This January, the Catholic internets were abuzz (largely stemming from this Substack post and the many reactions to it) with discussion and debate about the role of the parish. Should you go to your territorial parish, no matter what? Is it “church-hopping” to drive by three parishes to the one you want to attend?
As the pastor of a personal parish in a personal diocese, I have certain natural interests in these questions! The very existence of the Ordinariate, along with other personal parishes (like ethnic parishes and those devoted to the usus antiquior), brings out some of these tensions in modern Catholic life.
The parish exists for the faithful, not the other way around. I wonder if the suspicion we sometimes find toward non-territorial church attendance relies on a false idea that the practice of the Catholic faith must look the same for everyone. People worry that personal parishes can become enclaves of the likeminded, but so can neighborhoods.
My own biggest concern is less that people attend the church of their choosing and more that so often they do not choose at all: they float about from place to place as liturgical tourists, settling perhaps for a time on one place due to convenience but remaining largely anonymous and uninvolved. I would prefer to be the person who has community and connection at a parish an hour away to the person who walks to church next door but has no friends or relationships in the parish.
The five reasons below are just some of the arguments for being a committed member of a parish. By “committed member,” I mean that you are there more often than not, that you get to know people and let yourself be known by them, and that you contribute in some meaningful way to the life of the church.
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Active parish membership keeps the faith personal.
For some people, this may seem counterintuitive. Modern versions of Christianity often emphasize that we should have a personal relationship with Jesus over “religious” or “institutional” affiliations.
But a spiritual life centered on “just me and Jesus” can easily become personal in a bad way — that is, it can reshape the Faith so that it is more like me and less like Jesus.
Other people can be difficult! But this is part of why we need them. Seeing the same people week after week forces us to confront a wider range of Christian experience than we would encounter on our own. More importantly, the life of grace to which God calls us is not one of isolated devotion, but of communion, which necessarily involves Christ’s body, the Church. As the Tradition teaches, there is no salvation outside the Church (extra ecclesiam nulla salus). Even the holy hermits, like some of the desert fathers, understood their separation as intrinsically ordered to the good of the whole Church.
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Supporting the parish is good for your soul.
One of the precepts of the Church is to contribute, within one’s means, to the material needs of the Church (see the Catechism, 2043; Code of Canon Law, 222). But this matter of law is fundamentally ordered to the salvation of the faithful. Stewardship is a constant theme of Sacred Scripture, alongside warnings against greed and disordered worldly ambition.
The most perfect giving happens as an outflow of the heart. For many of us, it is necessary to act in a way that helps direct and form our hearts! Whether it’s sacrificial financial giving or the support of the church with our time, energy, or skills, fulfilling the precept forms us to prioritize the things of God over the things of this world. We should be wary of approaching church life with the mentality of bargain-hunting consumers.
- Parishes resist generational and socio-economic bubbles.
In my parish, we have people from the neighborhood and people from far away, people of different ethnicities and cultures, people of different economic and family situations. Where else, in our culture, aside from maybe the DMV, can we meet people who aren’t exactly like us?
Social media feed on our desire to hang out with those just like us. Where else do children regularly meet people of older generations who aren’t family?
Recent statistical analysis of Catholics in America suggested a strong correlation between cross-generational religious life and children who stay Catholic when they grow up. We need places like this. In the parish, Catholics can model what it looks like to have both diversity and unity, both difference and communion.
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Membership brings clarity.
Sometimes this is a very practical, even bureaucratic clarity: when your friend asks you to be a godparent for her baby, where do you get your required “letter of good standing”? As a pastor, how can I in good conscience say someone is a practicing Catholic when I never see him at church, and we have no record of him having contributed anything to the parish?
There are times, especially in a parish like ours, where someone lives farther away and cannot be here regularly. But it is still possible to be clear about our intentions and commitments.
The administrative stuff can be tedious, but it points to something larger. Whom do you call when you’re in a life-threatening situation? Whom do you call when your family is in trouble? Hospitals are all supposed to have Catholic priests on call, but wouldn’t it be better to call your own priest if you can?
Regularly we get random calls to the parish asking for help. Sometimes I give out grocery gift cards and the like, but it is very difficult to judge these needs and discern whether there is something I can do. If you’re a member, we can know you first as a person, which means we can more readily support one another in moments of trial.
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Committed members make the parish better for everyone.
Though we should resist a consumer mentality about church, there is a healthy aspect of self-interest here worth noting. Parishes are just better all around when they are full of committed members. That is to say: often the parish can only become what you want it to be when you are part of it.
St. Augustine famously taught that he believed so that he might understand; the intellectual pursuit of the Faith is in a certain sense bigger on the inside. Just so parish life. Committing to the life of the parish is going to make the parish better, which is going to make it a better experience for you and your family.
Sometimes, especially in a small mission parish like mine, this can feel risky, because we are so small. But Christianity is a grand romance, an adventure. Commitment to parish life, maybe especially to the life of a small parish with a unique mission, is a rejection of safe, complacent, beige Catholicism, and an embrace of the beautiful call to discipleship that leads to eternal life.