives, mostly some variation of Spiritualist.
But the report provides no data showing that the couples marrying in hotels are the same couples later baptising their children. These are separate statistics, and many recent newlyweds will not yet have children.
The report also says that, if more people disapproved of the church, the recent Department of Education survey about the sort of primary schools parents want would have shown far more demand for divestment.
But you can’t equate demand for a different school patron to approval or disapproval of the Catholic Church.
Parents might prefer the existing school because it is their only or most convenient local school, their child is already settled there, they like the teachers, they don’t want their child’s education disrupted, they don’t want to be seen to be causing trouble, or any other reason.
It would also be interesting to see if the drop in baptisms increased after the Education (Admission to Schools) Act 2018, which prevented Catholic schools from giving priority in admission to children who were baptised as Catholics.
This drop in baptisms would also mean that the numbers of children in schools exercising their right to not attend religious instruction would increase significantly. At present there is no evidence that this is happening as we believe parents find exercising the right discriminatory.
Cultural Catholicism
The report repeatedly notes that cultural Catholicism is a factor in Irish life. But cultural Catholicism did not emerge in a vacuum. For generations, the Catholic Church has explicitly sought to shape and evangelise our culture.
The Pontifical Council for Culture says that:
“What matters is to evangelise man’s culture and cultures, in a vital way, in depth and right to their very roots… Though independent of cultures, the Gospel and evangelisation… are capable of permeating them all without becoming subject to any one of them.”
Pope Francis said that that:
It is imperative to evangelise cultures in order to inculturate the Gospel. In countries of Catholic tradition, this means encouraging, fostering and reinforcing a richness which already exists. In countries of other religious traditions, or profoundly secularised countries, it will mean sparking new processes for evangelising culture.
In 2020, the Irish Catholic Bishops held a series of Zoom conferences titled “Evangelising Irish Culture Today.” It cited Pope Paul VI as saying:
What matters is to evangelise culture: not in a purely decorative way, as it were, by applying a thin veneer, but in a vital way, in depth and right to its very roots.
This helps explain the Catholic Church’s extraordinary influence over Irish culture and public institutions, including the school system that it still largely controls. As the Iona report concludes, it remains to be seen what happens if and when cultural Catholicism fades as a force in Irish life.
No comments