Where the Church is met.

What a parish is

A parish is a certain community of the Christian faithful stably constituted in a particular church, whose pastoral care is entrusted to a pastor as its proper shepherd, under the authority of the diocesan bishop.¹ Like the diocese it belongs to, a parish is a community before it is a building: the church is the parish’s house, not its substance.

There the faithful are baptized, there absolved, there communicated, confirmed, married, and buried. The pastor is bound by law to know his people, to visit them, to keep the registers of their sacraments, and to apply Mass for them every Sunday and holy day: the Mass pro populo, offered for the people whether they know it or not.²

Territorial and personal, mission and chapel

As a rule a parish is territorial, embracing all the faithful of a certain place; but where it is useful, personal parishes are established by reason of rite, language, or nationality.³ A community not yet erected as a parish may be a quasi-parish or a mission; a chapel or oratory may serve a community that could never sustain a parish. The record keeps these distinctions (parish, mission, shrine, chapel) because the Church makes them.

The hours of mercy

Confession is not a convenience the Church arranged for herself. Those who approach the sacrament of Penance obtain pardon from God’s mercy for the offense committed against him, and are, at the same time, reconciled with the Church which they have wounded by their sins.⁴ The faithful who have attained the age of discretion are bound to confess grave sins at least once a year,⁵ and the confession of everyday faults, without being strictly necessary, is strongly recommended.⁶

None of that is possible unless someone is in the confessional at an hour a working person can reach. Canon law says so without softening it: all to whom the care of souls has been entrusted are obliged to make provision so that confessions are heard when the faithful reasonably seek to be heard, and that they have the opportunity to approach individual confession on days and at times established for their convenience.⁷ A published confession schedule is that canon kept in public.

So the record sets down the hours of confession wherever a parish publishes them, with the source and the date the source was last read.

The Lord in the tabernacle

The Catholic Church has always offered and still offers to the sacrament of the Eucharist the cult of adoration, not only during Mass, but also outside of it, reserving the consecrated hosts with the utmost care, exposing them to the solemn veneration of the faithful, and carrying them in procession.⁸ Where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved, the church is to be open to the faithful for at least some hours every day so that they can pray before it, unless there is a grave reason to the contrary,⁹ and an annual solemn exposition is recommended, that the local community may more profoundly meditate on and adore the eucharistic mystery.¹⁰

An open church at a known hour is therefore a fact that can be written down: this door, at this time, with the Lord within it. The record keeps exposition and adoration hours on the same terms as the Mass.

The works of the parish

The Catechism does not define the parish by its liturgy alone. The parish initiates the Christian people into the ordinary expression of the liturgical life; it gathers them together in that celebration; it teaches Christ’s saving doctrine; and it practices the charity of the Lord in good works and brotherly love.¹¹ The last of those is not an appendix to the others.

The Council set the parish forward as the obvious example of the apostolate on the community level, inasmuch as it brings together the many human differences within its boundaries and merges them into the universality of the Church.¹² That apostolate belongs to the lay faithful by right and by duty, by virtue of their Baptism and Confirmation, individually or grouped in associations.¹³ The pastor’s own law says the same thing from the other side: he is to foster works through which the spirit of the gospel is promoted, even in what pertains to social justice; he is to seek out with particular diligence the poor, the afflicted, the lonely, and those exiled from their country; and he is to recognize and promote the proper part which the lay members of the faithful have in the mission of the Church.¹⁴

A conference of St. Vincent de Paul, a praesidium of the Legion of Mary, a food pantry, a catechumenate, a choir, a group of young mothers: this is the parish doing the thing it exists to do. The record sets these down by name where the parish publishes them, with the hour they meet and the way to reach them, and holds them to the same standard of source as an address.

What is set down here

The parish churches recorded here are set down within their dioceses, with their titles, their addresses, the times of their Masses, the hours of confession and of adoration, and the works the parish carries on between them. Each of those is held to one rule: it is published with its source and the date that source was last read, or it is not published as verified at all. Where we hold nothing, the page says that plainly instead of leaving a blank to be mistaken for a fact.

A record of hours has one weakness no amount of crawling repairs. A confession hour is added for Lent, a holy hour lapses when a priest is transferred, and a page read in March is quietly wrong by August. The people who know are the people who were there on Saturday.

So the reader has a part in this. Beneath every schedule on a parish page you can say whether it is still right, or report that it has changed, and you can send a correction for an editor to read. A reader’s word never rewrites the record by itself: it dates it, and where readers report a change it sets that doubt in plain sight above the times until someone has checked. Truth about a parish’s own life belongs to the parish. What belongs to us is to keep it accurately, to say where we got it, and to admit quickly when it has gone stale.¹⁵