c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ As Roman Catholic Archbishop Francis George adjusts to Chicago and Chicago adjusts to him, he will discover his strongest asset is also his greatest challenge _ the neighborhood parish.

Every big American city with a large Catholic population has such parishes. In Chicago, however, because of its rapid expansion through sudden immigration at the end of the last century and the beginning of the present one, the possibilities and the problems of the neighborhood parish are more dramatic, more intense, more challenging.

On the day George’s appointment was announced, the television stations in Chicago were deluged with phone calls from people demanding to know”what is he?” They didn’t mean ideologically. Rather they wanted to know whether he was Polish or German or Irish. The callers were surely from the parishes; ethnicity is a more important issue in the neighborhoods than ideology.

The Catholic parishes and the Catholic schools around which the immigrants crowded _ and still crowd _ became the religious and social and civic centers of the lives of many of the people. They became places in the checkerboard of the city, as University of Chicago sociologist Gerald Suttles once remarked, where you mattered for who you were and not for what you did.

Parishes were and are still centers of fierce loyalty _ often ethnic loyalty _ and places that must be protected because they are seen as extensions of the self. For many of their members they ARE the church, the only manifestation of Catholicism impinging on their lives.

When Chicago Catholics _ even suburbanites _ are asked where they’re from, they almost invariably respond with the name of their parish. So, too, do some Jewish politicians who understand the geography of the city’s politics.

The pastor _ his manners, his personal security, his style of liturgy, his ability as a preacher, his respect for the equality of women, his compassion _ matters far more to the ordinary Catholic than the pope or the archbishop.

The neighborhood parishes can be and have been”parochial”in the sense that they are sometimes narrow, rigid, and prejudiced. On the other hand, they are often centers of generosity, service, and openness to the larger community. They are where the money comes from to maintain the archdiocese and especially to keep alive the inner city parishes with which Catholics maintain their popular and alternative education for the poor.

Of themselves such communities _ which persist into the suburbs because people like them _ are neither good nor bad. In a culture where the”quest for community”is on the top of the agenda of many people, the neighborhood parish, especially with its own school, is one of the strongest community building institutions human ingenuity has ever developed.

The issue then becomes community for what?

The parishes are prepared to fight downtown whenever they feel that they are threatened. Thus, when the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s planners tried to eliminate some parishes on the near west side of Chicago, they opened a fight that went to the heart of many Catholics’ identity.

The result was a scenario that might provide Martin Scorsese with material for a farce. All three churches remain open.

A little more than a stone’s throw from those three surviving parishes, is Old St. Patrick’s Church, the oldest public building in the city. A decade ago when two new priests came to the parish, they had three parishioners at Mass on Sunday.

Now thousands of parishioners fill the church five times over the weekend, the parish has reopened its primary school and plans a high school, both self-consciously designed for students of every class, race and ethnic group. Old St. Pat’s has become one of the finest parishes in the country.

The most formidable task for the new archbishop will be to help more parishes _ each in its own context _ to migrate from”parochialism”to the enthusiasm and compassion and generosity of Old St. Pat’s.

If he solves that challenge in Chicago, he will established a model for everywhere else.

DEA END GREELEY