I would tend to agree, but I think many people try to compress community into a 90 minute period around worship services. I know a couple non-denominational churches where they have a coffee bar where everyone gathers for 30 minutes before the worship service, they then take their drinks into the worship space and then have more social time after wards before perhaps having additional bible studies after a 30 minute break. Basically people come and go throughout a 4 hour period. Some go to worship, others go to part or all of the bible studies and some are there for all 4 hours. The church becomes a community hub on Sundays and Wednesday nights.
In my experience, Catholic parishes tend not do the everything over 4 hours type of deal. Part of that is that many large parishes (the only type in my area), have Mass scheduled between 1.5 - 2 hours apart from 7am - 1pm on Sundays. Because you might have 5 or more masses each Sunday, the sub communities are not always worshiping together at the same Mass. Because of that the community tends to take place outside the church proper. In other words worship is done in the church proper, but community is done outside the church.
One of the differences I see between Catholic parishes and other churches is around the church/parish providing the community structure itself. I have friends where they have a 2 page list of activities that you can sign up for, with dates, times, etc. published by the church. My parish has a number of activities going on all the time, but they are not always directly “sponsored” by the parish. While there might be 1 “official” bible study going on at the parish, there are likely 8 or 10 other small group bible studies going on at individual parishioners houses. In other words the parish tends to worship in a large community, but the social aspect is often through small group communities.
I think much of that comes down to staffing though. A local non-denom church near us has a smaller congregation than my parish, but has something like 10 or 12 paid ministers on staff. This is in addition to their office staff. We have 4 ministers [2 priests and 2 deacons], but perhaps 7 if you include the choir director, DRE, and High School Youth leader. Outside of maybe the High School leader, non of them are specifically there to build community. All the community is from volunteers and as such they don’t tend to do it through the church as much as an extension of the church.
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Long and short, I think the challenge for some in the Catholic scheme, is that the parish is not the clearing house for community in the same way that it is in other types of churches. That means you need to put forth more effort into getting plugged into community. It doesn’t mean it isn’t there, but it rather a difference in where the structure is based. And lest someone claim that this is uniquely a Catholic “problem”, this is very similar to how things were done in the Presbyterian church that I grew up in. Worship was not an extension of the community, but was first around worship with multiple sub communities that occasionally worshiped together.**
