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Irish Catholic priests are being afflicted with performance anxiety during online masses due to bad reviews from worshipers of the “mass leap”.
Parishioners are pressuring priests in Ireland to install webcams and liven up their services to attract more viewers, according to the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP).
Covid-19 restrictions have forced churches to move services online, leading some worshipers to label the priests as if they were television presenters, according to Father Brendan Hoban, the group’s co-founder.
“They’re jumping from mass to mass, just testing them out,” he said. “Priests are under enormous pressure to act. They are being marked by their particular performances ”.
Parishioners were comparing the display figures as if it were a competition, Fr Hoban said. “It is an indication of whether your church is as good as the church in the future. We have 47 hits, another has 2000 hits, what’s wrong with you, father? Why do we only have 47 hits?
“They would say that the priest next door has A, B, C and D in terms of presentation skills.” Comments from parishioners were made in person or over the phone, he said.
ACP spokesman Fr. Tim Hazelwood drew attention to the issue in a Zoom address at the group’s annual general meeting on October 28. Some priests had stopped providing services online because of “very hurtful” comments, he said, in comments published by the Irish Independent.
Although online performance anxiety may seem like an updated Father Ted plot for the Covid-19 era, Hoban said it was a serious problem for older, vulnerable men who do their best to cope with multiple pressures. The average age of priests in Ireland was 72, and most lived alone and many had health problems, he said.
Many are not comfortable saying Mass in an empty church under the lens of a webcam. “They don’t know where the congregation is, out there in the ether. It can be two people or a thousand. They are not trained to do Mass this way. “
Hoban said priests felt additional pressure from some parishioners and conservative commentators who wanted them to pressure the government to lift restrictions on churches. He said priests with underlying health problems were nervous about the large number of people attending the services.
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