carol marie:
I guess I just wish we could have it all in the Catholic Church. Jesus and the fellowship of believers… with all the fun stuff that goes along with.
There is no reason why it couldn’t, it starts with us.
I remember visiting a Roman Catholic parish that was very small, tiny by today’s RC standards (perhaps not so tiny compared to many other churches). And it was just as you describe.
The town was small, and so was the church.
I can still remember when my cousin’s husband became a Catholic many years ago. We had a Mass in the most intimate setting, at the most 20 people. It was such a warm and emotionally inspiring setting that I have never forgotten it, although it must be 40 years now. This was in a large parish of several thousand people and I had never witnessed a Mass in such an intimate, community centered setting before then.
At one point in American Catholicism the idea was to build the grandest, most imposing structures possible for Roman Catholic churches, with schools. The parishes were erected just like Cathedrals, some had grade schools and high schools and they would have five or six masses on a Sunday in some places.
I remember a parish when I was young that had six priests assigned to it.
Saint Stanislaus Kostka parish (not far from St John Cantius in Chicago) at one time had 50,000 parishioners! This was almost 100 years ago. Most of those individuals originally came from little farm communities in Europe, with small country parishes, and when they got to Chicago they wanted a cathedral and dropped their hard-earned pennies in the basket to pay for one.
All of these things had an enormous impact on Catholic culture in the U.S.A. The church has been motoring along like this for over 100 years, but now the descendants of those immigrants have moved to the suburbs, and don’t know the people sitting next to them. The archdiocese doesn’t know any other way to organize a parish, plus there is a shortage of priests and schools are expensive to maintain.
Truth be told, that was one of the reasons I fell in love with the Eastern church. Few of their parishes are so big that you could not get to know most of the parishioners on a first-name basis. You cannot be anonymous in an Eastern parish, that idea bothers some people who just are not used to it.
So it is not a Catholic vs Protestant thing, unless some Catholics become dead-set against loving and interacting with their own fellow parishioners. The fact is, this is something we can change.
Am I allowed to say I miss all that??
