You better not shop around: countering the current trend to shop around for a parish that "fits" you, Peter Feuerherd makes the case for sticking with your neighborhood community. He argues that everyone loses when Catholics see churches as one more consumer choice.

BACK IN MY COLLEGE DAYS, I HELD A WEEKEND job parking cars at a golf club on the South Shore of Long Island. One Saturday the club rented its catering hall for an Hasidic Jewish wedding. I can still picture the river of blackclad men, followed by women, walking down the ocean road. There was no doubt that they offered a presence: This neighborhood knew that this particular community was here to stay.

I don't think the scene would have had the same impact if the wedding guests had arrived in SUVs and limos. The Sabbath injunction against driving forced the group to walk, en masse, providing a concrete neighborhood presence. The result was they were noticed.

Catholics used to have that. In many neighborhoods the massive stroll to Sunday Mass provided evidence that this particular slice of earth was a papist stronghold.

It's not so true any more. Today the most valuable slice of parish property might very well be the parking lot, where Catholics from all over can quietly and unobtrusively settle in after traveling some distance to Sunday Mass. An increasing number don't even live near the churches they attend. The church, for many so-called parish shoppers, has much in common with the shopping mall. The old concept of parish geographical boundaries has fallen into disfavor.

Still, there is a kind of poetic wisdom--backed by thousands of years of pastoral practice--in what official church regulations say regarding the seemingly arcane issue of parish boundaries.

Canon 518 reads: "As a general rule a parish is to be territorial, that is, it embraces all the Christian faithful within a certain territory." The wisdom of the church assumes that in the normal course of events the Body of Christ is found right in your own neighborhood.

Yet that wisdom is at odds with much of what all tunedin American Catholics know. Parishes are frequently seen not as territorial entities, but as sites where like-minded people come together on Sundays.

We don't like the labels, but I'm sure you know the shorthand. Conservative Catholics travel miles to seek out Tridentine Latin rites; liberal Catholics seek out a liturgy with snazzy music or feel-good sermons. In a consumer culture, we have increasingly seen church liturgy and community as simply another choice of competing brands, faith versions of Coke vs. Pepsi.

Churches develop market niches: St. Benedict has great Gregorian chant, St. Perpetua features upbeat St. Louis Jesuit music, and St. George is where the priest preaches on Election Day that God is a pro-life Republican. At Our Son of Justice Church on the other side of town, however, God is usually referred to as a liberal Democrat.

It's increasingly difficult to persuade parish shoppers that their neighborhood churches might have something to offer when competitive behemoths, kind of like ecclesial WalMart or Target stores, offer enticing bargains just a few stops down the interstate. A recent study by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University indicated that about a quarter of Catholics regularly attend parishes outside their neighborhood.

SO WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO DISCOURAGE PARISH shopping? What could be more American? Shouldn't faithful Catholics go where they feel most comfortable?

Well, not exactly. Catholics dare to call themselves the Body of Christ. That Body can sometimes feel uncomfortable, even sickly. Yet the analogy implies that we are to reach out of our own bodies and become part of something bigger.

Ideally, the parish is intended to be a faith family, not a motley collection of jaded consumers. It's one thing to choose Target over K-Mart, quite another to trade that sometimes cranky 3-year-old for a more sedate child. Yet the consumer temptation is real, and in a culture that takes that mentality for granted, it has become a routine of Catholic life, even if below the radar screen of most churchy discussions and studies.

But some notice. Jesuit Father Walter J. Burghardt writes that "some Catholics refuse to worship with other Catholics save on their own narrow terms." Those terms can include a similar social class, ideological temperament, ethnicity, or age. Yet imposing these conditions is a stab to the heart of the unity of the Body of Christ. It's not that parish shoppers are evil. They might, however, be establishing an alternative structure of church without thinking through what is being lost, namely the vitality of the neighborhood parish.

I knew one pastor in a Midwest city who was bright, ready, and eager to invigorate a church where he was assigned. Yet the core of his potentially most involved parishioners had already hightailed it down the road to what was considered a more dynamic Catholic parish.

The neighborhood parish, by contrast, is a living response to Robert Putnam's call for the need for social networks outlined in his famous book Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster). Catholics in healthy neighborhood parishes don't bowl alone. They at least can find a few familiar faces at the local alleys.

It's more than social, though. It's deeper. Catholic thinkers have marveled at the vitality of neighborhood parishes. Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, perhaps the two most famous American converts, said they were attracted to the church through regular working people coming together in unity around the Eucharist in simple neighborhood churches. It is a central aspect of Catholic theology, argues sociologist Father Andrew Greeley.

"For the churches of the Reformation, salvation is essentially an individual activity. For Catholicism it has always been essentially a communal activity," says Greeley, who regularly waxes warmly about his own experience growing up in a Chicago parish.

YET, WHILE AWARE 0F ALL THIS, I TOO MUST ADMIT T0 having been, at times, a parish shopper. I've lived in five different metropolitan areas. Sometimes my wife and I traveled to parishes where, for example, we thought our then-young children would find a good religious education program with other young couples to share our travails. When we lived in Dayton, Ohio, we found ourselves mesmerized by the weekly homilies of a priest who recounted vivid tales from his African mission days, even though his church was some 10 miles from our apartment.

Still, in exploring my own spiritual journey, I have found that blooming where I have been planted has proved to be a deeper experience.

Right after college I moved to Indianapolis, where I walked to my neighborhood parish. Having grown up in suburban Long Island, I was conditioned to think that Catholics were almost always Irish, or sometimes Italian. My Indianapolis parish was almost all African American, many of the parishioners converts. From them I discovered the beauty of two-hour liturgies with soaring preaching and involvement in a neighborhood that benefited from their presence.

I currently live in Queens, New York and attend my neighborhood parish. After we moved back to New York 13 years a ago, I thought of finding my spiritual home at my old college, which was familiar and had developed a reputation for lively liturgy attracting alumni from all over the metropolitan area.

I resisted the temptation, and I'm glad I did. At my neighborhood parish, we're blessedly not all the same, I'm improving my Spanish by regularly attending a Sunday Mass in that language geared to new immigrants. I attend a men's spirituality group where--at 46--I am the youngest of the dozen or so regulars. At first I wondered what these old guys had to tell me. But I discovered they are a font of seasoned wisdom, having navigated through to retirement age with their spirituality and humor intact.

NOT EVERYONE HAS SUCH HAPPY LOCAL EXPERIENCES, granted. If you re a parish shopper and have found a spiritual niche, despite canon law, the odds are unlikely that the pope will send out the Swiss Guard to lasso you back to your neighborhood church. Your bishop is probably happy to count you among those faithful Catholics who are in the pews each Sunday.

I'm willing to concede that it's possible that your neighborhood church might seem to be a place where the spiritual life is deadening. Perhaps you have had bad experiences in your local parish that have caused you to search elsewhere. Maybe the homilies are lukewarm. (The CARA study indicates that most parish shoppers seek out better sermons and are likely to be under 30.) Perhaps you have a zeal to assist a parish in an area where direct social ministry with the poor is possible, and that personal contribution is worth your commute from a more wealthy area.

All these are potentially good reasons to savor the taste of a church community away from your neighborhood. Even the canon law on parish boundaries allows for exceptions. Yet I still feel that those quarter of American Catholics who are shoppers might benefit from some home cooking in their parish church. Better yet, they can contribute to the stew of their own neighborhood faith life and try and make a contribution where they live. They just might be surprise what they find there, if they give it a chance. And if they join a few friends on the way, the neighborhood people just might get the sense that there's something important happening right in their own backyards.