pastoral care

[organist]

From recent experience, there seem to be no arrangements to deal with people like me who are dismissed from a parish (19 years as organist and choir director and my wife 10 years as server). Only one priest even mentioned the need for the provision of pastoral care and although I have seen both the bishops involved since the event, nothing was said - too embarrassed perhaps?
I am now very happily playing in the Church of England with a good choir, excellent organ, supportive vicar and lovely congregation who come and say how much they appreciate us.
But oh the sadness that all that training in the Catholic liturgy is not being fully used and I miss incense and Latin!
I'm still going to Mass on Saturday evenings but if I want to sing the Mass, the cathedral seems to be the only solution. Some priests have been welcoming but too often the Mass is dull and has a feeling of "going through the motions" about it.
It's the laity who have given real support and thank God for them all.
A wider issue is - how welcoming are we to newcomers and what do we do when people leave the parish? If we notice, do we find out why?

[sidvicius]

I know of one place where the PP was moved sort of locally - which could have been fatal for the church he was moved from. All the parishioners who liked the old PP and didn't like the new PP voted with their feet, as the new place wasn't so far away that they couldn't go there without much difficulty.

This sort of thing leaves a huge dent in parish finances, to say nothing of morale - I'm surprised that no-one higher up didn't notice the slump in income, and act accordingly. But while opportunites are there to attract new sheep, nothing ever seems to be done very visibly, to search for the lost. I hope someone can correct me on this.

[Sonoqui]

Sadly, Sid (may I be familiar and call you Sid?), the 'higher-ups' seem to be too busy bothering about the purity (or whatever) of the Liturgy etc. rather than about those who are there (or usually not) to listen to said Liturgy and rather than about whether or not we've got enough priests to 'deliver' it.

Just call me an old cynic (be my guest - if you dare) but I seem to recall something about 'fiddling whilst Rome burns' and it's getting truer by the minute as far as I'm concerned.

[Tsume Tsuyu]

I'm probably going off at a tangent here, but the re-awakening of this thread reminded me of a situation in our parish a few years ago. We had a PP who not everyone liked for all sorts of reasons. He was very different from our previous PP - very money orientated, which was necessary for our parish at the time, I think, but which didn't endear people to him. There were other problems too. As a consequence, I watched several parishioners of many years' standing move to other parishes and, no, there didn't seem to be any mechanism for enquiring why people who had been stalwarts of our parish since it began (the church was built in 1963) would suddenly switch allegiance to another parish. It would be a difficult area of pastoral care, I think, because the onus would be on the Priest to notice and do something, and if he felt these were people who, for whatever reason, did not make his life particularly easy, then he might choose not to enquire as to their reasons for leaving. And so, whilst I think the idea of enquiring after people who move on (the equivalent of an exit interview in the workplace, I suppose) is a good one, it would only succeed if carefully managed, perhaps with an appointed lay-person within the parish responsible for visiting those who 'disappear'.

Anyway, in case you were wondering, the tangent comes now: this particular PP took a real dislike to the choir I'm a member of and made this plain, sometimes even making derogatory remarks from the sanctuary before the end of Mass. To say the situation was trying was an understatement. Things became so bad that I was about to become one of those people who just 'moved on' when it was announced that he was being moved. My initial reaction was one of relief – that I hadn't had to move from the church I was baptised in and had worshipped in all my life. But, once he'd gone, I felt a profound sense of failure. Failure that we (my choir) had not managed to 'connect' with him, had never been able to touch him with what we were doing, but only antagonise him. Failure because he left our parish with a wrong impression of what we were trying to do. I wonder whether maybe, just maybe we didn't try hard enough to work with him. The irony is that I always got on well with him, despite my often being frustrated by things he said and did. He was never anything but kind to me, and appreciative of all I did in the parish (with the possible exception of my involvement with the choir ). Rumour has it that, when he left, he told people that it was a difficult parish and he'd had a trying time there and so maybe we all failed him a bit? I'm assuming he was just moved, and didn't ask for a move, and so it's not as though he went because he was unhappy, but it sounds as though he was unhappy whilst he was there and that's very sad. I wonder, do Priests have exit interviews when they leave parishes?