Ethnic Catholic parishes on every corner vs. mega Catholic parishes

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I’m not sure why anyone would characterize attending Sunday Mass at St. Matthews as akin to attending a “football game?” Their church holds 2K. They have several Masses each Sunday. Some are simultaneous. I’ve been to a number of cathedrals and basilicas in the US that hold more than 2K and the experience was never like a “football game.”
 
TK421 said:
It makes me wish the southwest developed the same way. There’s countless half-alive tiny parishes that diocese’s feel obligated to maintain with a priest, or split priests between multiple parishes. It’s a horrible arrangement for the clergy. It either takes a special grace to want to go there, or the missionary priests are simply used as cannon fodder.
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Are you talking largely about New Mexico? I wouldn’t think Arizona or Southern Texas wouldn’t have traditionally large Catholic presence?
 
Duesenberg said:
I’m not sure why anyone would characterize attending Sunday Mass at St. Matthews as akin to attending a “football game?” Their church holds 2K.
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You answered your own question there.

I’ve been to a lot of cathedrals and basilicas with large capacity too, and on certain days like holidays they were at their very large capacity. It was basically like attending any large event, concert, sporting event, etc. The logistics of getting yourself in and out in that type of a crowd are okay once in a while. I don’t want that as a weekly thing. I find it a distraction from prayer to some extent.

I note that there are also cathedrals and basilicas designed to hold a much smaller number of people, and that on many days that aren’t special Mass or feast days the big ones draw smaller crowds, and I prefer going to those less crowded places/ on less crowded days.
 
In my rust belt diocese, there were parishes every few blocks, mostly ethnic. Today the diocese has closed almost half of the parishes in the last 20 years. There still are lots of parishes with under 200 people attending on the weekend, mostly elderly. The outer suburbs have a few enormous parishes, because the diocese put a freeze on new parishes since 1970 due to the priest shortage (and because they feared the opposition to closing iconic neighborhood parishes).

The problem is people fight tooth and nail to keep open those huge old churches, where grandmother got married, where many relatives were baptized, etc. Many of these buildings are genuinely historic structures, but there is no money to keep them up.

There is a desperate need for the diocese to put more priests, and more money, into outreach in the suburbs to youths, and especially, young adults. That is really part of our Catholic heritage that has been forgotten, as much as I would like to keep beloved old St X parish open.
 
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To be frank, the diversity in my parish is one of the things I like most about the Catholic Church. Since there’s only one for miles, every Catholic from every nationality that lives in my area goes there. We have Koreans, Filipinos, black folks, white folks… I really looks like a world-wide Church, even in southeastern Kentucky.

On the other hand, when I was a Baptist for years, pretty much everyone was some shade of middle class and white. Most of your black Baptists attend congregations that historically appeal to that specific demographic.

I’m not against ethnic churches, per se, but I do enjoy the diversity of mine. Reminds me we’re all just “one Church”.
 
In my areas, there are plenty of churches that have somewhere between 500 and a couple thousand parishioners and manage to have ethnic diversity as well (Vietnamese, African, Latino, Filipino).

As someone pointed out, a lot of churches closed in the Rust Belt and were consolidated into remaining ones. This does not mean that every church has 200 people, is not diverse, or is not growing. One of the older churches in my area is growing by leaps and bounds, partly because the area has become very popular for those looking to buy “vintage” homes and partly because the priest has started a very vibrant youth ministry and all the families are going there. I predict that churches like his will continue to thrive whereas some of the others where the real estate market is doing poorly or the priest is not so motivated will likely go under.
 
Mega parishes might work well in an urban area, but in rural and smaller suburban cities, I think the traditional parish (by city) works better. I would think the only place we should see an ethnic parish is in an ethnic city. The whole segregation thing seem rather contrary to Catholicism, and definitely runs afoul of 1 Corinthians 12.

I attend a split parish, one third English-speaking, one third Spanish, and a third bi-lingual. We are sort of considered ethnic, but that is our city. Our priest and our faith brings us together rather nicely. Like during integration in the South, we learn a deeper respect and understanding of one another.
 
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Here in North Florida…like most of the south…there are smaller Protestant churches on almost every corner…Catholic Churches tend to have fairly large congregations but fewer churches…it’s good if your parish has many groups/activities you can become involved in…otherwise you can feel pretty much like a stranger…I think that’s why Protestants who convert have trouble feeling welcome…many of the Protestant churches are smaller and more local so the church feels more like a family gathering where they can worship together and enjoy the activities in their church community…I would hope there are parts of the US where there are smaller Catholic communities that enjoy that closeness.
 
I want to say that in the old Domesday book, the average distance between village church and village church, in some districts, was about 1 mile, give or take a bit. So supposing it takes 15-20 minutes to walk a mile, all the people are generally within a short walk of church.

The transportation technology for those early Boston and Philadelphia churchgoers was about the same. So you’d have churches that are close together by modern standards, but were still within a manageable walk.

In towns/cities that have been developed in the last 100 years or so, transportation has changed significantly. Mobility is taken for granted. But churches are still frequently 20-30 minutes apart… but you’re traveling 70 mph.

In a town like Houston, its population exploded after 1900, especially as (a) you had the effects of the Great Storm, which shifted a tremendous amount of economic wealth to Houston; and (b) you had the effects of Spindletop. Houston had a population of 45k in 1900… it was almost 300k by 1930… it was approaching 1M by 1960… it was approaching 2M by 2000. So I can definitely see a city that’s expanding so exponentially, wanting to build a giant church to serve the needs of a rapidly-growing population, rather than try to constantly keep ahead of the development and expanding population by splitting resources into numerous smaller churches.
 
midori said:
In towns/cities that have been developed in the last 100 years or so, transportation has changed significantly. Mobility is taken for granted. But churches are still frequently 20-30 minutes apart… but you’re traveling 70 mph.
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This is the main thing I see with a lot of the Southern cities that have experienced significant growth. The growth is not really in terms of self-sustaining towns popping up but in terms of developments, or people buying a piece of land that they put a house on. People expect to drive a distance to go to a shopping center, and drive or bus the kids to school. It makes sense to also drive to a central megachurch. Most often the highways have also been constructed to accommodate this kind of travel, and the weather is generally good year round so you don’t have snow and ice issues driving 30 miles to the megachurch.

By contrast, you go to a place like Philadelphia or New Jersey and the highway infrastructure is relatively bad, traffic is congested and there is a lot of weather disruption. I like to go to a historic church that’s maybe 15 miles away from my work outside Philadelphia, but it takes me an hour to get there because of the rush hour traffic and lack of a fast highway route. Driving 30 miles into the city easily takes 2 hours, and the public transportation options are not good and have not kept up with development. If people had to drive 30 miles to get to church, many of them likely either wouldn’t go or would have a lot of hassle getting there.
 
It was just my opinion. Maybe I do not understand what an ethnic parish is. I know of a parish I think of as a Polish parish, as they have one Mass in Polish and most of the community is Polish descent. Would that be an ethnic parish? I am just not a very big fan of segregation. I know it is still common in the north though.
 
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pnewton said:
I would think the only place we should see an ethnic parish is in an ethnic city.
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Not really true. A lot of smaller towns attracted people of certain ethnicities to work in the coal fields or mills back in the day, and there were usually enough Poles or Slovaks or whatever that they were able to build and staff their own church. Some of those rural churches are still around.
 
commenter said:
In my rust belt diocese, there were parishes every few blocks, mostly ethnic. Today the diocese has closed almost half of the parishes in the last 20 years. There still are lots of parishes with under 200 people attending on the weekend, mostly elderly. The outer suburbs have a few enormous parishes, because the diocese put a freeze on new parishes since 1970 due to the priest shortage (and because they feared the opposition to closing iconic neighborhood parishes).

The problem is people fight tooth and nail to keep open those huge old churches, where grandmother got married, where many relatives were baptized, etc. Many of these buildings are genuinely historic structures, but there is no money to keep them up.

There is a desperate need for the diocese to put more priests, and more money, into outreach in the suburbs to youths, and especially, young adults. That is really part of our Catholic heritage that has been forgotten, as much as I would like to keep beloved old St X parish open.
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That’s very interesting to me – also very foreign. We have few ethnic parishes here in California and few need closing. Too bad we cannot teleport churches to where they are most needed…

I watched a program several years ago on EWTN about a big, beautiful, historic church (in St. Louis I think?) that was saved. The elderly pastor was able to recruit enough fundraisers, contractors, engineers, etc. to get the job started. When he passed away, it really galvanized them to get the job done, and they did.

I recently Googled that church and it became Episcopalian after the local ordinary tried to close it – the original agreement for the land donation kept him from doing so.

I have to wonder, are there no people living around these old inner-city churches anymore? It seems like the solution (which should have started generations ago), is to evangelize the local neighborhoods that surround these churches. The Catholic Church doesn’t seem to be very good at that.
 
Peebo said:
Here in North Florida…like most of the south…there are smaller Protestant churches on almost every corner…Catholic Churches tend to have fairly large congregations but fewer churches…it’s good if your parish has many groups/activities you can become involved in…otherwise you can feel pretty much like a stranger…I think that’s why Protestants who convert have trouble feeling welcome…many of the Protestant churches are smaller and more local so the church feels more like a family gathering where they can worship together and enjoy the activities in their church community…I would hope there are parts of the US where there are smaller Catholic communities that enjoy that closeness.
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Many Protestant churches are also huge. Their model is that everyone gets together for Sunday services, but during the week they meet in small faith groups. That model came from the Saddleback Church here in California and is now used by the largest Catholic Parish in the USA – St. Matt’s in Charlotte, NC.

I think that is a GREAT model if implemented correctly. My parish has small faith groups. The problem is that the “lay coordinator” in charge of small faith groups is disliked, to put it mildly. That casts a HUGE pall over the entire program.
 
It’s not “segregation”, why would you think that? I’m frankly appalled that you would make such a remark.

There are parishes that are “nationality parishes” where, among other things, people from certain countries or areas can hear regular Masses in their native language (not English), celebrate the feast days that they celebrate back in Poland or Mexico or wherever (not necessarily celebrated or made such a big deal out of at their regular parish church), and have other customs they’re used to having “at home”. In some cases these parishes preserve a historic church that was in the middle of some neighborhood that used to be Little Poland or Little Italy but the original residents moved out to the suburbs and now their grandchildren live somewhere else, but need to preserve their heritage. Everybody is still welcome to come to the Masses at these churches, you don’t get thrown out if you aren’t the correct nationality, but it’s kind of like going to church in Italy, or Poland, or Mexico, etc.

The Latino parish in my area in Pennsylvania was something the Latino community wanted because many of them do not speak English or have cars and the closest parishes that had Spanish-speaking Masses were a ways away. There were some priests and nuns running around trying to minister to them and it was very difficult for them. The Diocese also for some weird reason did not want them to have their own church/ parish for years even though the same Diocese has multiple “nationality” parishes for Polish, irish, Italian etc. I have no idea what the problem was. Maybe they thought it would look segregated. Finally a wealthy Italian man felt called to donate to the Latino community all the money for a new church with plenty of space right out in the area where they work, and they were very happy and built the church and named it after the man’s patron saint and did in the end get Diocesan approval for it. I’ve been out to the church for the Our Lady of Guadalupe feast and they have the dancers and the traditional service and about six Masses that day all of which are full (the one I was at was standing room only and they had about 6 guys parking cars).

The town I live in, which is about 20 miles away, also has Spanish language mass once a week, as do several of the other surrounding towns, and we have Latino people attending those and also the English language services with us, but I’m sure some of them go over to the “nationality” church once in a while as well to feel a bit more at home. Nothing wrong with it.

Edited to add, here is also explanation from Wiki

National parish - Wikipedia
 
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It’s interesting – the Diocese of Orange (County) here in CA has strongly resisted creating ethnic parishes. Just about every parish has Masses that are celebrated in English, Spanish and Vietnamese. Some have Masses in other languages as well. It has worked very well, although OC needs more churches in general.

This is one of the things that turns me off about the EF Mass. So many adherents crave having their own “EF-only” parish. That’s a HUGE turn off to me.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Everybody is still welcome to come to the Masses at these churches, you don’t get thrown out if you aren’t the correct nationality
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Its more than just the masses. My mum is Slovak, and the family belonged to the Slovak parish. But the church was 5 or 6 miles away, a bit of a trek in the early 1930’s when she was born, especially with an infant in tow.

In those days, children were born at home, and were usually baptized within a few days. So my grandparents took my mum to the Polish church a couple of blocks away to be baptized, even though that wasn’t what they were.
 
Right. By “Masses”, I meant everything.

There was a “national parish” by my college that a lot of the college students including me attended, not because we were Italians, but just because we liked that it was a traditional church (very different from the brutalist-building, social-justice-happy Newman Center) and it was close by campus, in fact closer to a number of the dorms than the Newman Center was. it’s still there and hosts a giant Feast of the Assumption fair every year, with wonderful food, rides and games, and also lots of Masses, rosaries, and processions.
 
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