Editorial

Saving our Parishes

By Mattias A. Caro | May 31, 2015

Invitation is the first step in the journey of Christian discipleship.

In my ordinary daily life (as I suspect is true for most Catholics) this invitation is revisited each time we visit our parish. The word ‘parish’ has its origins in the ancient Greek word for a sojourner, itself a word derived from dwelling place. Its administrative origin is as a unit of ecclesial division, denoting the particular territory of a priest’s mission field. Taken together, the idea of a parish is a space created to welcome the Christian believer and to invite him or her to prayerful rest in the sacramental encounter with the Lord.

The invitation is tactile and real. I dip my fingers in the Holy Water fount, a visible reminder of my baptism and God’s blessing on my life. I genuflect before God present. The priest invites me into prayer “in the [triune] name” of God. I am visiting His house, His dwelling in my local community.

This invitation is for both the initiated (that is, the baptized Christian believer) and for the uninitiated (those who come to explore belief in God and in His Christ). The parish is open to each as a waystation in life since we share a common human condition. We all share the same need and desire for God, together with faults and wrongdoings and an intellect that at times struggles to see beyond our own limitations. The parish invites all because all share the same need, whether they recognize it or not.

Practically, this invitation works itself out through what we refer to colloquially as the life of a parish. This might include Sunday and daily mass, confessions, a grade school, a catechetical program, various affinity groups for men, women, prayer warriors, and servants. The parish even develops its own internal language and customs of fish fries, CCD, and ministries. By its internal culture the parish offers many points for its members to form fellowship and community.

But this invitation is threatened on a number of levels. First, the parish is threatened by those who want it to “get with the times.” Most of these criticisms come from those (including our President) who’d like to see Church spend less time on the hot-button issues of the day (especially abortion and marriage) and more time on making the world a better place as these critics define it. In other words, the invitation of a parish should be directed solely toward the societal benefits it can provide.

Second, it’s threatened by the increasingly perfunctory role our culture of Catholicism plays coupled with its weakening as a sign that distinguishes us. For example, we Catholics recognize the importance of receiving the sacraments of initiation. We’ve also largely built up customs around the sacraments: the christening gown, the First Holy Communion dress, and the red ropes for the Holy Spirit. But more and more, these customs seem disconnected from the enduring change and grace these sacraments impart. There is a sad drop-off in the number of children who attend weekly mass after First Holy Communion. Attendance picks up again right before Holy Confirmation, only to drop off right after the children receive the sacrament.

What’s more, the parish no longer celebrates strongly those distinctive customs and practices that mark our communities and lives as Catholic. Even a bad Catholic used to refrain from meat on Friday, keep a rosary on his or her bedpost, pray a Hail Mary when turbulence hits, light a candle when a new job is needed, or even remember the number of years since the last time he or she saw the inside of a confessional. But in the way of prayers and lived experience, the parish has done little in the last several decades to cultivate a distinctly Catholic culture.

Finally, the parish is threatened by the pressure to renew parish life through an analysis of its bottom line. How many people are we reaching? What percentage of our parishioners give regularly or contribute to the diocesan annual appeal? Who volunteers? Who is really active in our parish groups?

These threats are threats because they redirect parish life from its primary mission: the people’s sacramental encounter with the Lord. If the parish’s mission is that of welcome and invitation, one lost sinner is of more worth than ninety-nine faithful. Metrics do little to illuminate the health of the parish.

Perhaps part of the problem lies in the parish trying to offer too many different experiences and to fill too many needs. The Church is trying too hard to accommodate the faithful however she can. It’s a ‘big tent’ approach asking the Church to make herself palatable to ever-evolving trends in religious community and experience. Many decades ago, our Holy Father Emeritus previewed the future of the Church in Faith and the Future:

The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes … she will lose many of her social privileges. … As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members.

My daily work consists in running my own parish’s catechetical and youth programs. I very much want Benedict’s words to be untrue. The edifices of programs and communities we have should endure. But even I see among the youth and the faithful an increasing difficulty accepting the parish as a place of invitation. More and more, people either do not see the need for what the parish provides or simply do not identify with the Catholic faith and don’t look for what they need in the parish church. I see way too many youth leave the Church because, in their eyes, the parish (and by extension the Church) doesn’t care about X (gay people, the poor, immigrants, etc.). Fine. But that is not why the parish exists.

How can the parish return to being a place of invitation to prayerful rest in the sacramental encounter with the Lord, even to those who have been trained by our culture to reflexively reject Catholicism? The invitation certainly has to be incarnational. That is, we can’t expect simply to try to get people to the parish and then expect God and His grace to do the rest. That’s lazy.

It starts by making the parish welcoming. This spirit of welcoming, however, needs to cut against a tendency to be “all things for all people.” Because the basis of the Christian experience is the invitation, the parish needs constantly to renew itself taking into consideration this question: Are we inviting, from the streets and nooks of our community, all those to whom Christ wishes to extend His message?

This examination might be difficult because there is always a sense, a tendency in human community, to call something our community and our parish, which asks new members to immediately conform to our idiosyncrasies. In the case of the modern American parish, it is precisely the developed internal culture and pre-existing groups that can cut against a disposition of being inviting toward the stranger.

Fortunately, the tools at our disposal to once again renew a spirit of invitation are quite human and simple. When John asked Jesus, “Master, where do you live”, Our Lord said simply, “Come and see” (Jn 1:38-39). Ushers should greet people and smile especially for unfamiliar faces. At the liturgy people should sing loudly and recite prayers clearly. Nothing is more disheartening than parishes where there’s no energy among the people.

After mass people should stay and make friends. I’m guilty of only talking to the people I know at the parish, but it is important to greet those we don’t know, to welcome the stranger. When the people of a parish make these small acts of attention and invitation, suddenly hearts are a little less focused on the seeming barriers to belief and the troubles our modern age brings. We are outwardly moved not toward ourselves but toward the other.

Not everyone will accept the invitation. Most in fact will not. But we must extend it, not once, but continually. We must orient our communities and parish life to do so. It is precisely this example of Christ we are in need of renewing. For in His sacramental presence, especially in the Sacraments celebrated so often in the parish, Christ awaits. How will we help Him invite?

LawProf61

As the author poignantly notes, what is happening inside the church is a function of what is happening outside it. At its core, the sacramental connection with Christ must be driven by the recognition that Christ is the path to salvation, and that salvation matters. The Parish isn’t just a place to meet nice people who want to feed the poor. The Church’s decision to partner and identify with left-wing “social justice” groups has shifted the focus from salvation and redemption to the earthly concerns of poverty. Eliminating human suffering (including poverty) is a worthwhile objective and activity, and absolutely grounded in Christ’s message. But the spiritual has been lost in the temporal.

More recently, as many of these leftist movements have revealed their hostility to Christianity (which some of us warned of, incidentally, years ago), the Church has been left with its mouth hanging open. The same “social justice” it used to support ministering to the poor has been usurped to cover active support for homosexuality and “gay marriage,” and abortion as “reproductive rights,” among other causes antithetical to the Church’s teaching on sexuality and the inherent worth of every human being.

The Church handed generations of young Christians over to these movements, as receptive audiences. Now, those generations turn to the Church and say, in essence, “We can have a government that does these things; MANDATES them, in fact. What do we need YOU for?“

If you will pardon the business metaphor, the Church needs to re-find its core competency: bringing people to Christ.
Richard

Very good article, but my question is: how does Catholicism look inviting to the average Westerner? If people are leaving the Church because they find it either irrelevant to their daily lives or hostile to their liberally informed notions of social justice (the Church doesn’t care for people X, Y, Z -gays, poor, women, etc.), then what does it concretely look like to make the faith inviting to such people? If there are fundamental divisions of values and perspective, then what does invitation look like?

Also, to be honest, if the liturgy is pretty drab, if the priest is an entertainer or beginning the Mass with “In the name of the Mother and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” and the local bishop doesn’t care, if the music is just of painfully low quality, I would feel a bit uncomfortable inviting ANYONE to come and see that… I know for myself, when I was an atheist (but having grown up Catholic), seeing such liturgies always repulsed me because of their obvious triteness. There is nothing to dedicate myself there to, and if there is (the supernatural reality present no matter how bad the surface level stuff is), it’s just not ringing through in any obvious way.
http://www.ethikapolitika.org Mattias A Caro

Your point is well taken. As a layperson I’ve experienced many a time that downtrodden liturgy. In college I saw that all too often. I was always impressed by the older parishioners, however, who took a shining upon us college students, talked to us after Mass, and then started inviting us to their homes for dinner. It took the edge off the painful liturgies, and I think, because of that fellowship, allowed me to refocus on the prayerfulness and encounter with Christ, especially in the Eucharist (I say penance too but it was never great going to penance down there having to argue with the priest “oh yes. that’s a sin.”). Of course, as a layperson, there is often very little we can do in these situations and voting with our feet isn’t always possible.

There is not one prescription and my examples were not meant to be prescriptive, but only to offer a few ideas.
http://www.ethikapolitika.org Mattias A Caro

“At its core, the sacramental connection with Christ must be driven by the recognition that Christ is the path to salvation, and that salvation matters.”

Couldn’t have said it better. One point I said stepped is the “messaging” of the Church. That, I suppose, wasn’t my point because ultimately the conversation about messaging turns to the message and there in the whole thing blows up because most people have some version of getting the Church with the times. That, of course, is not my point. Nor should the Church get with the times.

We all know of simple examples of where-in we welcome others or we were welcomed into the Church. Unfortunately, most of these used to occur within the family, but now it’s up to the Church to step up, in some respects. Even taking the analogy out further: marriage preparation was never as necessary because we had large Catholic families where if not parents, then aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents provided the social solidarity and witness that was so natural in the formation of virtue. Now, the poor pastors have to step in and most, I suspect, would rather not. Again, is that the parish’s core competency or is it stepping in because of a failure?
Richard

Those are good ideas. A friend of mine told me that often we need to engage people on a human level, simple bonding and fellowship, in order to make it easier to engage them on a spiritual level, doing the mundane things first before getting to the higher. He said it to me specifically because I like to skip the mundane, but as your article points out, it doesn’t often work well.