Is your parish on a mission?
From the mid 1800s to the early 1900s, Catholic immigrants poured into the United States. These newly arrived Catholics were often met with challenging working conditions, anti-Catholicism, discrimination and a largely ungoverned, unorganized and unfamiliar society. Naturally, they tended to stick together. They needed each other. They needed the familiarity. They needed their community - their parish, not only for the sacraments, but for the very practical purpose of survival.
Things are different now. I’m not sure our parishes have adapted all that well.
In the 1500s the Church sent out missionaries to the New World. They ventured forth bravely into totally unknown territory. They were frequently met with hostility, unbelievable challenges and the uncomfortably unfamiliar. There was no home-base nearby. America, today, is more like this: More suited for missionaries than maintenance men.
The parish model that worked hundreds of years ago in a homogeneously Catholic European country may not work well here. A parish model that worked great in New England in the 1900s, may be quite useless today.
America is one of the biggest mission fields in the world. The reason so many other religious groups and denominations are growing is in part because they treat it that way. They have the advantage of not having any old expired habits left over from the last century. But they also don’t have the wisdom compounded from the centuries before that. We just have to use it.
The Church has usually fared extremely well in the mission field. We just need to realize we’re in one.
What are we doing right with how we run our parishes in modern-day America? What are we doing wrong?
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“These newly arrived Catholics were often met with challenging working conditions, ant-Catholicism…”
Ah, ant-Catholicism. Thousands of Catholics working diligently together to keep the Church alive. Sure, they’ve had to go underground, but they manage. Those were the days!
Your post reminded me of some remarks by Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith:
“The Church exists only if it evangelizes, and the same is true for the parish. If a parish does not evangelize, it is only a building.”
“The parish community must move away from a maintenance model to a missionary model - if the only thing we do is repair the buildings, this will kill us spiritually.”
For the full article, read here: http://blog.christlife.org/2008/02/missionary-parishes.html
(Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, Jan 30, 200
What we’re doing right is holding fast to the core basics of the spiritual life, Mass, confession, celebrations of the liturgical year and devotions. What we’re doing wrong is the failure to use those core fundamentals to form mature, outwardly focused disciples that use their gifts and talents to build the Body of Christ into a dynamic, living, active force for the transformation of the world. The spiritual life of the parish is not meant as an end in itself. The holiness it forms is meant to serve God and the Church in mission. That does not necessarily mean being a missionary. But it does mean infusing the culture with Christianity so that every aspect shines with the light of Christ and radiates God’s glory into the world.
That’s such an interesting question with such a complex answer. Full disclosure: We (Catherine of Siena Institute) have an unusual bird’s eye view of the question since our mission is to equip parishes to form lay apostles and because we have worked directly with about 60,000 Catholics in hundreds of parishes in 100 dioceses.
But if we just focus on the Mission vs. Maintenance issue, the short and the rather stunning answer would be that roughly 90% of US parishes are essentially maintenance organizations because roughly 95% of their parishioners are not yet intentional disciples. We have found that the Catholic practice of parish ministry is profoundly shaped by the fact that the vast majority of our people - active, marginal, or inactive - are in earlier, essentially passive stages of spiritual development. That doesn’t mean that God has no place in their life or that they don’t have certain spiritual questions or longing or that they don’t do good things. But they aren’t yet disciples for a variety of reasons that I can’t squeeze into a paragraph! And that changes everything. You have to be a disciple before you can be an apostle, before you can be sent. Where true evangelization occurs and a parish culture of discipleship is fostered, a tremendous hunger for formation, for discernment, and for mission inevitably follows and it comes from the people themselves.
My my great grandfather Calix Roy certainly fits the bill, mid 1880s from St Jean, Quebec. Settled in the French-Canadian/Catholic quarter of North Adams.
Yes, we should continue to go out and spread the Gospel and the Truth as we have for centuries. It’s sad that so many people who have Catholic family members are rejecting Catholicism for new Protestant movements.
Post-Vatican 2 the parish system fell apart in many areas of the country. Part of that is due to the flight to the suburbs and then the kids who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s people moving far away from home. That’s unfortunate, but I don’t know what could have been done about that.
Funny how when my old parish tried to be more welcoming and rejecting tenets of the Faith, it isolated people and couldn’t act as a support for many people. That’s what happened in many places. But when a parish embraces the Faith, it becomes vibrant and welcoming. Those parishes don’t often struggle with finances and people actually want to associate with the parish.
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