What is the Mission of a Parish? by Rachel Hoover

By Rachel Hoover, Crisis Magazine, Dec. 2, 2021

Rachel Hoover is a technical writer by day and a critic and essayist for several Catholic publications in the early evening. She holds a B.A. from Christendom College and lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

What is the Church for? If a member of an uncontacted tribe entered a typical Catholic parish today, how long would it take him to learn an accurate answer to that question?

Recently, Fr. James Grant wrote in these pages about putting the parish mission into action. He points out clear problems in the Church: our parish congregations are dwindling, as are vocations to the priesthood; priests are overworked, sometimes stretched across several dying parishes; among the laity, “frustration at not having sufficient parish pastoral care is increasing,” and parishioners are particularly demoralized in places where their parishes are being shut down and combined with others. Fr. Grant rightly concludes, “we are in survival mode.” …

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