I.
By any normal statistical measure the Church in the United States is “in decline.” Whether statistical measures are as valuable as some of us seem to think, whether they provide us with an exhaustive understanding of a given problem, whether they can sometimes blind us to other equally meaningful considerations which they are by definition unable to capture—all of these questions are beyond the scope of this essay.
This is because I am not actually concerned here with statistics as such, but with the reality of which they provide a (no doubt hopelessly limited and inadequate) picture. Thus, when I remind readers that there are fewer people attending Mass than there were half a decade ago and that there is every reason to believe that in 2030 there will be fewer still, or that in many dioceses priestly ordinations have failed to pick up, I am not suggesting that simply increasing the numbers is in itself a solution to the problem. A small increase or even a slight arrestment of the numerical decline—however welcome its consequences might prove to be, especially for the individual souls of those involved—would not meaningfully alter the trajectory with which I am concerned. In most dioceses in this country—including many of the largest ones, where for the time being the overwhelming majority of the observant Catholic population is concentrated—we will very soon find ourselves in a situation where (we are told) there will not be enough priests to meet the present needs of the faithful. But our future needs will not resemble our present ones, even in strictly numerical terms. The median age of Catholics is older than that of Americans, and even this number is only the happy result of our recent immigration policies, which do not appear to be long for this world. Parishes are closing or being “merged” across the country by the hundreds. This will continue; thousands more will close in my lifetime. This would be true even without looming diocesan bankruptcies and the unimaginable health-care costs for retired clergy that we are about to assume.
All of which is to say that the future for American Catholics is the “smaller Church” envisioned by Pope Benedict [small caps]XVI[end small caps]. We are headed there, I will not say inevitably, but almost certainly, barring some extraordinary unforeseen irruption of grace. Such things do happen, of course, but they are usually very sudden affairs. They cannot be predicted, much less counted upon; they certainly cannot be quantified, least of all in advance. Which is why I think it is fair to say that the smaller Church is probably coming whether we are prepared for it or not.
Are we prepared for it? What would it mean to prepare ourselves for the possibility that millions of souls who might otherwise have availed themselves of the visible channels of grace prepared for us by Our Lord must instead be entrusted to the less certain hope of His mercy, abundant as it no doubt is? What would we be willing to surrender, or even to consign to oblivion, in order to forestall such a defection?
This is not exactly breakfast table conversation, but it is still a discussion worth having. Doing so will mean questioning many assumptions—both implicit and explicit—about parishes, dioceses, and Church governance.
In this essay I will challenge the belief that the traditional parish model has a future in contemporary America and will argue instead for a radical rethinking of how the Church organizes Herself. What are parishes? What purpose have they served historically, and how has that function changed over time? And—most important—can we imagine another means by which the spiritual needs of the faithful might be met, one more in line with the structure of American life? It is not going to change to suit our preferences.
I have said just now that I intend to question a number of assumptions about the life of the Church. Before proceeding, I should probably make explicit one assumption of my own, an assumption that undergirds everything I have to say about Her. It is simply this: that while the Church’s dogmas are immutable, her social forms from the time of the Apostles have always been protean. In some ages She has anticipated the needs of a civilization; in others She has simply risen to meet circumstances as She found them, as they presented themselves—at times Her arrival has been almost immediate, like the call of a visitor who, though not unwelcome, is unexpected, and finds himself greeted almost uncomprehendingly; at others it has been almost too late. That this kind of adaptability is not only possible but desirable and even necessary I take for granted as a concomitant of Our Lord’s promises to Her. If we intend to play our part in their fulfillment by making disciples of all nations, our visible corporate life as Catholics must be desirable to others—our next-door neighbors, for example. And at present, unless I am very much mistaken, it is not even desirable to most of us.
II.
Everyone knows what a parish is. Your parish is the place you go to on Sundays and holy days of obligation. It is where you go to confession; where, if you are in that stage of life, your children may be baptized and receive their first Holy Communions. Your marriage may have been solemnized at your parish, where you may also have attended funerals, and where your own obsequies may one day be performed. Perhaps you volunteer at your parish, by counting money, for example, or by planting flowers; perhaps you have attended a parish festival or taken part in a procession or First Fridays.
It follows from this understanding that your “pastor” is the priest who says Mass at your parish (unless he is on vacation) and who hears your confession and so on. Likewise, your fellow “parishioners” are those with whom you worship. They may be your next-door neighbors; they may commute forty minutes or an hour from the opposite direction. In many cases this “parish” is the church at which you have chosen to “register,” a practical administrative procedure that involves sharing names, ages, addresses, and so on. Registration at your parish is not a juridical act; in many cases the only formal consequence of registration is receiving printed envelopes for the Sunday collection—and perhaps a free calendar.
This is normally how I use the word “parish.” It is a good definition, practical, almost universally understood. But it is not the only one. A canon lawyer would say that a parish is “a certain community of the Christian faithful stably constituted in a particular church” and that it is cared for by a “pastor,” a priest (usually secular) who acts under the authority of his bishop. Parishes are generally organized on “territorial” grounds; they are part of ecclesiastical geography, a kind of subdivision of dioceses, lines on a map; a given parish “includes all the Christian faithful of a certain territory.” If you are a baptized Catholic who resides within the territory of a given parish, you are, unwittingly or otherwise, a parishioner there, even if you have never once darkened the doors of the parish church; and the priest who has been entrusted, temporarily or for life, with the care of your parish is in fact your pastor. This is, strictly speaking, true no matter what. He may not know your name or you his. It is simply a juridical reality. In this sense virtually every Catholic—except for those residing within what the Church has formally designated as mission territory, where there are no defined parish boundaries—is a parishioner somewhere.
These two competing definitions of a parish, which for the sake of convenience I will refer to as “familiar” and “formalist” respectively, often coincide. Millions of American Catholics are parishioners in both the familiar and the formalist sense because the church at which they hear Mass and receive the other sacraments—the “community of the Christian faithful” with which they self-identify—happens to be their parish. At the risk of overgeneralizing, I think it is reasonable to say that while all sorts of Catholics are parishioners in both the familiar and formalist senses, there are certain Catholics for whom this is overwhelmingly the case: older ones who for good or ill do not take an active interest in Church politics or theological disputes, who are less likely to seek out churches that align with their liturgical preferences—for the traditional Mass, for example, or some more vaguely defined qualities perceived as “reverent”—or their desire for homilies delivered in their native language or even simply on account of the architecture.
This is also not the place to discuss in detail the reasons for “parish shopping.” It goes without saying that it is unseemly. Canon lawyers obviously hate it; indeed, they consider it a category mistake—one cannot choose one’s parish except accidentally, at one remove, by choosing one’s postal address. Many pastors feel the same way, though my experience suggests that it is a minority opinion among the younger clergy.
One of the many assumptions of this essay is that parish shopping—which is far more widely practiced than it is denounced—is simply an established fact of Church life. But some of the arguments against it are worth considering briefly, not least because they tend to be addressed to Catholics who self-identify as “orthodox” or “conservative” or even “traditionalist,” which is to say, the sorts of people who do not need convincing on the more basic question of whether we are obligated to attend Mass in the first place. Sermons preached to the choir are always worth paying attention to—they reveal what the preacher, who knows that his audience is actually listening, cares about most.
One common argument against parish shopping is not doctrinal but personal and spiritual and, in a sense, probabilistic: The more inclined to parish shopping you are, the argument goes, the more likely you are to be edified by its avoidance—by steeling yourself against the kinds of things that other serious Catholics go out of their way to avoid, you are not only undergoing a voluntary penance of sorts but making your own little slice of the universal Church a better place, both by modeling pious habits and, eventually, by directly influencing aspects of parish life that are open to lay negotiation (e.g., the selection of hymns).
Another anti–parish shopping argument is more abstract. Choosing one’s place of worship, as opposed to accepting cartographic fiat, is said to encourage an essentially liberal attitude toward ecclesiastical authority, which it half-consciously subsumes into a kind of market framework. Here parishes and pastors are competing consumer products between which one chooses, in the same way one might decide between two brands of razor—or, indeed, between cartridge and safety razors. The One Sacrifice of Calvary is not a choice; it is not one option among many. It should be the object of awe and loathing, however hard it might be to conjure up these emotions, not of Wirecutter-style deliberation.
I have rehearsed these arguments not in order to mock them but precisely because both have occasionally given me pause (though never, I hasten to add, anything more than that). They are both serious; they both address themselves to questions about the soul and the mental habits appropriate to a well-ordered spiritual life; and both, I think, ultimately fail. My objection to the first one is simply that it appeals to our instincts for self-aggrandizement. It invites the listener to vaunt his own spiritual fortitude, to regard his own presence in a spiritual community as a kind of gift. It also seems to me naïve. Being the only large young family in a parish otherwise made up entirely of septuagenarians, or the only woman wearing a mantilla at Mass or the only person kneeling after (or even during) the Agnus Dei—these present very real occasions of sin. It is not obvious to me that being (in effect) selected for a parish is less prideful than selecting one.
The anti-liberal argument is more difficult. This is true even in its crudest form, which sometimes consists simply of asking why there were no parish shoppers in the Middle Ages (which is not strictly speaking the case). It speaks directly to our pious instincts; it asks us to regard the Church differently from any merely human institution or activity, as the supreme authority to which we must submit ourselves, without regard to our preferences (a category that apparently includes objections to things like the reception of Communion in the hand).
This is a salutary attitude, no doubt. But is opposition to parish shopping the appropriate vehicle for it? Is driving an extra twenty minutes to avoid banjo-accompanied renditions of “Lord of the Dance” actually a liberal impulse, or an expression of private judgement comparable to the views of Humanae vitae’s detractors? I have my doubts.
What, then, explains the obsession with confining the laity to their territorial parishes (which I first encountered in a fairly conservative East Coast diocese some years ago)? One could be crude and suggest that there are obvious financial considerations at work, but this would only make sense in the case of pastors who (understandably) desire the support of all their parishioners. It would not explain why some bishops feel strongly about it or why it is a pet subject among canon lawyers. Which is why I think there is a better explanation, namely a longing for order.
But American Catholic life is not orderly. Parish shopping as we know it may be the source of disorder, but it is also a reflection of it. It was (among other things) an inevitable consequence of the upheavals of the Second Vatican Council and the liturgical chaos of the 1970s, with the consequences of which we are still living. I am agnostic on the question of whether what high school civics teachers used to call “good government” has an ecclesiastical analogue, but those who are convinced that it has also believe that one of its necessary conditions is the imposition of what one might think of as “canon law and order.” Not respecting parish or diocesan boundaries is thus the equivalent of vandalism or jaywalking—police the former aggressively and you will eliminate heresy (though this is not necessarily how its proponents would phrase it). It is meant to be a strategy for creating the Catholic version of good neighborhoods and respectable, upstanding citizens.
This impulse is understandable. Between the end of the Second Vatican Council and the belated promulgation of the new code in 1983, canon law existed in a state of semi-occlusion; older priests have told me that during their seminary days in the 1970s they were told that it had simply ceased to exist, like the Spanish Inquisition. During the pontificate of John Paul [small caps]II[end small caps] the revival of canon law served conservative Catholics well. They no longer needed to enter the lists with Father McBrien or the National Catholic Reporter. They were not making controversial doctrinal arguments, any more than a lawyer writing a brief is making an argument about political philosophy—they were simply handing down the law. Treating various questions that ultimately transcended the Church’s positive law as if they were primarily legal had disastrous consequences. Among other things, it discouraged Catholics from thinking about the ultimate sources of their faith. Instead of asking about (say) the radically different Eucharistic theology implicit in the distribution of Holy Communion by lay ministers, an entire generation was trained to point to the relevant canon which presupposed it. (Nothing, incidentally, has done more to justify practical Lefebvrist disregard for ecclesiastical law than instrumentalizing it to avoid theological arguments.)
The assumption that canon law could save us was simply the opposite error of the liturgical reformers whose mess the conservatives were attempting to clean up. Post-conciliar antinomians believed that the Church would be better off without rules; their opponents thought that simply following the letter of the law would bring about a restoration of the Church’s moral authority. But canon law was never the source of the esteem in which She had been held by the faithful. She owed Her prestige, such as it was, to the efficacious reception of the sacraments, the perceived worthiness of Her pastors, and the integral relationship between the Church and ordinary social life. When the conditions for all of these disappeared—when the Mass became something unrecognizable, when beloved shepherds were revealed as hirelings, and when continued participation in the life of the Church became divorced from ordinary social intercourse—She lost something that could not be recovered by recourse to the law. “There was,” as Saint Paul said, “something the law could not do.”
III.
If I seem to have strayed from my point, it is only because I think it is worth demonstrating that arguments about parishes really tend to be arguments about other things: genuine solicitude for the spiritual well-being of individuals, a desire for the restoration of order in the Church without the need to revisit the theological debates that led to its disappearance, tensions between “Say the black, do the red” conservatives and committed liturgical traditionalists. When attachment to one’s territorial parish is exhorted, especially in the face of math that says that its continued existence is essentially an accident, it has less to do with the particular parish, or with parishes in general, than with someone’s preferred vision of what well-ordered Catholic life is supposed to look like.
I have long doubted that parishes as we know them—certainly in what I have referred to as the “formalist” sense, but perhaps in the “familiar” one as well—will continue to play a significant role in anyone’s conception of American Catholic life. This is not as radical an assertion as it might sound. If anything we have been naïve about parishes for far too long. The parish was never a natural fit on American soil. Unlike in Europe, where parish boundaries are older than the modern states themselves, in most parts of the United States they emerged only at the end of the nineteenth century and were largely confined to immigrant neighborhoods in major cities. Catholic worship was otherwise a furtive, ad hoc affair of chapels, many of which were converted secular buildings or private houses. Much of our thinking about parishes—the assumption that they are in some sense meaningful communities, the aspirational desire to use them as a vehicle for public expression of the faith—is really nostalgia for the long-vanished era when when they were, in some cases literally, the center of “the old neighborhood.” A century ago American Catholics could be and often were served by priests who had grown up in the parish, whose parents had journeyed from the same countries, indeed even the same villages. The social unit of the parish was part of an organic and cohesive world in which what we would now think of as our social and economic lives were effortlessly combined with religious observances. In the old neighborhood the parish was intimately bound up in shared devotions to national saints, traditions of vernacular prayer, architectural norms, and common standards of craftsmanship. The parish was more than simply the place where one attended Mass, and the pastor was, in a very real sense, the shepherd of his flock. Whatever else can be said of him, he certainly had the smell of the sheep.
For most Americans, a “parish” in the sense I have described is at best a conceptual reality, the sort of thing we are capable of understanding only as a result of serious mental effort. (For some readers it will be most familiar from the works of Dickens, in which relief for the poor is organized around what were by then Anglican parish boundaries.) This world is as remote from ours as theirs was from the revolutions of 1848, if not from the Napoleonic Wars. Whenever I read a sad story about the shuttering of one of these “old neighborhood” parishes, I ask myself why it didn’t happen decades ago. After the 1960s—which meant white flight, suburbanization, and upward economic and social mobility for the children and grandchildren of immigrants, to say nothing of the upheavals and departures of the Second Vatican Council—the world of urban parish boundaries largely disappeared. New parishes, and indeed new dioceses, came into existence in the suburbs, where they were anachronisms from the day of their dedications; in rural America, where Catholics were thinner on the ground to begin with, they made even less sense. They were, and have always been, more like the scattered recusant chapels of eighteenth-century England than our answer to the saint-strewn landscape of Europe.
When I say that parishes have rarely made sense in this country, one may be naturally inclined to ask why I don’t think they could make sense in the future. But the answer is implicit in the question. The American “parish” was a product of various social conditions that existed here for a very brief period. Most living Catholics never experienced them; almost none will ever do so again. Where is the “old neighborhood” now? Why do we live where we do? And what have we got in common with our neighbors? We reside within our territorial parish boundaries because we have purchased houses there. Most of us have purchased those houses because we could afford them, because of their proximity to our work; most of us do not have a meaningful organic relationship to our postal addresses. Our social lives, such as they are, are willed into existence with the help of digital technology. Even if we are on good terms with the folks next door, we do not have the same relationship with them that Italian immigrants had with their paisans in 1910. Absent these natural conditions, it is difficult to imagine how we would recreate the spiritual benefits that they made possible.
This is to say nothing of what sociologists call the “built environment” in which parish life once took place. The idea that one’s parish is not a church to which one might walk would have been incomprehensible to Catholics a century ago—they would have assumed that you lived deep in mission territory and were served by some kind of put-upon circuit riding priest. This, incidentally, is why there is always something pathetic in the attempts of today’s parish priests (working from the best of intentions, of course!) to revive the custom of processions at parishes from which they have disappeared or, more to the point, where they were never meant to take place. Walking down a sidewalk or a thin strip of grass on the edge of a road—or even around a parking lot—is simply not what a procession is. The old customs died because the forms of social organization that had given rise to them had died also. This does not mean that suburban ersatz processions are not worth doing. But it is simply a fact that they do not have the public meaning they once possessed.
I am not the first person to draw attention to some of these issues. As I write this, new para-ecclesial communities are being envisaged that will attempt to recreate something like the vanished world of the old neighborhood parish—the one proposed around Saint Joseph’s in Detroit, for example, or the one ongoing in Silver Spring, Maryland. While I welcome these undertakings and the thinking that leads to them, I also believe that it is worth drawing attention to the perhaps unanticipated ways in which such postmodern attempts at shoring up community life are unlikely to succeed. A self-selected group of Catholics—most of them educated members of the professional classes—with sufficient means to relocate to a major metropolitan area is simply not the same thing as the tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Such experiments, which have more in common with artists’ colonies than with pre-war working-class Catholic culture, are not scalable. The absence of genuinely shared work—doctors and lawyers and computer programmers and journalists will be commuting to offices in other parts of the city or else working from home—will also have unavoidable consequences. Even if they prove successful, they cannot be the default template for the majority of faithful Catholic families in this country.
One thing I have often asked myself is to what extent if any the episcopate concerns itself with these questions. To the casual observer—and, indeed, to the engaged one—it certainly looks as if most of the bishops are barely aware of how the lives of the faithful outside the pews differ from those of their parents and grandparents. This is especially true of those at or near (or indeed past) the age of seventy-five, who grew up in a world that is scarcely imaginable today, a world where they walked to the parochial school and their younger siblings roamed the neighborhood freely while Mom and Aunt Barb and their friends smoked cigarettes and did one another’s hair, confident in the assumption that the sisters were doing a good job at Saint Al’s and that the boys were going to enjoy their camping trip with Father McGloin. This world, as I say, does not exist. The parish and school might not exist, even vestigially. The comparable reality today is a handful of women who are not neighbors—they might see one another for a few minutes on Sunday afternoon in the parking lot; they have had the education of their children foisted upon them by the failure of the Catholic school system. The responsibilities incumbent upon a good mother—even in a worldly sense—have multiplied even as motherhood itself has transformed slowly but imperceptibly from an almost universally shared experience into a kind of boutique lifestyle choice. It is more and in some senses harder work than ever, more of it falls on them than it did on their mothers and grandmothers, and they have fewer companions. They can find themselves jailed for letting their nine-year-olds sit in the car for thirty seconds while they run to buy a carton of eggs. Their existence is atomized; their handful of scattered attempts to improve the situation—e.g., by creating informal parish play groups—are all too often obstructed by diocesan authorities. When they do get a break, it often takes the form of a passive-aggressive invitation to “offer up” their spare evening by joining a quasi-Protestant Bible Society when what they really want is to have a drink and a laugh. Aunt Barb at any rate would have understood.
If I am correct in my assumption that faithful Catholic mothers and their children are almost totally invisible to the bishops, this is unfortunate but also understandable. What is, I think, less forgivable—it is certainly less understandable—is the fact that parish priests, including younger parish priests, are often similarly unaware of the realities of modern Catholic family life. If nothing else they are certainly in a position to know that in practice what passes for “parish life” is all too often a handful of churchy regulars—recent-ish college graduates, confirmed bachelors, retirees—drinking coffee with the parish secretary while somewhere in the distance a mother yells from the driver’s seat of a Ford Transit full of screaming children that if they want to play with their friends they had better be quiet while Mommy fills out her [small caps]VIRTUS[end small caps] training form.
IV.
Most metaphor is at best half-conscious. Earlier when I referred to “parish shopping” as a fact of life, I did so despite the fact that the implicit image conjured up by the phrase does not strike me as a useful one, even for the harshest critics of the thing described. (Parish “hunting” would be more appropriate, perhaps.) But part of me thinks that it might be usefully re-appropriated as a way of introducing my tentative solution to the problems I have been describing.
I believe that the future of American Catholic life is not parish shopping but the replacement of all or most parishes with—Costco. I have not chosen this warehouse club chain at random. Costco is, in a very real sense, the ultimate symbol of our way of life. Costco is not an ordinary retailer; for many Americans it is optometrist and repairman and vintner; it is a pizzeria and a pharmacy, a place to buy organic vegetables from a gymnasium-sized freezer room or processed snack food in impossibly large quantities. It is impossible to walk there, and it is never in an attractive neighborhood, or any kind of neighborhood for that matter. Costco did not grow; instead, it rose up in a barren place and people came to it. Membership is, of course, required, but it is not beyond the means of anyone who really wishes to join up. Costco is simultaneously a sign of our abundance and our decadence; its operations are evidence of a great deal of thought being expended on providing what a thoughtless society requires. It is horrifying only if we insist upon being snobbish. And even if we do so insist, it is simply unavoidable.
What do I mean when I say that Costco symbolizes our way of life, and that it might also serve as an appropriate metaphor for the future of Catholic communities? Just as the old European parish reflected the social structures of Christendom, whose symbol was of course the cross, and the American ethnic enclave parish the effects of industrialism, which we might associate with the factory, so too would some hitherto-undreamed-of ecclesial structure speak to the life of today, which we might helpfully associate with Costco.
Our form of life is suburban. I use this word neutrally, without any trace of disparagement. Regardless of where we actually live, we are all suburbanites because the fundamental habits, structures, and social technologies that originated in suburbia have become universal. Our civilization is transient, convenient, uprooted. Whether we live in Manhattan, New York, or Manhattan, Kansas, our outlook—the innumerable basic assumptions that govern every aspect of our social and economic relations and the cultural backdrop against which all of them take place—is fundamentally suburban.
Costco is, as I say, the essence of suburbia. When I say that it should replace parishes I do not of course mean the church building should be replaced by an actual shopping center. Instead I envision a number of ersatz oratories, centrally located, where possible in the largest and most attractive former parish churches. Instead of being isolated in scattered rectories, diocesan priests would live a common life on the grounds of the oratories themselves; rather than travel to two or three different “clustered” parish churches, where confession can only be offered for half an hour a week, they would rotate six days a week in the box and at the altar. What Pope Benedict [small caps]XVI[end small caps] referred to in a similar context as “mutual enrichment” would take place when idealistic, perhaps doctrinally rigid young priests came into contact with gruff old pastors, who might themselves benefit from an occasional dose of romanticism.
The faithful, too, would be pushed together: Traditionalists, the elderly, Spanish speakers, devout old ladies, and backsliders would force their annoying habits on one another. There would be play and study groups, scheduled or otherwise. Wednesday night catechism would once again involve parents drafting off their children, perhaps leaving to have more of them. On weekdays and Saturdays mothers would abandon their teenagers to ad hoc calculus tutors and introductory Hebrew lectures and get a cup of coffee or a hot lunch. Clubs of every kind would meet. Toddlers would trip over one another on indoor and outdoor play structures. A nurse would supply Band-Aids. Every Friday there would be a fish fry with beer and mixed drinks. A well-stocked library would contain the writings of the Fathers, Denzinger, Saint Thomas in a parallel edition, dictionaries, and the Riverside Milton. In time priests would rediscover the wisdom not only of confession during Mass but of multiple Masses being said simultaneously, one at each side altar, while the faithful light candles or tell their beads or make etchings of the memorials. Registration would not, of course, be required.
V.
To some readers, including a handful who will concede that it might even be desirable, what I have proposed may sound fanciful or even ludicrous. While skepticism is certainly understandable, I do think it is worth considering whether most of it is really as quixotic as it seems. “The extension of Christianity to an immense multitude,” said Cardinal Danielou, “was held back during the first centuries by the fact that the social cadres and cultural forms of the society in which it operated were hostile to it.” Asking ordinary men and women to remain faithful to Christ and His Church in the absence of a social structure capable of accommodating them required “a strength of character of which the majority of men were not capable.”
This has always been recognized. When the English hierarchy was reconstituted by Cardinal Wiseman in 1850, his critics embarrassed themselves by referring to his actions as evidence of “Papal Aggression.” So far from expressing the hope of Cardinal Pole and Henrietta Maria and James [small caps]II[end small caps] for a return of the historic English religious establishment—with her great cathedrals, her splendid titles of Canterbury and Winchester, and her medieval parish and diocesan boundaries—to Rome, it was in fact an acknowledgement that the reality of the Church transcended the painful accidents of history. Her salvific mission could best be carried on not by pining after a long-vanished past but by ministering to the faithful as She found them: not only the vast class of emigrant Irish laborers in the growing industrial towns or the shabby, genteel remnants of the old recusant gentry stock but untold numbers of possible converts, including those from the educated middle classes who are now associated with the so-called “Catholic Revival.” The restoration of the hierarchy was not a political plot, nor was it animated by nostalgia. It was the work of serious men who understood the high nature of their calling as well as its essential fluidity. Their unusual sensitivity and purposefulness was perhaps best conveyed by the boundaries they drew and the names assigned to them: Their new dioceses conformed not to Domesday lines but to England as she actually was in the middle of the nineteenth century, the England of Birmingham and Manchester and Liverpool, of smokestacks and the Reform Bill and select committees, in which the “Catholic question” that had vexed Protestant statesmen since the beginning of the reign of George [small caps]III[end small caps] had been finally settled by Catholic Emancipation. It was a concession—not to the spiritual claims made since the Reformation three centuries earlier but to the world that it had made possible.
“Growth,” in Newman’s favorite maxim, “is the only evidence of life.” The Benedictine monasteries flourished amid the ruins of the Western Empire because they were houses of learning and agriculture as well as prayer. The friars arose when the medieval secular clergy had grown lax and venal. “Inflexible in nothing,” as Macaulay put it, “but in their fidelity to the Church,” the Society of Jesus emerged during the Counter-Reformation to carry the Gospel to the edges of the known world and to restore it to the refined salons of Paris and Vienna; mobile, adaptable, conspicuously free from communal recitation of the Divine Office, they built, virtually from scratch, the greatest engine for the propagation and defense of the Church the world has ever seen, and rebuilt it after their suppression and subsequent revival. The spiritual genius of Saint Philip Neri recognized the need for priests who were free to minister to the needs of the urban faithful without being bound by religious vows or subject to the authority of a superior while living in common. Their charism was formally inseparable from the structure of their new form of life, a structure that itself answered to the changed conditions of Europe at the end of the sixteenth century. It is, I think, no accident that John Henry Newman, the first Englishman canonized after the Reformation, was a priest of the Oratory.
VI.
What are the primary obstacles to “suburban” oratories? Earlier I asked what a parish is. I might have asked about dioceses. Setting aside the answers provided by canon law and the fundamental nature of the episcopate, I can give a precise answer: Dioceses in this country, on paper, are non-profit corporations. Many of them are, or were, wealthy. If we are going to make radical but necessary changes to the basic structure of Catholic life in the United States, we will almost certainly have to alter our conceptions of dioceses as well.
This is true for any number of reasons. The first is simply that our dioceses are sclerotic. It would be difficult to imagine any institutions less capable of adaptation, of dynamic change, of sober, inward-looking reflection. This is true no matter how bad their outlooks are or how obvious the solutions to at least some of their problems might be. Rather than try the reader’s patience with a detailed discussion of why this is the case, I will simply assert that as currently constituted and governed our dioceses, in addition to falling victim to the same pathologies as other large non-profit corporations, are paralyzed. Their single overarching goal is risk mitigation, in the hope of minimizing financial liability brought about by lawsuits. This is why nearly three decades on the so-called “New Evangelization” is a catchphrase that rightly elicits groans; it is why, as far as I can tell, diocesan “Unleash the Gospel” campaigns have no discernible effects beyond the makers of slide decks. To put it somewhat clunkily, we are incapable of being “entrepreneurial.”
Why is this? Everyone, I think, knows some of the reasons. (One of them, the problem of finding talented administrators willing to work for comparatively little money, is above my own pay grade.) For my present purpose the most necessary short-term reform is eliminating the corporate existence of dioceses by incorporating parishes (and their eventual replacements) along with worthwhile non-parish ministries as non-profits in their own right. More than anything else, dioceses suffer because they are hemmed in by risk-averse lawyers and bureaucrats. A well-attended Catholic homeschooling co-op in my own diocese meets in a rented Protestant building where it is free to organize, to act; virtually none of what it is able to accomplish would be possible in a contemporary parish environment, nor will it ever be unless many things change. That these problems are or appear to be invisible to diocesan bureaucrats seems incredible to me, but here we are.
I have already gone for too long, in part because of various digressions, some of them doubtless more profitable than others. I do not regret most of them; indeed, I ought probably to have said more about certain topics (e.g., the possibility of federal or state legislation that eases the transfer of diocesan assets to parishes or limits the Church’s civil liability or both; the political questions surrounding immigration). There are some topics about which I have been silent. I have, for example, written thousands of words without even touching upon the all-important question of women’s religious life. Enormous resources are rightly (if not always fruitfully) expended in pursuit of increasing vocations to the priesthood, but what about sisters? Any boy who serves Mass has, from the age of seven or eight, a model set before him; but in most parts of this country women’s religious life is invisible to the overwhelming majority of our girls, including those who attend Catholic schools. (So why not an orthodox reboot of Nuns on a Bus—or perhaps Nuns in an R.V.?)
I could continue in this vein indefinitely. Instead, for those who have found my argument unwieldy (or who have simply preferred to skip ahead), I will restate what I take to be my most important conclusions below:
The decline of the Catholic Church in the United States—at least to the extent that religious decline can be measured by things like Mass attendance, the number of baptisms and religious vocations, and the state of diocesan finances—is an inevitability.
We are long past the point where it is worth arguing about who or what is to blame for the present state of things; what falls to the coming generation of clergy and laity alike is preparing for the above-mentioned decline, especially for a world in which there are vastly fewer men and women in the pews—including large numbers of “cradle Catholics” whose spiritual profile nevertheless resembles that of adult converts. They have chosen to be here.
The parish, always something of a poor fit in the United States, is in many parts of the country an anachronism.
In many dioceses the needs of the faithful would be better served if the secular clergy were placed in centrally located oratories rather than spread across geographically disparate parishes.
The common life of oratories would also improve the spiritual lives of the secular clergy themselves.
The accommodation of the Church to the structure of contemporary American life will not in itself save Her; nothing will because She is not Herself the recipient but, through Christ, the source of our salvation. This does not make reform less desirable; indeed, it is still absolutely necessary.
The sclerotic nature of diocesan bureaucracy is an obstacle to reform.
Self-congratulatory talk about a new generation of well-formed young clergy is unhelpful if the paradigm for which they are being trained is managed decline.
Virtually every aspect of modern Church governance is informed primarily by risk mitigation; the overarching principle must once again become the salvation of souls.
Practically speaking, it no longer serves the Church’s interest for dioceses to be organized as large non-profits; instead, the process of organizing existing parishes into discrete corporate entities should continue apace.
Such reorganization should be in the service of the kinds of reforms I have described, not simply the means of shielding assets for future managers of decline.
To these and other arguments which are implicit in or logically follow from those that I have made above, obstacles abound—sentimental, financial, bureaucratic, logistical, and so on—but if Heaven is our final aim, then the logic is inescapable. The Church must now turn to what She has always done best: adjusting Her outward forms to serve the unchanging needs of the faithful.
