A parish priest has called for better communication between clergy, undertakers and parishioners after an experience that left him questioning whether ministry is drifting from relational to transactional.
Writing in his Notebook column for The Irish Catholic, Fr Martin Delaney describes visiting a woman in his parish monthly for several years, bringing her Communion, and attending her in hospital days before she died. When she died, the local undertaker relayed the family’s preferred funeral date — one Fr Delaney could not manage due to a prior commitment. He offered the next morning instead, but the family then asked whether another priest could say the Mass so they could keep the original date.
“No one behaved badly,” Fr Delaney writes, stressing the family were grieving and the undertaker doing difficult work under pressure. “And yet I have to admit that I felt disappointed and, perhaps, a little hurt.”
Ordained forty years ago, Fr Delaney notes his two parishes once shared six full-time priests; today he is the only one. “That is not a complaint; it is simply the arithmetic of the last four decades,” he writes — but argues parishioner expectations haven’t adjusted at the same pace.
He also highlights undertakers’ growing role as intermediaries who often broker dates before a priest is consulted — not a criticism, he says, but evidence that clergy-undertaker conversations “are becoming more necessary, not less.”
Rather than new guidelines, which he says “rarely capture the pastoral nuance a moment like this needs,” Fr Delaney is urging honest, ongoing dialogue — with undertakers, parish communities and among priests themselves — about what one priest covering multiple parishes truly requires.
“The alternative,” he warns, “is more moments… a small, telling sign that something in the relationship between priest and people needs tending to.”
