The “dream residence” – featured in the glossy property pages – is often a con job: “A property fantasy is on offer – with perfect models sprawled across a bed or cosying up on a sofa. But if a place is to be home, it needs to be more than an exclusive, private paradise.

It needs to be part of a world to which you belong”. If there is no surrounding community for you to belong to, then you and your “dream home” might as well be set-down in some remote stretch of Western Australia … or you might as well be in a space module – so few are the social contacts around you.

Many of the affluent today live in a combined office and home; but “outside the window of the plush home-office, the throb and hum of commerce and industry is falling silent”. For: People no longer have to go shopping – they do it on-line. They have no need to rub shoulders at work – they just aside step into their ‘virtual’ office. And they need never go out to socialise – they just communicate via the computer-monitor. “We shop, work and play at the push of a button”.

In Ireland, we may not have reached this extreme. Here, the threat to community was worst when most of the population were on extended working-hours. But in Britain, in a recent survey about neighbourliness, only 6% of respondents stated that their own neighbourhood had a strong spirit of community.

It has been pointed out that community was never guaranteed to grow automatically – it had to be helped along [Catherine Pepinster, The Tablet – whom I have been quoting]. Even many decades ago when English factory-owners were building houses for their workers, they often incorporated playing-fields and premises for libraries and clubs.

CENTRE BRINGS COMMUNITY TO LIFE

It was something like this particular line of thinking that finally convinced one midland parish priest here. “Years ago”, admits Portlaoise’s Monsignor John Byrne, “I was of the impression that it was up to groups to gather first – and prove the need for a building in which to meet. But now I firmly believe that you cannot expect people to come together into an inappropriate setting, to voluntarily give of their time. We must put the proper resources and ministries into our community to make it work”.

So when his church was being renovated, Fr Byrne added a full community-centre. “Aside from the church being the central worshipping point of the parish”, he holds that the community centre is “the social focal point …Parishioners feel comfortable here … Local people can freely interact with the church … It’s a place of welcome [where parishioners] are in no way intimidated … where they feel at home … To many groups of people, the centre is just that – a home. In the downstairs meeting area, clusters of parishioners gather for a chat after daily Mass … Many are freely [revealing] that – until the centre’s construction – they ‘had not lived at all’”. [Information: Aoife Hegarty, Irish Catholic].

He seems, then to have made two discoveries – First: Even in a large town there are still a considerable number of people who feel the lack of social contact – who have ‘not lived at all’ – and who are searching for the kind of community which will bring their humanity to full flowering. Second: Even where there is a ground-swell of genuine desire for community, actual lived community is not going to happen unless somebody comes along and puts in place the physical structure and the inviting atmosphere.

500 ATTEND MASS EACH WEEKDAY

In a parish setting, full lay participation can then be the result. So all functions are no longer left to the priest – and the community become fully accepting of elements of lay leadership … Margaret Dooley operates in Portlaoise as a catechist – running, for instance, family programmes of sacramental preparation.

Margaret also organises a ‘play and pray’ group for toddlers each Sunday – where, no doubt, many a toddler comes to play and many an adult stays to pray. (In England too, it was reported recently, groups for parents and toddlers are a common feature of parishes, both Catholic and Protestant). Apparently wherever you have a vibrant Christian community, it is easy to attract outsiders to the margins of it – and later some of the outsiders are drawn into full participation.

Some people might feel that, with all the emphasis on community, on groups, on activities, the main purpose of a parish might get lost: to bring people closer to God. However, it is the opposite which happens if the direction is right: If the motivation behind everything is religious, and if the whole ethos is spiritual – then searchers find their way to the parish as a place to encounter God. And we learn that even on a weekday morning, Saints Peter and Paul’s Church, Portlaoise, has an attendance at Mass which many another parish would be happy to total on a Sunday: 500.