American Parishes

Catholic parishes, argue this book’s editors, occupy an often-ignored middle level of analysis between studies of global Catholicism and Catholic individuals. Existing parish studies tend to be applied and atheoretical, using “the methods of sociology without conceptual elaboration or theoretical interpretation” (5). What theoretical interpretations exist tend at least implicitly to associate Catholic parishes with Protestant congregations in a general field of “congregational studies,” which “is insufficient by itself to understand Catholic parishes in particular” (6). Instead, the authors protest, “parishes are distinctive, special and even “exceptional” when we compare them to other congregations” and thus “require specialized study in their own right” (238–9). To amend these problems, they propose that parishes be newly conceived as the “embedded middle” of American Catholicism, where “individual Catholics come together to create a local identity within a global Catholic Church” (231) in the process of cultural production “shaped by the social forces of community, geography and authority” (232).

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