The Iona Institute have revealed a new study showing that last year a quarter of all weddings that took place in Ireland were broadly ‘New Age’ in character, while Christian ceremonies accounted for not much more than a third of the total. The paper, by columnist Breda O’Brien, says that the Churches must respond to this challenge and see if they can find ways to draw more people back to Christian wedding ceremonies.
The findings of the paper come from CSO data and show that:
Catholic weddings accounted for 91.4pc of the total in 1994 and last year this had fallen to just 34.3pc of all ceremonies
Church of Ireland weddings fell in that time from 2.6pc of the total to 1.1pc
Weddings carried by by Entheos Ireland (623) alone outnumbered Church of Ireland weddings by more than two to one
An organisation called the ‘Spiritualist Union of Ireland’ conducted 7.8pc of all weddings in the country last year
When you add in weddings performed by other, similar organisations, they account for almost a quarter of the total, and rising.
Officially they come under the CSO heading ‘Other religious denominations’ although few of them are denominations as such and, as mentioned, sometimes explicitly reject organised religion. It would be better for the CSO to use a different heading.
Commenting on the big change in practice, the author of the paper, Breda O’Brien said: “It is clear that the Churches need to have a think about what is happening and come up with a response. For example, at present the Catholic Church will only hold its wedding ceremonies in churches, but it is actually free to hold those weddings in other locations, like hotels, if it wanted. This is already happening in some dioceses in America, for example”.
“Unless the Churches do find a way to respond, the present trends will probably worsen from their point of view and will very likely extend to funerals as well in due course.”
“However, it is interesting that many couples still want a spiritual dimension to their weddings. This provides an opportunity for the Churches”.
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