I notice that many Catholic churches have the name of a saint in their official name. How do they decide which saint to use? Do the decision makers use their personal favorite saints? Or do they have diocesan oversight to assign different saints to nearby churches?
My understanding is that it’s up to the local bishop.
The bishop probably has final say, but in practice, it’s mostly up to the congregation. So you tend to see Italian saints’ names in churches built to service Italian neighborhoods, Irish saints in Irish neighborhoods, Slovakian saints in Slovakian neighborhoods, etc.
Not always, though…the Italian church in my hometown is Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which is in the Middle East, not Italy. And the German church is St. Mary’s, who is generic enough to apply to ANY ethnicity.
It does work sometimes, though…I remember going to the parish of Our Lady of Czestochowa, which was primarily a Polish congregation, judging from the names in the bulletin, while we were on vacation once.
Then again, though, St. Joseph was also Middle-Eastern, but he’s been adopted as a sort of “honorary Italian”. I suspect the same is true of Mount Carmel.
This question piqued my interest enough that I spent a couple of hours trying to track down the answer. The only thing that I can add to the discussion is that the name of the parish is announced along with the pastor who’s appointed to head it. This happens a long time before there’s a congregation established.
My guess is, it’s the bishop’s decision, perhaps with some input from the appointed pastor.
A new Episcopal (Anglican) mission was started near here – as far as I can determine, the name was chosen by the group trying to get a new parish started, with the bishop simply approving it. (He provides a supply priest until they’re strong enough to become a parish, at which point they get to call a priest as rector.)
Catholics & Anglicans don’t have many “new churches” being started, at least in the USA.
Now, it’s more common to have churches going out of business, and merging with another nearby church. There is often a new name given to the merged church, either a combination of the names of the 2 previous churches (if that sounds reasonable) or a completely new name. If a new one, often the merged congregations will vote or rank names, and the bishop chooses from them.
If the new church is run by a specific congregation it is common to choose, whenever possible, a saint from “the ranks” of the congregation.
Good point – just adding, for those not familiar with the terminology, that “congregation” as Aji is using it here does not mean “local church membership” but “religious order” – e.g., that a Franciscan-run church might be “St. Clare” or “St. Bonaventure”, a Carmelite one “St. Teresa”, a Jesuit one “St. Francis Xavier”.
Recently canonised saints, or those with a strong local connection, seem to figure highly in the calculations. In the last few years in Australia the title of Blessed Mary MacKillop (the first Australian beatus, who is to be canonised on 17 October) has been given to several new churches.
Are they planning on changing the church names on that date, to keep up with her status?
I just checked the history of my old parish church in the Bronx, St. Raymond’s. It’s the oldest parish in the Bronx, founded in 1845. The site says the church was named for St. Raymond because it was dedicated on his feast day; but that seems odd, since surely they could have dedicated it on the feast of any saint they wanted to name the parish after. In any case, the name seems to have no connection to the ethnicity of the members of the parish, who would have been overwhelmingly Irish at that time; St. Raymond was from Spain.
I presume so. It wouldn’t be the first time a church/school etc has had to change its name to reflect the upgraded status of its titular. I remember all the churches dedicated to Blessed Oliver Plunkett having to change with his canonisation in 1975.
Yeah well, it meshes with the practice of tacking the saint of the day to a child being baptised; sometimes before the name chosen by the parents, even. They set a day for the dedication because it was convenient, then looked up the list of Saints whose feast fell on that date (there’s always several).
“An XX saint” doesn’t mean “a saint from XX”: it means a saint that’s popular in XX. There’s churches dedicated to Our Lady all over the place. Each of her advocations is popular in different places, but often the first church to have an image with that advocation is not in the place of the name or is not named after the advocation (for example, Our Lady of Jerusalem is the patron saint of the Spanish village of Artajona: her image is in the Church of St Michael, which existed for centuries before the image was brought there from Jerusalem). Our Lady of Mount Carmel, mentioned by jayjay, is the patron saint of sailors and fishermen: that’s likely to be more popular with the Irish than with the Andorrans, I imagine. Churches dedicated to her are strewn all over the Spanish coast; inland, they’re rare.
According to the site you link to, the area wasn’t an Irish neighbourhood when the church was dedicated; it became so later. My own parish church, St Patrick’s, serves a thriving Italian community - but the church was there before they were, and guess who was around when the church was dedicated?
The suggestion that this church was dedicated to St Raymond because the dedication happened to be celebrted on his feastday strikes me as implausible; far more likely to be the other way around. If nothing else, for obvious reasons you can’t actually schedule a church dedication until fairly late in the let’s-establish-a-parish-raise-some-funds-and-build-a-church project, and I would think the dedication is likely to get decided before the date of the ceremony gets decided.
Besides, 31 August is the feast of several other saints, including the much more prominent St. Cyprian of Carthage. So why Raymond? It doesn’t stack up.
It’s unlikely that a ‘new’ Anglican church (as distinct from a replacement building) would be built here at all. Many here become redundant and are closed, and the building’s sold off for something else. The parish may still exist but shares a minister with several others.
The church of King Charles The Martyr in Potters Bar, for example, http://www.kcm-church.org.uk/history.html doesn’t appear to have any local connection with the said King. Choosing it was probably an expression of High Church doctrinal sympathies
Going into the really obscure, I imagine that a converted-to-Catholic Anglican-use parish (and therefore the churches) might change their name if originally it was “We hate papists Parish” or something no-that-catholic.
The Roman Catholic Church here normally prefers to build a new building when it requires one. Taking on an old, draughty, church that costs a mint to heat isn’t really sensible for them.
I worship at one of the approximately three trillion Episcopalian churches named St. Paul’s. When our parish sold its previous building in 1930, it was bought by the local Roman Catholic diocese, which (in a nice bit of punning ecclesiastical humor) named it “The Shrine of the Conversion of St. Paul.”