Parish Registration

[Phemie]

LOL! Nowdays you can’t even go off the grid with the Church.

Most of the parish database programs on the market allow parishes to assign a parish household ID number to each family (as well as an individual ID number to each parishioner). The diocese also issues a household ID number and a techie parish will have both household numbers in their database. Parishes are supposed to send updates (new households, deaths, households that give notification of a move, households with “no activity” presumed to have moved or left the Church ) a certain number of times a year and the diocese tries to make sense of all that.

True enough. I think most parishioners associate ‘a number’ with the donation envelope they use and few of our parishioners realize that they (or at least their families) have a ‘number’ even thought they don’t use envelopes.

We don’t send envelopes to every family as some parishes do. For us that would be a waste of money and paper since about 75% would end up in the garbage. Some parishioners will never give anything even with an envelope, some will give hundreds and never use envelopes because they don’t want/need a tax receipt at the end of the year. We only issue envelopes to those who use them regularly and to anyone who asks for them. One parish I belonged to issued nobody envelopes. They just had a stack of them at the entrance and you used them if you so desired. That was probably an even better system because I may destroy as many as 20 envelopes a year just because I donate only once or twice in a particular month for any given reason. If I know my number is 11, I could just pick up my unnumbered envelope on Sunday morning, write my number or name on it and drop my donation in it.

 

[RedSparklyShoes]

My geographical parish is most definitely the one I can see from my front step. But I’ve actually never attended a mass there. “My parish” is the one we attend regularly and is a few minutes away by car.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I think technically one is supposed to go to the parish to which one’s geographical location assigns one. But it’s pretty loose, and there are other considerations that are considered valid.

My wife and I are in one “parish”, the nearest to our house. But my family is originally from another parish nearby and because that parish had a kindergarten and upper grades, our kids went to school there for awhile, then to our home parish for awhile, then back. That switching was actually sort of enriching for them because they have two sets of friends and acquaintences that are rather different. One set is more urban and the other is pretty rural.

And, of course, the associations one forms when one’s kids (or grandkids who are repeating the pattern) go to two parish schools tend to make one a member of both parishes in other ways.