If by “supportive” you mean that five or six women that I only know through church and have never had out to dinner or lunch once in my life spontaneously offered to send a meal over to our house when I had my surgery, then yes, I think we’re in a supportive community-oriented Catholic parish.
We actually have people who volunteer every week to be “greeters”, and Father stands around and talks to whoever wants to talk before he goes to the sacristy to remove his vestments. It has been that way through three different priests.
Why, though, did you write “they did have food drives” and not “we did have food drives”? I will tell you this: If you want people anywhere to call you by your first name, it helps if you can be occasionally be seen during the set-up and tear-down stages, and not just show up in-between all the work. I would say that over 95% of the work in city parishes is done by 5-10% of the parishioners, and I don’t only mean the fundraisers and the food drives. It is not as if Father and the paid staff single-handedly plan the liturgies, clean the church, put out the flowers, wash and iron the altar linens, care for the vestments, set up the credence table, train the altar servers and have them there on time, sing all the parts in the choir, usher people to their seats, take up the collection, buy the doughnuts, make the coffee, set out the tables and chairs in the parish hall, and put it all away after every Mass. That doesn’t count the work of long-range planning, catechesis, various kinds of social justice outreach, fundraising, keeping the parish school running, and maintaining the facilities and grounds. Yes! I am saying that most parishes even have more yard maintenance than they can afford to pay to have done. There is a lot of volunteer effort required to keep a parish running, even just the part that happens between 4 pm Saturday and 1 pm Sunday, but at most medium or large parishes, most parishioners only *show up *for the sacraments, and don’t give any time at all to make sure that even that work gets done. In a small parish out in the sticks, they can’t do that, because there is too much to do, and so everybody knows everybody. In a large parish, if the people who do all the work have to field complaints from someone they don’t know about how things ought to be different, they can get a bit short in their answers. They ought to be unfailingly nice, but it can be understandably difficult.
Our parish has a coffee and donut social after the Sunday morning Masses. They tried a few things after Saturday vigil Masses, but most people attending those Masses apparently have other plans for the evening. Socials, however, take someone to run them. If you’d like to see that at your parish, you may need to spearhead the effort yourself. It is not something the priest can pull off by himself, and it is generally something done by those who see the need for it.
I don’t know exactly what you mean by “fiefdoms for the egotistical”, but I gather that there were lots of generals and not many in the general infantry. I can’t speak to the reasons for that, because the reasons are varied all the way from an entry-level volunteer who gets disgruntled because all is currently wanted is a willingness to work and on up to every project being made solely of “leaders”, every one of whom want to micromanage everyone else out of their minds. That is something you have to discern on the ground.
