The territorial imperative
Feuerherd, Peter
THE LAST WORD THE TERRITORIAL IMPERATIVE Peter Feuerherd Father S. was a perpetually disgruntled pastor in the middle-American city I lived in some twenty years ago. He was in charge of Saint...
...This is Congregationalism...
...And the more one looks, one discovers that increasingly Catholics in pluralistic America are as divided around the Mass as they are in other accidentals of politics, class, ethnicity, etc...
...When Protestants have a disagreement, we form another denomination...
...He was a prophetic priest making a point...
...But in failing to heed the Midwestern priesfs warning, American Catholic life has become increasingly balkanized, even at Mass—the ritual that should bring us together...
...Both developed unique market niches, bringing in Catholics from all over to a kind of liturgy with which they were comfortable...
...Jesuit Father Walter J. Burghardt notes in Long Have 1 Loved You: A Theologian Reflects mi His Church (Orbis), that "some Catholics refuse to worship with other Catholics save on their own narrow terms...
...area for its traditional Latin Mass, and that it is a magnet for prominent like-minded Catholics...
...These days I recall Father S. with a certain fondness...
...He wasn't making a liturgical point, however...
...But I knew they were Catholics ready to embark with various degrees of seriousness on their Lenten journeys...
...Even though they lived inside his parish's geographic boundaries, they needed to go "where I can be fed," a phrase heard often from Catholic parish shoppers...
...And then, over lunch at a Chinese restaurant, he would offer a long-winded explanation of the beauties of parish boundaries, lines drawn to indicate where the people of God should find their spiritual sustenance together...
...A Brazilian Presbyterian theologian once told me what he admired about Catholicism: "You can hold to all sorts of different beliefs, and still come together around the Eucharist...
...This aspect of Hanssen's life was described in detail in a recent New York Times (February 25) article...
...He needed to try something else to grab market share...
...He was in charge of Saint Joan's Church, located in a neighborhood perceived as being on the edge of decay...
...Why couldn't he understand that...
...Father S. said he could sure use the energy of those parishioners who had abandoned Saint Joan's for the hip happenings next door...
...Burghardt is right...
...It was the kind of scene that inspired Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, two converts who found in the Catholic parish a place where the people—often championed in vague platitudes by Merton's and Day's trendy leftist friends—actually lived...
...Two decades later, I have now come to appreciate Father S.'s view more fully...
...There the church was not only filled, there were homeless people in from the cold, men in janitorial service uniforms who work in the nearby office towers, and management types in suits...
...What struck me is that Hanssen's church shares much of what Saint Tom's offered...
...The Times says the parish in the Virginia suburbs that Hanssen belongs to is well-known in the D.C...
...Saint Tom's, the neighboring parish, had established itself as a hip Catholic alternative, known far and wide for its clown liturgies (yes, such things actually did exist), balloons, and strumming music from the Saint Louis Jesuits...
...What a contrast to the Ash Wednesday Mass I attended at Saint Paul's on the West Side of Manhattan...
...Thaf s how Catholics were supposed to do things, he would say...
...One striking aspect about the case of Robert Philip Hanssen, the FBI agent accused of spying for the Russians, is that he is a Catholic...
...At the time, I chalked up Father S.'s complaints as the grumbling of a man who—perhaps the worst sin in American capitalism—could not compete with a neighboring franchise...
...They represented seemingly all the races and ethnicities the West Side of Manhattan can offer on a weekday afternoon...
...Why couldn't he appreciate the inclination of those who were attracted to Saint Tom's...
...Not a forty-five-minute Sunday Catholic, but a serious one and a member of Opus Dei...
...I don't know where he is, but I realize now that he wasn't just a jealous grumpy old pastor...
...Catholics should attend the parish where they live...
...He needed them to help revive the neighborhood...
...But we may be losing that sense of the church...
...This is not Catholicism," Father S. would proclaim to anyone who would listen...
...A veteran priest, he had been made pastor a few years before and had inherited a losing brand...
...We should take his message more seriously, lest we continue to reap the whirlwind of a church increasingly divided around its sacred table...
...I'm not sure whether I'm ready to bring out the parish-boundary militia to enforce the obscure canon laws cited by Father S. concerning the integrity of officially recognized territorial parishes...
...He was making an issue about parish organization...
...How many had voted for Al Gore or for George W. Bush was a complete unknown...
...only Protestants shopped around for the perfect church aligned to their personal worship styles...
...So what if Saint Joan's were to struggle, and perhaps even fold...
...He had lost the best and the brightest, he complained...
...Peter Feuerherd is a frequent Commonweal contributor...
...I had no idea whether anyone read the Wanderer, Crisis, National Catholic Reporter, or Commonweal...
Vol. 128 • April 2001 • No. 8
