Killing the Territory

Should we care which parish you attend?

Remember when I talked about needing a better Catholic commentariat? We got a good example of that this week, when Catholics on social media began a lot of discourse about your “territorial parish” and your obligations towards it.

A WHAT?

You might not know this, but as a Catholic, you have an “assigned” parish, known as your territorial or boundary parish. Per the Code of Canon Law(518) that “ includes all the Christian faithful of a certain territory.” For things like marriage and other sacraments, you actually have a right to receive them at your territorial parish, under the principle that, if everything else fails, you have the right to the sacraments somewhere. You also have an obligation to attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation, and to assist the Church in various functions/necessities. (Canon 222) Ergo, some make the connection that under normal circumstances, you are obligated to attend Mass at your territorial parish, unless there is a sufficient reason otherwise. If you are familiar with the insufferable discourse about NFP on social media, you know “sufficient reason otherwise” is code for “your reasons suck unless you can exhaustively prove it is sufficient.”

I DON’T GET IT

Its not so much as confusing as a pointless anachronism. One thing to remember about Church law is that, before 1917, there was no Code of Canon Law. There was Church law, there were general guidelines followed, but at times things were a bit messy and inconsistent. The late 18th and 19th centuries were a time of great standardization within Western Civilization, as liberalism began to do away with separate laws and separate structures and selective implementations and began to promote a standardized approach (as much as possible) towards citizens with rights, rather than subjects. The Catholic Church learned from this spirit and for the most part, the 1917 (and later 1983) Code of Canon Law has been a tremendous boon for the Church.

Yet it is important to remember that this idea of living under a standardized code for the entire Western Church is a very recent innovation, and sometimes particular codes are heavily influenced by the spirit of the age. Since every member of the Church was entitled to have pastoral care provided for them, and to rationalize/standardize Church governance, parishes were given territorial mandates, following the obvious longstanding territorial mandate of a diocese, which dates to the times of the Roman Empire. (Men who need their daily quota for thinking about Rome, consider it satisfied.)

For those 50 or some odd years, the concept of a territorial parish worked well, if only because most people only had one such Church around them, and little means of easy transportation to another. One area where this was a clear exception was the United States of America. As canon law allowed for the provisioning of Churches based on nationality, a lot of immigrant communities took ready advantage of this. In cities, several parishes were immigrant communities, and it was not always the case those immigrants lived right down the road. Another instance would be the neighborhood I grew up in, which had two Catholic parishes after 1950: one for the Polish community, and one for the Irish. Even though they were originally made with a territorial mandate in mind, that was seldom followed. So even then, when people talk about the need to restore one’s fidelity to their territorial parish, that didn’t really exist in many parts of America, before or after the code of canon law.

Why The Territorial Parish Died

There are three huge things behind the fact that nobody knows what their territorial parish even is nowadays. First is the dramatic expansion of transportation. In the 1917 code, this was a world in which even horse drawn carriages were not something every family had, and the beginnings of the automobile were themselves in the beginning. Society is simply a lot more mobile nowadays, and people have far greater freedom of movement than they used to. That killed the concept of a territorial parish, because options opened up. There were times when Churches tried to say you couldn’t fulfill your obligation except at certain parishes, but by the 1983 Code this was put to rest, making clear you could satisfy your Sunday obligation at any parish in communion with the global Church, provided it was a valid and licit Eucharist.

Another reason was the growth of the suburb because of increased mobility. People moved around further away from their home communities. As people moved, they had less ties to their old neighborhoods, and their ties to their new territorial parishes were never that strong to begin with. People did not attend Mass at their territorial parish because it was their territorial parish. They attended Mass at their territorial parish because that’s where their community was.

The Parish Revolution

Finally, being this is a traditionalist commentary, I’m going to get in a “blame” on Vatican II. Or at least the implementation of the Council. As parishes looked to implement Vatican II (and seldom in the same way at every parish), many parishes took on the form of insurrectionary communes, hoisting the banner of revolution high. They would implement Vatican II and implement it good and hard. These parishes would bring about sweeping changes in a short amount of time. As the 70s and 80s progressed, a key identifying mark of the parish is how faithful they were to implementing Vatican II, whatever you took that to mean. This proved a highly contentious process and led to fractures not along ethnic or geographic lines, but ideological ones.

It was this, not the death of the territorial parish, that was disastrous. People were alienated from those original communities, and once alienated, looked for areas where they would feel welcome. The Church wisely did not interfere with this process, rightly judging that such interference would lead to even more chaos, and even fewer people attending Mass. Why some are looking to bring it back when Mass attendance is even worse in the 2020s is weird. (Well, I get why parish priests advocate it on selfish reasons alone, but everyone else?)

Territories in the Springtime of the Laity

Unique in its history of ecumenical councils, Vatican II spent a lot of time talking about the importance of the laity in the life of the Church, yet devoted almost no time to saying what it was or wasn’t meant to be. (A situation eerily like 1800s Europe where governments began struggling with how to balance ancient institutions with a growing consciousness of popular sovereignty.) As a result, it’s entirely possible that a lot of the institutions and laws of the Church were written during a time, and by authors, who did not intend the obligations of the laity to be their focus. It is highly doubtful that the canonical understanding of a territorial parish was meant to be a limiting principle on where a Catholic can go to Mass, rather than a baseline principle of where a Catholic can find pastoral care. The former wasn't even really a live question in 1917, and only in its infancy in the 1980s. I feel old for saying this, but 40 years have passed since 1983. There is still a lot of juridical value with a territorial parish, for bishops and priests. Less so for the laity. In America, the entire concept never really took root anyways, at least in the cities. Rather than attempting to imprison Catholics in communities that they have never had any tie to, maybe we should think about how to make existing communities better for them. In attempting to save the territorial parish, let’s not kill the territory.