Introduction

This chapter introduces the phenomenon of personal parishes in contemporary American Catholicism. Personal parishes organize Catholics on the basis of purpose rather than territory. They cluster local Catholics by ethnicity, liturgical preference (including for the Traditional Latin Mass), social justice orientation, and more. In making room for diverse expressions of Catholicism, personal parishes represent a structural response to heterogeneity from the top. Their patterns of use over time showcase organizational changes to how bishops structure local Catholicism. National parishes were once commonplace; today, a growing number of dioceses introduce personal parishes for new purposes. This chapter previews the remaining content of the book as well as briefly summarizing the mixed methodological approach upon which this research is based.

Parish and Place

The Catholic Church stands at the forefront of an emergent majority-minority America. Parish and Place tells the story of how the largest US religion is responding at the local level to unprecedented cultural, racial, linguistic, ideological, and political diversification among American Catholics. Specifically, it explores bishops’ use of personal parishes—parishes formally established not on the basis of territory, but purpose. Today’s personal parishes serve an array of Catholics drawn together by shared identities and preferences rather than shared neighborhoods. Their contemporary application permits Catholic leaders to act upon the perceived need for named, specialist organizations alongside the more common territorial parish, designed to serve all in its midst. Parish and Place documents the US Catholic Church’s earlier move away from national parishes and more recent renewal of the personal parish as an organizational form. In-depth interviews and national survey data detail the rise and rationale behind new parishes for the Traditional Latin Mass, for Vietnamese Catholics, for Black Catholics, and more. Featuring insights from bishops, priests, and diocesan leaders throughout the United States, chapters offer a rare view of institutional decision-making from the top. The book is at once a demonstration of structural responses to diversity across wider conceptions of space, and a look at just how far fragmentation can go before it challenges cohesion and unity.

Fragmentation

Fragmentation is an inherent consequence of specialist adaptations in organizational structures. Catholics worship together, but apart in personal parishes. From below, individual Catholics make parish choices that enable them to live out their Catholicism in a way that is meaningful to them. Traditionalist Catholics may gather in Traditional Latin Mass personal parishes. Progressive Catholics may gather in personal parishes with a social mission. From above, Catholic leaders necessarily grapple with the tension of homophily: like-minded Catholics clustering into like-minded parishes. Personal parishes enable bishops to manage and control how this happens among local religious organizations. Personal parishes represent Catholicism’s structural accommodation of religious agency from the top: how leaders (as opposed to individual Catholics doing culture work on the ground) make room for choice and difference, organizationally. Personal parishes represent the cultural work of the Catholic Church as an institution.

Slaying Antichrist

This chapter examines the economic problems and social unrest that in 1549 erupted into riot and rebellion during Edward VI's reign. Copies of the new Prayer Book were distributed, and the new liturgy was performed in place of the Latin mass on Whitsunday even in remote rural parishes. One of these was Sampford Courtenay, a small village in mid-Devon. The chapter first describes the events that led to the Sampford Courtenay rebellion, along with similar uprisings in Cornwall and in Norfolk. It then considers the Oxfordshire rebellion, a short but bloody civil war portrayed by many as a conflict between forces of Christ and Antichrist. It also discusses the sequence of events that led to the removal from power of Edward's uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset. Finally, it analyses the assertion by evangelicals that radicals and Romanists both distorted the Word of God.

The Latin Liturgical Song Subtitled. Middle Dutch Translations of Hymns and Sequences

This article aims to provide insight into the nature, distribution and function of certain Middle Dutch translations of Latin hymns and sequences that originated in the circles of the Devotio Moderna. Unlike the vernacular versions in (most) Middle Dutch lay breviaries, which were used as texts for prayer in the context of private devotion, the translations in what I refer to as “vernacular mass and office books” functioned as subtitles to the Latin liturgy. This type of book was primarily intended for canonesses regular, religious women who had to attend the liturgical services of the Divine Office and of Mass, but had not (fully) mastered Latin. Mass and office books originated in the eastern part of the northern Netherlands, whereas the lay breviaries were intended for tertiaries from the western side of the diocese of Utrecht. These women, who followed the rule of the Third Order of St Francis, were not obliged to attend the liturgical services. In order to illustrate the nature and function of the mass and office books, the article focuses on the books of the canonesses regular of St Agnes's in Maaseik.