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This chapter explores the divergent forms of religious culture and parish life which characterised the region of Michoacán, Mexico in the 1920s. It explains that the despite the best efforts to revolutionary priest-baiters, the Church exercised an omnipresent influence in 1920s Michoacán and the landscape was everywhere dotted with roadside crosses, church towers, and village sanctuaries. By the mid-1920s, Michoacán was not simply a divided political constituency but a mosaic of mutable parish identities which were based on varying degrees of religious participation, distinct popular attitudes to the sacraments and varying relationships to the parish clergy.

The introduction presents a brief overview of the 1985 Notre Dame Study of Catholic Parish Life and how the authors of this book build on and update the many topics identified 30 years ago. Many other topics such as multicultural parishes, parishes administered by someone other than a priest, parish finances, and the increased use of lay ecclesial ministers in parish ministry, which were just beginning to appear in parishes 30 years ago are covered in greater detail in this book The introduction lays out the plan for how the book covers these newer topics of cultural diversity, changing ministerial roles, and evolving parish structures.

This chapter describes the experience and opinions of Catholics in the pews. Important liturgical issues, such as the type of music being played, the quality of the homilies, and reactions to liturgical change, are examined. Parishioners describe their attitude about being Catholic, what attracts them to their parish and how satisfied or dissatisfied they are with aspects of their parish. They evaluate their parish according to nine essential elements of parish life. The chapter also investigates parishioner attitudes about parish leadership and the direction of the parish as well as the types and quality of parish programs and services. These include the various parish ministries and community-building outreach activities, such as evangelization and communication as well as attitudes about cultural diversity.

Catholic parishes in the United States are complex organizations (where multiple communities coexist and interact). Relying on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and a case study approach, this chapter explores three parishes in Southern California that showcase the complexity of interactions among different racial and ethnic communities. These parishes are shared in various configurations by white, Latino, Black, and Asian parishioners, and this chapter illuminates the power dynamics of race and ethnicity as they work themselves out in American life. In shared parishes, the cultural work of constructing Catholic identity necessarily involves deploying distinct cultural expressions of Catholicism shaped by broader power dynamics of race, ethnicity, and language. This chapter lays bare this process as parishes illustrate power-in-action, with parish interactions variously producing, perpetuating, and challenging existing power dynamics and race relations.

The interrogatories for the clerical order in the Memoriale Presbiterorum begin in the traditional manner with the religious. The author devotes separate sections to the simple religious, and to ‘claustrales’, the religious holding cloistral office, and obedientiaries. The topics that form the basis of the Memoriale’s s interrogation of clerics derive from ecclesiastical law, common and local, and having many parallels in the literature of complaint. The general observations with which the author concludes his chapter on secular clerics, however, reveal a bias that is fundamental to his approach to the pastoral cure. He is aware that inadequacies on the part of secular clerics are regarded by the ‘religious’ that is in this context as being a justification for their interference in parish life.

This chapter is a dialogue with and reflection by John A. Coleman, S.J., a trained, well-published sociologist and Jesuit pastor in Northern California. In describing and exploring his own experience as a sociologist and pastor, he models the kind of inquiry raised by previous chapters, applying them in a practical way to a single parish to which the author belongs. Through lived experience and his bipartite role as sociologist and parish priest, Fr. Coleman shares in a personal way his own approach to the study of Catholic parishes. The chapter contains numerous questions and tools for applied sociological parish studies.

This chapter examines options available in canon law to provide innovative parish staffing structures that offer new opportunities for pastoral leadership. These new structures include utilizing a team of priests (canon 517.1); assigning a nonpriest (deacon or lay person) administrator, typically called a parish life coordinator, to a parish (canon 517.2); or assigning one priest to pastor more than one parish (canon 526). Parishes can also be merged, creating even larger parishes out of the territory of two or more existing parishes. All of these options have their strengths and weaknesses. The chapter also presents the attitudes of parish leaders and parishioners who have been involved in such parish reconfigurations.

This chapter discusses four strategies parishioners at All Saints consistently used to make sense of parish life in an era of transformation: through frameworks for social order, though articulated from clashing perspectives; by asserting identity through correct, that is, properly regulated worship; through popular religion reimagined and adapted to a different context; and via evangelization as a narrative of conversion. The first two ways—social order and correct ritual—occupied both cultural communities in a significant way. The second two—popular religion and evangelization—served the Latino community, engaged as they were in a more dramatic process of adaptation and change. All four strategies functioned as lenses for observing, understanding, and taking part in the transformed parish environment. Through them, people at All Saints responded religiously to the historical, cultural, and ecclesial context in which they found themselves, especially to the juxtaposition of two cultural worlds within the one city and parish.