In July 2010 Tony Hanna and I visited a variety of dioceses in New Zealand and Australia before and after our involvement in Brisbane’s Pray 2010 conference.  Our own Spiritfest 2011 conference to be held in Armagh from 1 - 3 July 2011 is being modelled on the Brisbane conference at which Tony was one of the keynote speakers.  Participating gave us a lot of tips and ideas for Spiritfest 2011.

The outstanding memory of our time in New Zealand and Australia was of the tremendous hospitality we receive everywhere we went.  We stayed with two bishops, three families and two priests on our travels, were wined and dined by various people, were taken to the opera in Sydney and to a fine golf club north of Bendigo. Every effort was made to meet with us to facilitate our learning about what is happening in the ecclesial context in Australia and New Zealand. The hospitality was outstanding.

In New Zealand we visited the dioceses of Auckland and Wellington and in Australia we visited Broken Bay, Melbourne and Sandhurst and at the Pray 2010 conference we met with many people from the diocese of Brisbane and from many other places across Australia and New Zealand.  In our conversations we explored issues such as pastoral planning, the development of lay leadership, the formation of pastoral areas, the decline in the numbers of priests, attendance at Sunday Eucharist, the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults and Catholic education.

We discovered differences between their realities and ours.  Sandhurst diocese has around 40 parishes and half the number of priests.  We have 61 parishes and almost twice the number of priests.  Melbourne diocese has a population of about 4 million people, with perhaps up to a quarter of them Catholic. Broken Bay diocese, which is one of the three dioceses in the Sydney area, has responded to the declining number of priests by brining in priests from a variety of different countries. It has been a mixed experience, which has raised issues of inculturation and questions of priestly ministry.

Another difference was the high number of people employed pastorally at diocesan level.  Wellington has one person working full-time on the diocesan newsletter. In Auckland we participated in the monthly prayer time and gathering of the diocesan staff. There are about 65 of them.

However, in the midst of these differences we were particularly struck by the similarity of approach to the development of pastoral areas that we have been involved in over the last three years and which the dioceses in New Zealand have been involved in over a much longer period.

The Pastoral Plan for the Diocese of Auckland 2004 – 2006 has this to say about pastoral areas:

In order to deal with the future shortage of clergy from the outset and to make better use of faith resources and community strengths, parishes were clustered according to Mass count, perceived compatibility and geographical area.
Sixty-five parishes were divided into twenty-five regional pastoral areas, which were asked to work closely together, to run joint programmes, share resources, and support one another  (page 6).

Compare this to our own description of a pastoral area:

A pastoral area is a cluster of neighbouring parishes that support each other and share the collaborative gifts and talents of each parish. With the help of the Holy Spirit, they do this in order to fulfill the mission of the Church to proclaim the word of God and further the mission of Christ in the world.

Under the leadership of the Vicar forane the pastoral area resource team helps to strengthen each of the parishes in the pastoral areas by:
•    Ensuring the effective sharing of the collective gifts and talents of the parishes in the pastoral area
•    Identifying pastoral matters that can be done better together as a pastoral area than separately as individual parishes.

In our conversation with Bishop Pat Dunn and some of his staff members the importance of sharing gifts and resources within the pastoral area was continually emphasized.

The work of developing the pastoral areas is ongoing as indicated in the second phase of the pastoral plan, 2007 – 2009 which has as one of its goals: to develop and strengthen relationships between the parishes in the pastoral areas.

The similarities with the Archdiocese of Wellington are also remarkably striking. Their Pastoral Area Councils are similar to our Pastoral Area Resource Teams and our attempts to have co-leadership between ordained and lay in the pastoral areas mirrors in some small way the pastoral area teams that have been created in Wellington.  The difference is that Wellington has been working on these developments over a longer period so that their structures have grown and matured.  The bishop of Auckland acknowledged that Wellington is the model to learn from and the diocese of Sandhurst modeled its recent report New Wine: New Wineskins on their experience of Wellington Archdiocese.

The purpose of the pastoral area council in Wellington is to support and advise the pastoral area team, and to co-ordinate the joint action of the parishes in the area. In this it shares with Auckland and Armagh the idea of sharing resources and joint action. What is new perhaps is that they exist to support and advise the pastoral area team.

Pastoral areas in the Archdiocese of Wellington 2010 has this to say about pastoral area teams:

A pastoral area team consists of the priests appointed by the Archbishop to whom he has entrusted the pastoral care of the parishes within the pastoral area.  Should lay leaders be appointed to the pastoral area, they become members of the Pastoral Team also.

The Archbishop appoints one of its priest members as Moderator. The Moderator is responsible to the Archbishop for the direction of the pastoral care in the area.

Should each of the parishes have a resident parish priest, there is no need for a moderator, since each parish is responsible to the Archbishop for pastoral ministry in the parish.

It may be that the pastoral area has pastoral assistants for specific tasks such as youth ministry, family ministry, social services, etc. It is for the pastoral team to decide whether such pastoral assistants are to be included in the team.The primary task of the team is to ensure that the most effective pastoral care is given to the whole pastoral area, and that no parishioners suffer lack of pastoral care and access to Mass and sacraments because they have no resident priest (page 14).

Wellington has forty-seven parishes and fourteen pastoral areas. What emerged in conversation with Archbishop John Dew, Lorraine McArthur and Sue Devereaux is that five of the pastoral areas have one parish in the pastoral area which has no resident priest. To each of these five parishes the Archbishop has appointed a lay pastoral leader (which is different from the lay pastoral associate).  It has emerged in the diocese that in the five pastoral areas where one of the members on the team is a lay person the pastoral area team has worked more effectively than pastoral areas which have a resident priest in each parish.  Part of the explanation of this experience may be practical. The priests in the pastoral area which has one parish without a resident priest are responsible for leading the Sunday Eucharist in the parish led by the lay leader and therefore, by necessity, collaboration begins.  In pastoral areas with a resident priest in each parish collaboration remains an option, an option the priests, it seems, have been reluctant to engage in.

In order to surface people for ministry as lay pastoral leaders the Archdiocese of Wellington has developed a four-year programme called Launch Out which has three key areas: spiritual, pastoral and theological/scriptural.  Our own progammes Go into my Vineyard and Soil for the Seed are attempts to prepare lay people for ministry.

When we began the work of creating pastoral areas in the Archdiocese of Armagh fears were expressed that this would lead to the merging of parishes or the suppression of parishes.  This has not happened to in the dioceses in New Zealand where they are committed to the development of pastoral areas.  It has happened in some places in Australia, but largely by consent.  Bishop Joe Grech in Sandhurst told us he would not easily merge parish or close parishes.  Instead they have been learning from the New Zealand experience and intend to appoint lay pastoral leaders to positions of pastoral leadership in parishes previously held by priests.

It was an unsettling yet affirming experience to realize that elements of our own approach to the formation of pastoral areas was so close to the experience of the formation of pastoral areas in the New Zealand, despite the fact that we had no previous knowledge of the New Zealand scene before embarking of the process ourselves.

The common elements include:
•    Strengthening parishes and church communities
•    Maintaining parish identity
•    Sharing resources and carrying out projects together
•    The development of pastoral area resource teams
•    Engaging lay people in pastoral area leadership
•    Forming people for ministry

If the future of the Church in Ireland includes a declining number of priests then we have much to learn from our brothers and sisters in faith down under about the development of lay leadership.  The emerging questions is: from where will we learn the lessons with regard to financing the emergence and development of lay leadership into the future?

Andrew McNally

Photo 1 - with Bishop Pat Dunn and members of the pastoral staff in Auckland

Photo 2 - with Bishop Joe Greck in Sandhurst

Photo 3 - with members of the pastoral staff in Wellington