How
do you know when it’s time to change parishes? In my parents’ generation,
parish boundaries were taken more seriously than they are today. If you lived
in one area, you attended one parish; if you lived a couple blocks down, you
attended the other. While each archdiocese still delineates parishes by
neighborhood streets, it is not unusual for people to continue attending a
parish even after they move out of the parish boundaries. I know more than a
few families who drive past three or four Catholic churches on their way to
their “home” parish. Parishes have different personalities, different styles of
song, and different populations of people. While some people are fortunate
enough to feel that their neighborhood parish fits them, others know that they
may have to drive across town to be spiritually fed.
For
the past fifteen years, Bill and I have been attending Ss. Peter and Paul
parish, on the east side of Milwaukee. We started going there when we were just
out of college, living in the neighborhood. Ss. Peter and Paul had a lively,
young population, dynamic priests and a 7 p.m. Sunday Mass that allowed for
sleeping in on Sunday mornings. We loved it. By the time we got married and
bought a house, we already had a history at the parish, and saw no reason to
stop attending there, even though our Glendale house wasn’t in the church’s
neighborhood.
By
the time Jacob was ready for school, we had been parish members at Ss. Peter
and Paul about seven years. At the time, we were both lectors and Eucharistic
ministers. I was in charge of a social justice program at the parish, and had
started a children’s Liturgy of the Word ministry. While Peter and Paul had a
parish school, we couldn’t quite justify the across-town drive when St. Monica,
another Catholic school, was about five minutes from our house. Torn between
sending Jacob to the much-closer St. Monica and wanting to continue our parish
membership at Ss. Peter and Paul, we asked the pastors of each parish if we
could have duel membership. They said yes. What followed was eight years of a
very imperfect Catholic school and parish relationship for our family. Sending
our sons to one Catholic school and attending Sunday Mass at another parish,
made us feel somewhat disjointed. Sometimes we felt connected to both parishes,
sometimes we felt out of step with each of the communities. One of the bonuses
to sending a child to a Catholic school should be that the sense of community
is continued beyond Friday’s final bell and into the weekend at Mass, fish
fries, or parish picnics. We were missing out on this perk, and while we
recognized that, there was too much we loved about Ss. Peter and Paul to close
our membership there and move to our kids’ school parish on weekends. So we
stayed at Ss. Peter and Paul.
Our
adoption of Jamie complicated things further. We moved again, this time deeper
into Glendale, farther from Ss. Peter and Paul. In addition, Jamie’s Puerto
Rican heritage made us look at our family’s various environments from her perspective.
Our neighborhood is mostly white. St.
Monica School, where she would attend kindergarten, is mostly white. Ss. Peter
and Paul has a sprinkling of racial diversity, but we had to admit, it too, is
mostly white. When we received a call last summer that our foster daughter, T,
who is African American, would be coming back, we were propelled into action.
We needed our two youngest children to have a community to belong to where they
would not be one of only a handful of minorities.
While
I continued going to Ss. Peter and Paul each Sunday, Bill went in search of a
parish that had a population of white, Puerto Rican and African American
members, plus good music and a vibrant priest. I really didn’t think he’d find
it, but he did.
We’ve
been attending that parish-- St. Francis of Assisi, on 4th and
Brown-- for over a year now. We walked
in with our very diverse family and saw ourselves mirrored back in the
diversity of the congregation. The music is primarily Gospel, which all our
kids love because of the strong beat and easy-to-remember lyrics. Fr. Mike
Bertram learned all our names the first Sunday and uses them when he gives us
Communion. It’s a small parish, compared
to either Ss. Peter and Paul or St. Monica, and incredibly welcoming. Our boys
have often rung the church bells on Sunday,
and the kids have brought up the gifts several times. Due to a 10-minute
long Sign of Peace that allows for some chatting and introductions, we know
about a dozen parishioners. While T has now moved back once again with her
biological family, when she was with us, I noticed that African American
members of the community made a special effort to seek her out at the Sign of
Peace. One woman is translating from Spanish to English the story of Our Lady
of Divine Providence, Puerto Rico’s patron saint, so that we can share it with
Jamie. She recently
Our
switch to St. Francis of Assisi from Ss. Peter and Paul is bittersweet. I like
to think that we grew from young adults into full-fledged adults at Peter and
Paul, and the readings, homilies and songs there helped to form us. We took to
heart the preaching we heard at Ss. Peter and Paul about the call to live our
faith, and signed up to be foster parents because of it. Ironically, it was the
gift of faith that Ss. Peter and Paul gave us that compelled us eventually to
move. I believe, however, that following the Gospel is supposed to keep us
moving; it’s supposed to keep us searching. And as we consider signing our
names as official parish members at St. Francis, and removing our names from
the Ss. Peter and Paul roster, I can only look ahead, and wonder what other
changes are in store.
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