One corporation that will not recover from the Covid-19 lockdown

Doing a masters’ some years back, I met a fellow Australian who mysteriously described himself as “working for a long-established multi-national corporation”. When pressed, he eventually revealed that he meant the Catholic Church – he was a priest in civvies. That corporation has been buffeted by storm waves in recent decades, mostly through its own severe failings. But now, like all the Christian churches, the pandemic has it propelled headlong to fight for its survival.

Closed churches and bans on weddings and baptisms initiated a habit of staying away. According to the Spectator magazine, a leaked Church of England document in Britain showed it expects membership and congregations to be 20 per cent lower after lockdown. This is on top of a 40 per cent decline in congregations over the past 30 years, stated in an internal report for the CofE. In Germany, major Christian churches were seeing a quarter of a million people a year leaving even before the pandemic shut down services. Last week here in Ireland two senior churchmen told Patsy McGarry of their fears, of a “possible disaster”, and visions of a future where many traditional Church activities were forced to cease. Veteran religious correspondent McGarry reported that priests’ income had fallen by a quarter during the lockdown, and donations in Dublin dropped by three-quarters in three months. This is dire for any going concern.

 

Whatever your opinion of organized religion, the Churches have provided tangible and intangible benefits to millions, for many years. One of the Irish bishops interviewed asked if it was practical for the church to continue to run so many schools, for example. The organisation is lacking money and the stream of teaching personnel that came from religious orders. Only two men are studying for the priesthood in the Dublin archdiocese. 

 

If the churches were corporations in fact and not just in effect, they would be facing a perfect storm of redundancies, cutbacks, strategy overhauls – and possibly takeovers. Darren Shearer of the Theology of Business podcast compiled eight reasons why churches are in fact businesses. He lives in the US where religion is indeed a big-money business, to the tune of a trillion dollars. Is the robust commercialism of the evangelical church in Shearer’s country the only hope for the spiritual but ageing ventures on the other side of the Atlantic?