The Territorial Imperative - importance of the parish boundary - Brief Article

Commonweal, April 20, 2001 by Peter Feuerherd

Father S. was a perpetually disgruntled pastor in the middle-American city I lived in some twenty years ago. He was in charge of Saint Joan's Church, located in a neighborhood perceived as being on the edge of decay. A veteran priest, he had been made pastor a few years before and had inherited a losing brand. Saint Tom's, the neighboring parish, had established itself as a hip Catholic alternative, known far and wide for its clown liturgies (yes, such things actually did exist), balloons, and strumming music from the Saint Louis Jesuits.

"This is not Catholicism," Father S. would proclaim to anyone who would listen. He wasn't making a liturgical point, however. He was making an issue about parish organization.

"This is Congregationalism. Catholics should attend the parish where they live." And then, over lunch at a Chinese restaurant, he would offer a long-winded explanation of the beauties of parish boundaries, lines drawn to indicate where the people of God should find their spiritual sustenance together. That's how Catholics were supposed to do things, he would say; only Protestants shopped around for the perfect church aligned to their personal worship styles.

Father S. said he could sure use the energy of those parishioners who had abandoned Saint Joan's for the hip happenings next door. He needed them to help revive the neighborhood. He had lost the best and the brightest, he complained.

At the time, I chalked up Father S.'s complaints as the grumbling of a man who--perhaps the worst sin in American capitalism--could not compete with a neighboring franchise. So what if Saint Joan's were to struggle, and perhaps even fold? He needed to try something else to grab market share. Why couldn't he understand that? Why couldn't he appreciate the inclination of those who were attracted to Saint Tom's? Even though they lived inside his parish's geographic boundaries, they needed to go "where I can be fed," a phrase heard often from Catholic parish shoppers.

Two decades later, I have now come to appreciate Father S.'s view more fully. I'm not sure whether I'm ready to bring out the parish-boundary militia to enforce the obscure canon laws cited by Father S. concerning the integrity of officially recognized territorial parishes. But in failing to heed the Midwestern priest's warning, American Catholic life has become increasingly balkanized, even at Mass--the ritual that should bring us together.

One striking aspect about the case of Robert Philip Hanssen, the FBI agent accused of spying for the Russians, is that he is a Catholic. Not a forty-five-minute Sunday Catholic, but a serious one and a member of Opus Dei. This aspect of Hanssen's life was described in detail in a recent New York Times (February 25) article. The Times says the parish in the Virginia suburbs that Hanssen belongs to is well-known in the D.C. area for its traditional Latin Mass, and that it is a magnet for prominent like-minded Catholics. What struck me is that Hanssen's church shares much of what Saint Tom's offered. Both developed unique market niches, bringing in Catholics from all over to a kind of liturgy with which they were comfortable.

What a contrast to the Ash Wednesday Mass I attended at Saint Paul's on the West Side of Manhattan. There the church was not only filled, there were homeless people in from the cold, men in janitorial service uniforms who work in the nearby office towers, and management types in suits. They represented seemingly all the races and ethnicities the West Side of Manhattan can offer on a weekday afternoon. I had no idea whether anyone read the Wanderer, Crisis, National Catholic Reporter, or Commonweal. How many had voted for Al Gore or for George W. Bush was a complete unknown. But I knew they were Catholics ready to embark with various degrees of seriousness on their Lenten journeys. It was the kind of scene that inspired Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, two converts who found in the Catholic parish a place where the people--often championed in vague platitudes by Merton's and Day's trendy leftist friends--actually lived.

A Brazilian Presbyterian theologian once told me what he admired about Catholicism: "You can hold to all sorts of different beliefs, and still come together around the Eucharist. When Protestants have a disagreement, we form another denomination."

But we may be losing that sense of the church. Jesuit Father Walter J. Burghardt notes in Long Have I Loved You: A Theologian Reflects on His Church (Orbis), that "some Catholics refuse to worship with other Catholics save on their own narrow terms." Burghardt is right. And the more one looks, one discovers that increasingly Catholics in pluralistic America are as divided around the Mass as they are in other accidentals of politics, class, ethnicity, etc.

These days I recall Father S. with a certain fondness. I don't know where he is, but I realize now that he wasn't just a jealous grumpy old pastor. He was a prophetic priest making a point. We should take his message more seriously, lest we continue to reap the whirlwind of a church increasingly divided around its sacred table.