PEOPLE & PLACES
The Evolution of the Catholic Parish Tricia C. Bruce
In her book Parish and Place: Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church, sociologist Tricia Bruce chronicles the changing nature of Catholic parishes in the United States, from communities defined by geography to communities bound by shared preferences, expressions, and practices. Below are selections from the book that look at the history of American Catholic parishes.
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intersection of authority, territory, and community. Authority—namely, a local bishop—prescribes when and for whom parishes are created and when or why they merge or close. Territory—or the boundaries in physical space that define a territorial “parish”—stipulates belonging, unless a special population is identified otherwise. And community—both ascribed and achieved—transforms a parish from abstraction into a viable and lived, shared experience of religious and social meaning. A parish is not just a building. “Parishes” identified Christian communities as long ago as the second century. The Greek source of the term— paroikia—translated to “those living near or besides.” A “paroikos” was a neighbor. Perhaps paradoxically, the word was also used to describe those living as foreigners in a land, with no right to citizenship. As such, the original connotation was as much theological as it was organizational: early Christians saw themselves as outsiders to the world, but insiders together. In time, paired with the Latin translation “paroecia” and (for awhile) used interchangeably with the Roman administrative term “diocesis,” parish took on an increasingly territorial meaning. A parish identified the jurisdiction of a local bishop. Terminology grew more uniform in the sixth century, as “parish” came to refer to a local congregation served by a priest, grouped together within the larger territory of a bishop; the latter labeled a diocese. Parish boundaries were not strictly determined prior to the Council of Trent in 1545. Pastors served all who came to them, domicile notwithstanding. The Council of Trent levied a partial indictment of this territorial agnosticism, replacing it with a strict conformity to boundaries parishes subsist at the
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and their delineation. A pastor needed to know whom (and whom not) to serve. The desire for pastoral jurisdiction trumped the original connotation of a parish as a unified community. Parish came to mean isolated, individual geographies of people, with fixed boundaries, under the rule of a local bishop. The first official compendium of rules and regulations governing the Catholic Church did not come until much later, with the 1917 Code of Canon Law. Although this first official “rulebook” of the global Roman Catholic Church did not explicitly define “parish,” it did identify a parish’s legal components. These included “(1) a territorial section of the diocese; (2) with a portion of the Catholic population assigned to it; and (3) having a proper pastor who looked after the care of souls.” Notably, the focus of the parish was on the pastor, not the people. Parishes were the ideal administrative, pastoral, organizational structure to be followed universally. But territory was not the only constitutive characteristic of parishes, even in the 1917 code. A second, non-territorial form of parish constitution also existed—one that resonated more so with earlier etymologies, unifying outsiders marginalized within an otherwise homogenous community. This alternative form is the personal parish, existing apart from—or in combination with—territory. Personal parishes define membership by the people who belong to them. Given the emphasis on persons rather than (primarily) on territory, they carry the moniker of person-al parishes. A “personal pastor,” ergo, “is one who is appointed for a certain number of persons or for some family.” The national parish was a subcategory of personal parishes, designed to serve Catholics whose language or customs set them apart from other Catholics. In the Catholic Church, territorial parish boundaries exist as a way to manage things, administratively. Like public school boundaries or political districts, they specify which Catholics go to which parish church, and which parish church (and pastor) is responsible for which Catholics. “For the faithful, territoriality means that the Church is not a membership organization in which you pick and choose your place or degree of affiliation,” writes Francis Cardinal George.
