Was the Parish Made for Man—or Man for the Parish?

Due to the recent, and particularly grandiose, liturgical vision of a certain Midwestern diocese, The Geographical Parish is once more the topic of the day. It’s a fascinating concept, and one that is comforting to a certain mathematical kind of mind: absolutely every single one of the 1.27 billion Catholics in the world is neatly accounted for, divided into parishes and deaneries and dioceses, placed on a color-coded map with tidy boundaries. It is a beautiful thing, really.  

I’m reminded of Ralph McInerny’s ambitious and strangely compelling (though ultimately unsatisfying) novel The Priest. One of the secondary characters, the pastor of St. Waldo, is absolutely obsessed with The Census—the natural counterpart of The Geographical Parish. In the pastor’s office hangs a local map with the boundaries of the parish clearly outlined in marker and little pushpins in place to show the progress of the yearly census; there is also a little Rolodex of index cards, with a note for every single parishioner. 

The pastor considers it one of the most important duties of the three priests assigned to St. Waldo to complete this census every year. So, Fr. Ascue, our hero, sallies forth into the neighborhood, clutching his share of the notecards, knocking on doors to inquire if everyone there has made his Easter duty and acquainting himself with the parishioners, who number in the thousands.

The Geographical Parish surfaces as a feature of the church in many of the mid-century Catholic novels of which I am so fond, but my acquaintance with the concept comes first from my childhood experience. I spent the first part of my life in an old-fashioned archdiocese that was firm on this system: you were not permitted to register except in your geographical parish, and you could not receive the sacraments elsewhere. It was unthinkable. When you met someone new in that city, you asked what parish they belonged to, and this told you what neighborhood they lived in. 

It did have a certain old-fashioned charm, and it assured one that the Church, if not the world, was well-ordered and well-governed; but it also meant that your liturgical experience and religious formation came down to luck of the draw. An overidentification of The Parish with The Church sometimes resulted in people, after a serious problem, not going to a new parish but simply ceasing to go to Church at all because the two were the same in their minds.  

When my family moved to a neighboring diocese, it turned out that our new Geographical Parish was actually a warehouse, filled with chairs instead of pews, where kneeling on the concrete floor was discouraged, and where we were memorably scolded by the pastor for attending Mass on what, in our previous archdiocese, had been Ascension Thursday. But this diocese allowed you to register wherever you chose, and so we quickly transferred to a city parish where the Latin Mass was, begrudgingly, allowed by the bishop. Here we belonged to the parish and, more importantly, to the Latin Mass Society. Someone picked up an ancient priest, people appeared at the appointed slot between two poorly-attended English Masses, and we disappeared again before anyone could take too much notice. 

There was no “parish life.” If you needed the actual parish for something, you never knew what you would get—the pastor might refuse a hospital visit, or he might conduct your wedding service very irregularly, but he was the pastor, and this was your parish, and so you had to take your chances. (Summorum Pontificum changed all this, and the Latin Mass I attended as a teenager has now become a thriving community that is beautifully integrated into the life of that church in a way that should be a model for all diocesan parishes with a Latin Mass.)  

There has only been one time since childhood that I have belonged, briefly, to my Geographical Parish. Upon moving to our new home, I visited every church in a five-mile radius, only to discover that the only one that actually felt Catholic was, providentially, our actual geographical parish. It only lasted a few years, though, because in the USCCB-endorsed musical-chair-priest-shuffle, we were given a Geographical Pastor who ad-libbed so much of the service that my children could no longer follow along in the missal. This is yet another problem with the geographical system—even if one finds a wonderful parish where one can grow spiritually, even if a family is willing to relocate for a healthy church or school, there is no guarantee that will not all change within a matter of weeks. 

Although we have happily relocated to another nearby parish that, in all the best ways, could be out of the pages of a Seton reader, more than one person has remonstrated with us for doing so. We were “abandoning” our parish; we were “parish shopping” and “parish hopping”; we should “stay and help make things better.” We shouldn’t be picking and choosing, we had an obligation to support our local parish.  

Why?

If I bear any responsibility for “the parish”—any parish—it would surely pale in comparison to the responsibility I hold for the souls of the half-dozen children in my care, and it was certainly not in their best spiritual interest to remain in the parish. This raises the question—Cui bono? Whom does this mysterious, old-fashioned, bureaucratic system benefit?

The purpose of The Geographical Parish is not self-perpetuation. It is not to make sure that Fr. Local has a captive audience of the people who happen to live within 2.4 square miles of where his church happens to have been built. It is not to guilt the inhabitants of Anytown, USA into sending their donations into his church basket, nor is it to ensure that a steady stream of children flow into his school.

The purpose of The Geographical Parish system is to make sure that each and every single person has someone—the local pastor—who is responsible to care for that person’s soul. Parishioners do not exist to benefit some nebulous concept of The Parish, a disembodied entity to which we owe allegiance, but the opposite. The real intent of this system is to make sure that no one is without the salvific services the Church has to offer—not only to registered members, who have their name printed on an envelope and an active file in ParishSOFT, but to every single human being who has need of this help. The Geographical Parish System ensures that every single soul has a specific point of connection to the one, holy, apostolic, catholic church.   The purpose of The Geographical Parish system is to make sure that each and every single person has someone—the local pastor—who is responsible to care for that person’s soul.Tweet This

At St. Waldo’s, that connection was made clear as one of three priests knocked on every door inside that marked boundary once a year. Sadly, the hierarchy of the Church has failed to provide that kind of care on a grand scale. And they cannot expect the laity (whom, perhaps, they now regret having empowered in the Second Vatican Council) to continue giving where they are not receiving. 

People who are thirsting for reverent liturgies, for access to the sacraments, for assistance in living out their vocations in the world—people who are desperately seeking Truth—can no longer merely amble a mile or so down the street into the nearest Catholic church and assume that they will be given any of those things. That is not the fault of the laity, and it is not a problem they can fix. The Parish is made for man, not man for The Parish. Certainly, we have responsibility for our fellow man; certainly, we have a moral obligation to provide for the financial support of our churches and priests; certainly, we are called to live with and in community. But our first obligation is to the care of our souls and the souls of our children, not to a section of a highlighted map.