Parishes come with the territory: parishes are more catholic when membership is based on territory rather than ideology.

Msgr. Philip Murnion says parishes are more catholic when membership is based on territory rather than ideology. When it comes to parish affiliation, don't vote with your feet; bloom where you're planted.

In the late 1960s and early `70s, as the flood of changes in church and society were washing over parishes--drowning some and lifting others off the sandbar on which they were stranded--I was a member of St. Gregory the Great on the West Side of New York. Between 86th Street and 92nd Street, and Central Park on the east and the Hudson River on the west lived an amazing variety of people. There were the old-timers of Irish, Italian, and Jewish descent, Puerto Rican and Haitian immigrants, professional writers and editors and lawyers, and many others. St. Gregory embraced them all.

At Mass as the priest went down the aisle at the greeting of peace, he would be met with a strong egalitarian handshake from a liberal Anglo, an abrazo from an enthusiastic Puerto Rican, a reverent kiss of his hand from a Haitian, and a defiant "Et cum spiritu tuo" from an unreconstructed old-timer. When parishioners were invited to voice their own petitions at the prayer of the faithful, one person's appeal that "our troops will be successful in Vietnam" elicited a lukewarm "Lord, hear our prayer." While a subsequent petition asking that "the efforts at peace may disengage us from Vietman" prompted a similar response.

The parish council was a faithful representation of the parish. Its composition was established by a two-part election process in which those directly elected thereupon elected five more members. Thus representation from groups inadequately chosen in the first poll was ensured.

As a territorial parish, it was deeply involved in what was happening in the neighborhood. The priests led a neighborhood organization that brought together community groups and area parishes as well as members of Jewish and Protestant communities. So strong was the connection between the parish, pastors, and community that, after one pastor moved on, some Jewish members wrote to the cardinal to express their concern about who their next pastor would be.

St. Gregory the Great was the best expression of what it meant to be a territorial parish. It was one that embraced all the varieties of Catholic identity and piety that existed within the boundaries of the parish--here was no self-selecting congregation. It was concerned with and involved in what happened with the neighborhood and its people. St. Gregory's rootedness not only brought it into contact and cooperation with other parishes, religions, and organizations. Its rootedness also meant that it had to take an interest in all of the issues, that affected the community. Sometimes this meant lending community groups the resources of the parish--the auditorium or the copy machine, for example.

But St. Gregory's inclusive style was not always easy. The sensitivities of one group could be bruised by the concerns of another. For instance, when the parish hosted antiwar protester Philip Berrigan's arrest by the FBI, some older and Hispanic parishioners marched in protest. Still, difficulties could be surmounted and broken relationships restored because the concerns of each group and each individual were respected in the parish's day-to-day life. The parishioners found common ground around the Eucharist, and the parish structured itself to seek both the common good of all the people and the separate goods of the respective subcommunities.

Our Lady of Refuge

With that kind of experience, it is not surprising that I am a dyed-in-the-wool supporter of territorial parishes. The following anecdote helps to illustrate the problems I have with nonterritorial approaches.

Some years ago a woman in a nearby diocese called and said she and others had developed an officially approved, self-selecting parish. And now the local bishop was asking them to reconsider their "parish" and return to their territorial churches. Her call was to secure support for their structure.

When I mentioned my assumption that they were a group of white, middle-class, liberal, professional parishioners, she asked if I had been at their worship. Of course I had not, but such parishes, which I sometimes call "Our Lady of Refuge" parishes (where one takes refuge when discontented with one's own parish), typically have such a composition.

Whatever their interest in diversity, the very dynamic that led to and shapes their community also leads to homogeneity. (Of course, there are also traditional parishes that serve as gathering places for like-minded conservatives.) I asked if she favored an approach to parish membership that resulted--however unwittingly--in racially and economically segregated communities. She of course demurred.

My commitment to territorial parishes, though not absolute, has grown out of experience and theory. My experience has been powerful and its impact obvious.

As for the theory, the territorial approach--which Karl Rahner called the "parochial principle"--embodies a view of church that says all baptized are members irrespective of "their condition or origin," as Pope John Paul II recently said. Whatever their nationality, gender, economic or educational background, or even relation to faith and church, baptized Catholics who live within the boundaries of the parish are members of the parish. They don't need to be registered, take envelopes, or be faithful participants in the sacraments and services to claim membership. These measures of commitment are desirable, but they are not criteria for membership.

Furthermore, the territorial parish represents the kind of incarnational ecclesiology that locates the church deeply within all the affairs of humankind. Again, to use the words of John Paul II: "If we are imbued with the grace of faith, enlivened by hope, and inspired by charity, there is no happy or sad aspect of village or neighborhood life which can fail to move us. Thus evangelization will take different forms in social solidarity, family life, work, neighborly relations."

The territorial principle also reflects an ecclesiology that is naturally ecumenical and interreligious.

A self-selecting parish, on the contrary, is by definition more homogeneous in terms of socioeconomic factors, ideology, and level of commitment to faith and church. However much its preaching, teaching, and worship promote catholicity, diversity, and hospitality, its very structure and the fact that people must choose to travel to a particular church not in their local community makes it more exclusive. Self-selecting parishes also draw people with a higher level of commitment than those who drop into their neighborhood church.

Heterogeneity in territorial parishes, I recognize, can also be limited because of residential segregation, but it remains the best possible means to include different kinds of people and concerns.

Unity in diversity

In our culture where problems of racism and ethnocentrism are far from extinct, where the Catholic population faces the great challenge of forging unity among its now more economically and ethnically diverse membership, and where there is a tendency to accept, in Michael Sandel's terms, "no unchosen obligations," the territorial parish remains a critical means of Catholic unity. At a time when religion is easily becoming privatized and reduced to one's spiritual experience in carefully circumscribed times and places, the territorial imperative to be concerned with and to make a contribution to the good of the larger community seems terribly important.

A proper-sized home includes room enough for a family to be together and room enough for privacy. The same applies to the church: there must be room enough to be together, and room enough to be apart.

A parish's liturgies and activities need the kind of large symbols and expressions, good art and architecture, and emphasis on the actions that unite us from that which divides. But the parish also needs to provide different worship, education, and service activities that allow people with very different backgrounds, needs, and interests to be together with their peers.

Yet this is no easy trick in parishes with great diversity. Parishes with a variety of languages and cultures struggle mightily to achieve unity balanced with diversity. (Parishes with the toughest struggles are those split between only two cultural language groups; those with three or more usually fare better.) In the past, dioceses often established separate "national" parishes for communities that spoke languages other than English. Now all attend the same parish. Although it's an advancement over a policy of racial segregation, various groups need opportunities to pray, celebrate, support one another, and simply talk with people who speak their language.

Nonetheless, the territorial principle is not enough: people with different nationalities, people with different life experiences often speak a different language; their experiences may have little relationship to parish territory. In modern society, and especially modern urban society, people have varying relationships to their neighborhood, on the one hand, and strong relationships with another "community" on the other--groups of people with whom they share occupations as well as cultural and political interests.

The, church in its pastoral ministry must reach people through other bases, often primary bases, of their social identity. The parish cannot be concerned only with matters connected to home if home is not where the heart is--or at least if the heart is divided. Pastoral ministry must relate the community of faith and Eucharist, of discipleship and mission, to all communities. Deliberate efforts are needed by the church to recognize, assemble, and serve.

Of course, this does happen. At St. Martha's in Akron, Ohio, a deliberate effort to balance unity of the whole parish with respect for the needs of a subgroup led to the formation of a small group of lawyers. They meet regularly as a community for faith and work. This led to the formation of 18 other occupation-based groups, and members are no longer just from within the boundaries of the parish--but from a wider area.

Old St. Patrick's in downtown Chicago also has had enormous success gathering young people who work in the city but live outside the parish's boundaries. St. Patrick's provides the kinds of support for discipleship that allows and encourages them to make the connections between their faith and the issues of their lives. Many parishes likewise offer a ministry to the divorced and separated, drawing people from a wide area who still remain loyal to their own parishes.

In these examples, each parish is a territorial parish, assembling people who are quite diverse, fostering unity across boundaries of economics, nationality, and ideology. Yet, each serves parishioner identities beyond its borders, just as parishes do in linking people with efforts at charity and justice in the world.

For the most part these efforts to recognize and organize various cultural communities have been the result of imagination and enterprise by individual pastors, members of parish staffs, or parishioners. As a church, however, we need to speak up more loudly about the importance of these pastoral principles. In individual parishes, and especially when restructuring parishes, we need to balance the task of calling people together--regardless of their subcommunities--into catholicity and "the task of offering hospitality in parish life to the communities that arise from secular life. Tying one to the other, as difficult as this is, protects the many values, serves the many communities, and fosters the one mission and its diverse expressions that constitute our church.

By Msgr. Philip Murnion, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York and director of the National Pastoral Life Center.