Great parishes - Paul Wilkes' book Excellent Catholic Parishes: The Guide to Best Places and Practices - Excerpt

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 26, 2001 by Tom Roberts

They come in all sizes, locations and accommodate a wide range of views

Paul Wilkes went to the Church of the Presentation Parish in Upper Saddle River, N.J., in 1997 to give a pre-Lenten mission. What he received was a whopping dose of inspiring church life and the idea for an ambitious project to find excellent parishes.

He has found them in abundance.

The noted Catholic author, who has written extensively on religion, particularly Catholic issues, had a hunch that Presentation was not the only exciting Catholic community out there. Wilkes, who first wrote about his visit to Presentation in the April 11, 1997, issue of NCR, in effect has since parlayed a common Catholic story -- the disgruntled parishioner in search of a better place -- into a massive national search for church excellence.

"Only when I returned to my home parish and a certain sadness came over me did I realize the dramatic difference between that parish and my own," he writes in the introduction to the book that resulted from his search. Excellent Catholic Parishes: The Guide to Best Places and Practices, published by Paulist Press, Mahwah, N.J., is due out next month.

A companion volume, Excellent Protestant Congregations, which Wilkes also wrote, will be published in April by Westminster/John Knox Press.

Those volumes, in turn, will be the basis for a Pastoral Summit, a gathering of leading Catholic and Protestant pastors and lay leaders from across the country May 30-June 1 in New Orleans.

"There were surely other parishes like that one in New Jersey, I assumed, and over the next year, with the generous support of a grant from the Lilly Endowment, I and two researchers set out to find them," he wrote. The Lilly Endowment is a philanthropic organization headquartered in Indianapolis that regularly funds research into religious topics.

Wilkes and his researchers in the Parish/Congregation Study found excellence in parishes large and small, Hispanic and African-American, rural and urban, with resident priests and without, conservative to moderate to liberal and everything in between -- 300 in all. Wilkes makes no claim that those 300 are the only excellent parishes. There are, after all, nearly 20,000 parishes in the United States and, by most predictions, that number will continue to grow. Although the priest shortage and demographic shifts and other forces have acted to dramatically reshape parish life in recent decades, most Catholics still identify the parish as their fundamental religious community.

Parish is the place

While approaches to spirituality proliferate in contemporary culture, "the parish remains the place most Catholics go for sustenance," writes Wilkes, an active Catholic and eucharistic minister. "In fact, two-thirds of all American Catholics are registered parishioners." And while one can find a great variety of religious expression in parishes, the people in the pews "are not as polarized as one might think. They are looking for -- albeit in many different ways -- a transcendent connection to God and guidance for their life's journey, a place where they will be at once nurtured and prodded."

What he has compiled, he believes, are compelling examples of excellent churches and, what's more, they all exhibit points of excellence that those involved in the project are convinced can be reproduced.

If Wilkes took a common Catholic wish and went national with it, he also did it in a way that most of us can understand at a visceral level. This is not a sociologist's treatise. This is a record of a pilgrim's search.

The parishes that made Wilkes' final list were discovered through conversations with experts in parish renewal, Catholic newspaper editors and specialists in various aspects of parish life who were asked to recommend the best parishes they knew. The publisher has embargoed the list until after the book is published, scheduled sometime next month. The list also will be available after publication on the project's Web site: www.pastoralsummit.org.

In the book, eight of the 300 Catholic parishes are profiled: Our Lady Help of Christians, Newton, Mass.; St. Pius X, El Paso, Texas; Catholic Area Parishes, a consolidated group of five parishes in Benson, DeGraff, Danvers, Clontarf and Murdock in Southwestern Minnesota; Holy Family, Inverness, Ill.; St. Peter Claver, New Orleans, La.; St. Francis of Assisi, Portland, Ore.; St. Francis of Assisi, Wichita, Kan.; St. Mark, Boise, Idaho. In the eight profiles, at least, we meet these parishes at a deeper level, in the stream of their own history and that of the wider church. Wilkes, who teaches classes on creative nonfiction and documentary filmmaking at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, is a wonderful storyteller. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and is the author of a number of books, including, The Seven Secrets of Successful Catholics and Beyond the Walls: Monastic Wisdom for Everyday Life.

One of the parishes profiled, St. Pius X in El Paso, is a mostly Hispanic parish, bustling with lay ministries and on the cutting edge of changing life in the poor neighborhoods surrounding the church: