Irish couple Gráinne and Daryn Keane were looking forward to marriage, but they faced a crucial question: Would they be married in the Catholic Church?
Ms. Keane felt a desire to assert greater autonomy over her own wedding than the proscriptions of the Catholic liturgy allowed, and believed that it would be disingenuous to seek a Catholic marriage when they did not perceive their own values to be reflected in the church.
“I believe that if honest, most people in Ireland would prefer to disconnect from the church for life milestones but feel their options are limited by external pressures and expectations and from a fear and lack of knowledge of alternatives,” Ms. Keane said in an email to America.
In the end, the Keanes opted for an alternative procedure: A ceremony conducted by the interfaith religious organization OneSpirit Ireland.
Their case is far from unique in Irish society. The share of Catholic marriages in Ireland precipitously declined between 1994 and 2023, according to a report authored by Irish Times columnist Breda O’Brien for the Iona Institute, a socially conservative think tank. During the same period, the country saw a sharp rise in what the institute classified as “New Age” and non-denominational wedding ceremonies.
In Ireland, individuals licensed by the state to perform marriages are known as solemnisers. Neasa Ní Argadáin, the solemniser for OneSpirit who performed the Keanes’ marriage, believes the increased demand for marriages outside the church is the result of a widespread dissatisfaction with the Catholic liturgy—a problem not limited to weddings.
“I felt that the church was not meeting people where they were at,” she told America. “It didn’t allow for that broader understanding or expression of the divine in-dwelling that I was witnessing in the people I met, who felt they believed in something they couldn’t always articulate well.”
Recounting the experience of attending a neighbor’s funeral Mass, she said, “The family were clearly unfamiliar with the responses, when to sit and stand, and I wondered how meaningful such a ceremony was to them, at a time when they needed ritual to make sense of their loss and grief.”
According to the Iona Institute’s report, only one third of weddings performed in Ireland in 2023 were conducted in a Catholic church, while one quarter of the total wedding ceremonies fell under a category of “New Age and other religions.” The decline in sacramental Catholic marriages in Ireland has been sharp and swift: In 1994, 91.4 percent of Irish marriages took place in the church and “other religious” only accounted for 0.3 percent.
The scandals that rocked the Irish church at the turn of the millennium—notably the disclosure of widespread sexual molestation of minors and the abuse of women in Magdalene asylums—are well-documented, as are the subsequent shifts in Irish attitudes towards social issues of interest to the church, like abortion and same-sex marriage.
Yet according to Ms. Ní Argadáin, the rise in New Age marriages alongside the steep drop in Catholic weddings suggests a continued desire for spirituality among young Irish people, even as their disaffection with traditional religious structures rises.
Ms. Ní Argadáin believes that many Irish couples may seek more authentic, personal experiences of a marriage celebration than—in their view—those on offer in the church. After taking a course in interfaith ministry in London, she became a solemniser for OneSpirit. “I was drawn to creating ceremonies and rituals which honored religious inheritance and tradition, but allowed them to be expressed in a way that felt more authentic to the people present,” she said.
Ms. O’Brien’s report found that among the weddings performed in “other religious denominations” in 2023, 16.3 percent—or 531 ceremonies—were officiated through OneSpirit.
Ms. Ní Argadáin said that her services remain in high demand, even though she does not extensively advertise them. “I have no website, business card or social media presence because this is not a business to me,” she said. “People who come to me usually have a strong faith background, but they express it in their own way. They would like a ceremony that authentically reflects that.”
Ms. Ní Argadáin said that others often mischaracterize her work as secular, atheist or humanist simply because it takes place outside the Catholic Church. But she insists that weddings officiated through OneSpirit are spiritual ceremonies. She added that many of the couples who seek her services consider themselves Catholic.
“My couples would probably have chosen to marry in the church up to 10 years ago,” she said. “But now, that doesn’t feel authentic to them and I think that’s healthy. Nobody, least of all the clergy, wants couples to use the church out of convenience or thoughtlessness.”
In her report, Ms. O’Brien described this attitude in similar terms. “It is difficult to classify some of these emerging religious organisations but many practice a bespoke type of spirituality tailored to the couple’s desires,” Ms. O’Brien wrote.
Drawing upon the Norwegian theologian Margrethe Loov’s characterization of New Age spirituality as “subjective-life spiritualities,” Ms. O’Brien argued in her report that in the Catholic faith, “authority is embedded in a hierarchical structure and theological dogmas, and the individual is expected to adhere to a preordained system of beliefs and values. In contrast, subjective-life spiritualities are characterized by an emphasis on the individual self as the authority, agent, and goal of spiritual practices.”
In an email to America, Ms. O’Brien said: “People are being fed a kind of therapeutic spirituality that emphasises individual choice over the demands of authentic community. But people still long for something profound when they marry. ‘Spiritual but not religious’ ceremonies meet a need but leave the couple at the not-altar. There is no ongoing support, much less challenge.”
Ms. O’Brien said that the church must “accept that only a thin veneer of Catholic culture is left for most people,” reconcile itself to “the need for evangelisation of Ireland as a new mission territory” and vigorously promote Catholic marriage among young people in order to reverse the decline.
“The key challenge for the church is the loss of faith,” she said. “It is one of the many ugly results of the criminal, evil sexual abuse of children, that the church became fearful of engaging in any kind of parish ministry with children and teenagers.”
Tom Hayes, a priest specializing in media relations for the Diocese of Cork and Ross, wrote in an email to America that “thirty-five percent of all marriages in Ireland in 2023 were Catholic ceremonies. It is important to note that this frequently quoted data is misleading because it is a percentage of all marriages, including people of other faiths and none, same-sex marriages, marriages of divorcees, and many other people who would not be free to celebrate a Catholic marriage…Nonetheless, it is clear that many couples who would be canonically free to celebrate a Catholic marriage are choosing to not do so.”
Father Hayes said that many people were more fixated on the wedding ceremony itself than on the sacramental nature of marriage. “People speak about their wedding day – they rarely speak about marriage!,” he said. “And, in most cases, they have never had the sacramentality of marriage explained to them in an adult way.”
Ms. O’Brien added that couples married in the Catholic Church have a crucial role to play in setting an example for other Irish people: “Lay people need to be aware that they are the only icon of Catholic marriage that most of their friends will ever see.”
Ireland’s General Register Office characterizes groups like OneSpirit as “denominations,” but Ms. O’Brien disputes this designation. They are, in her telling, philosophies more than structures, defined as much by their rejection of hierarchical religion as by any particular spiritual belief.
If the Catholic Church’s share of marriages in Ireland continues to fall, Ms. O’Brien’s research and the experiences of Ms. Ní Argadáin and Ms. Keane suggest that the hierarchical structure of the church itself—even more than any specific theological quarrel with Catholic teaching among the Irish people—may be the primary factor.
