Choose a church parish for the right reasons

    I recently read an article on church shopping in the online magazine Relevant and how it is an important process as young adults leave the churches where they grew up and begin to think about attending Mass on their own.
    As I read, I noticed that the article branched into various faiths, and I began thinking – many Catholics my age church shop rather frequently, hopping from parish to parish. Why is that?
    When shopping for certain products, most people know what they want. They choose certain brands over others; they have a taste for certain things. Our consumerist culture is telling us to search for the things that quench our desires, whatever they may be. However, these same commercial tendencies are happening when it comes to finding a church. Young adults are searching for a church, a parish that satiates their “tastes.”
    So, what’s the problem here? Certainly, it is important to find a parish in which we feel comfortable, in which we feel at home. Oftentimes, people will settle on a particular parish because it is a familiar style as the one in which they grew up. However, many young adults today are looking for parishes based on their individual “tastes,” based on what they like. What many fail to realize, though, is that to be part of the body of Christ is to be in the church, and to become a part of Christ’s body, we must die to ourselves. Our faith experience is not about us; it’s about God and his desires for his church.
    The “shopping” mentality certainly grows out of a consumer-minded society. Yet, the Catholic Church is a universal church, meaning that all of the parishes should be teaching the same doctrines, the same messages. All parishes are places for people in a global church to meet one another. Rather than driving around in search of a church that meets a person’s individual sense of community, perhaps it’s time for us to become the communities that we want, and others will follow.
    Well, what are some of the things that people should be looking for in a parish? In Canon Law, which can be found on the Vatican’s website, Catholics have a right for their priests to be faithful to the Magisterium, a beautiful worship space and an elevated liturgy that aspires to the beauty and sacredness of the sacrificial Mass (Can. 213-214). Thus, what everyone should be searching for is a parish that spiritually nourishes the laity, including orthodoxy in the liturgy. In addition, parishes should be challenging their members, allowing them to grow in the faith and learn more about its teachings.
    In C.S. Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters,” a senior demon, Screwtape, provides lessons through letters to his nephew, Wormwood, on ways to secure the damnation of a certain man. In the letters, God is referred to as “The Enemy.” Perhaps the greatest danger of church shopping is illustrated in a passage from the book: “In the second place, the search for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil. What he wants of the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise” (95).
    The harm, then, is that if we are shopping for churches, we become the judge. Rather than being open to receiving God’s word in the liturgy, we are judging, “yes, this is to my taste” or “no, this is not what I want.”
    While I think that many young adults do indeed need to find the parishes in which they feel they belong, I think that looking for these parishes must be done in keen discernment – are we looking for a church because it is best suited to us? Or are we searching for a parish that is spiritually nourishing its laity and challenging them to learn about their faith?
    Heather Bozant can be reached at [email protected]