An article about Rochester’s first Catholic bishop states that when he arrived the city had 35 parish churches and 29 mission churches.
What was - or is - the difference between the two?
Parishes are self-supporting (i.e., are fully funded by either their own endowment and/or their members’ current pledges). A mission requires funding from the diocese. Traditionally, in the Episcopal Church, the chief parish priest was a rector; at a mission, the chief priest is called a vicar. These days, however, I think “priest-in-charge” is encountered more often than “vicar.”
See: Grace Church Glossary (This is Episcopal, but the nomenclature is still used the same way).
Just a guess, but could a parish church be one that was self-supporting, and a mission church one that needed financial support from the diocese, in hopes of becoming self-sufficient?
What effect would this have on the parishioners? Would they be in the poorer parts of the city? Would the priests be a different set than the parish priests? Would missions normally become parishes or be incorporated into them? Their number actually grew over the Bishop’s career, so would churches start by being missions and then grow into parishes or were the two separate pathways? Would there be a sign outside that read St. So-and-so’s Mission Church? And any other points of distinction you can think of.
Generally the hope is that a mission establishment will grow into a permanent, settled, self-sustaining establishment. Though in a very remote rural area, not likely to see any development, it might be accepted that there was never going to be the critical mass of congregants needed for a self-sustaining parish.
They wouldn’t necessarily (or usually) be in the poorer parts of the city; they’re more likely to be in rural areas, in newly-settled areas, or in areas where the population is thinly spread and/or the proportion of Catholics in the population is low. (The diocese of Rochester includes a great deal more than the town and suburbs of Rochester.) Wealth enters into it too, since financial sustainability is a factor, but parishes in densely-populated inner-city areas could be self-sustaining even if many of the parishioners were comparatively poor. Morever parish boundaries would often be deliberately drawn to include some more socially upscale areas, precisely in order to create parishes with a better chance of financial viability.
The bishop would appoint priests both to the parishes and to the mission churches, drawing on the same pool of diocesan priests. However it wasn’t unusual for the bishop to invite a religious order to establish a relationship with a parish or a mission, and to supply priests for it, though the bishop still formally appointed the priests nominated by the religious order. And that probably happened more often with missions than with parishes, if only because there were many religions orders who specialised in mission, and who were happy to take on appointments that diocesan clergy might regard, to some degree, as hardship appointments.
Visiting the church, you probably couldn’t readily tell whether it was a mission or an established parish. In either case, any sign would most likely just say something like “St Mary’s Church” (or whatever). What went on in the church in the way of services and so forth was the same. A mission church, for obvious reasons, might be smaller and newer, and less well-appointed, than a parish church, and was less likely to have done things like establish a Catholic school or build a church hall. By and large, it didn’t matter to the congregants whether their church was a parish or a mission, but it mattered to the bishop, since he had to find money for the missions in his diocese.
Or in the boondocks, or areas with a lot of immigrants (not necessarily poorer, but it earmarks the area for “choose priests with extra care and if possible multilingual”, which answers your next question)…
Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes a place which used to be considered “regular” becomes “mission” because of changing situations: Europe used to send priests and nuns to other countries, now we’re importing them.
An area is declared “Mission land” if it’s considered hostile, if there is special attention to social issues (hospitals and schools funded by the diocese/the Church rather than self-or-government supported), if most of its personnel comes from very different areas…
It won’t necessarily be announced on a sign. There are places where seeing the sign “mission” on a church’s door would send the wrong message to the locals, there are others where it’s socially equivalent to “parish”: this kind of information needs to be taken into account when naming the churches.
I don’t know about the US, but in Spain RCC parishes aren’t expected to be self-supporting and as far as I know never have been: the diocese is a common “wallet”.
I think we have to distinguish between “mission territory”, on the one hand, and a church which is a mission rather than a parish, on the other.
“Mission territory”, in Catholic church-speak, is territory which isn’t organised into permantently-established dioceses, and so doesn’t govern itself. Instead, clerics are sent into the areas from outside, and they are managed from outside, and accountable to superiors outside. The object, obviously, is to build up the church within the territory until it reaches the critical mass necessary to sustain itself and run itself and manage its affairs, whereupon a network of dioceses is erected, and the area ceases to be “mission territory”.
So, for example the diocese of Lagos (in Nigeria) was erected in 1950. Prior to that, the territory concerned had been mission territory - the Vicariate Apostolic of Lagos, which itself had been carved out of a larger mission territory in 1943, which was the result of a subdivision of a still larger mission territory in the 1880s.
Occasionally the process works the other way. England, for example, became mission territory after the Protestant reformation in the sixteenth century, when the existing structure of dioceses was allowed to lapse, to be replaced by the Vicariate Apostolic of England. It remained mission territory until 1850, when a new network of Catholic dioceses was re-established.
The diocese of Rochester, obviously, was not mission territory, because it was a diocese. Nor, when it was a new diocese (in 1868), had it just ceased to be mission territory. It was carved out of the diocese of Buffalo which had been set up in 1847, and Buffalo had in turn been carved out of New York (set up in 1808).
But, within a diocese, when a church is described as a “mission” it doesn’t mean that it’s mission territory in the canonical sense. The very fact that it’s within a diocese means that it isn’t. What it means is that it’s in an area of the diocese which is not yet operating in a system of territorial parishes, because there isn’t (yet) a sufficiently established Catholic community to support a parish structure. Finances are part, but not the whole, of this; by and large, a parish needs to be able to raise the finances to do the things parishes need to do, and if the community there can’t generate that kind of money then the area is not yet ready to become a parish.
Well, yes, but only because in modern times there’s an expectation that the diocese has to pay its priests a common wage.
This wasn’t traditionally the case, in most places. Each parish had its revenues, which might be voluntary donations from the parishioners, tithes which were payable by law, rent or other income from property owned by the parish or from other endowments, etc. The priests were paid out of this, which meant that the priests in some parishes did considerably better than the priests in others. The bishop supervised, to the extent of inspecting the parish and ensuring that the priests weren’t diverting so much of the revenue to themselves that the parish’s activities were compromised or constrained. But, until comparatively modern times, in most places there was no system whereby the wealthier parishes were levied to support the poorer, or whereby the diocese guaranteed the same wage to ever priest. In the past, if a parish became too poor to generate enough income to keep the church standing and pay a priest the parish was supressed, or it was attached to a neighbouring parish, and the same man appointed as parish priest of both (possibly with an assistant priest).
I’ve also seen “mission church” used slightly differently, although I’m not sure it’s correct. It was used to refer to a new parish within a diocese which had previously been part of another parish and in some ways still seemed to be part of the original parish ( single pastor and staff , combined finances , etc) . All the ones I know of were founded because of an increasing Catholic population and eventually became independent parishes.
Thanks for the interesting info, UDS. You’re right. I completely forgot how big the Diocese of Rochester is. It now covers twelve counties. The website stops counting in 1978 for some reason but there were still 29 mission churches then. And even though the City of Rochester has one of the highest percentages of people living in poverty in the country, several of the surrounding counties are even higher. Lots of people consider this part of New York the upper tip of Appalachia and I wouldn’t say they’re wrong. The Church is definitely struggling around here.
Here’s an explanation of parish, mission, chapel etc. by the Archdiocese of St. Louis.
And here’s the website for one of the local mission churches, which seems to still exist only because a) it’s historic and b) it serves an extremely disorganized ethnic community that’s on the verge of dying out.
Yes. I know a strangely large amount of stuff about missions and priests in Nigeria, because for a number of years my (now-deceased) great-uncle was the provincial superior of the Jesuit order there. On his occasional visits home he’d tell us children stories about his life in Nigeria, and we were, of course, fascinated. He was a wonderful man, and I remember him fondly. He baptized all the children, married my father and mother, and officiated at the funerals of many in the family also. Cradle-to-grave Catholicism at its best.
They’re on a mission from God?
The diocese of Cleveland (and perhaps others) also has a program called “Church in the City”, which is sort of a middle ground: Churches in the inner city remain as parishes, but receive voluntary financial support from churches in the affluent suburbs. The diocese itself doesn’t provide any of the funds, and the churches are specifically partnered, so that the rich churches can point to and identify with where their money is going.
Do the old-fashioned “Missions” like those that once dotted the Spanish colonies still exist in a meaningful sense? Iirc the “Spanish Missions” in places like California were intended as places where proselytism campaigns were organized and where potential converts were immersed in a Catholic environment, somewhat like a school. Other than priests, deacons, monks, etc. who were assigned to the “Mission” on official business, you would have very few Regular Catholics ™ milling about or attending services. E.g. are there churches (whether or not officially styled “missions” according to the definition above) that primarily exist not to serve local Catholics who live nearby but to proselytize, seek converts, and/or educate/process/etc. wannabe converts? I know someone who became Catholic and they just did it by taking classes at the local Catholic church - there was no special Convert Initiation Center building or anything like that.
The missions you describe would have been set up in places where there was no existing local church or church community. You’d never have them in the same area as a regular parish, with “regular” catholics going to the parish and newbies and wannabes going to the mission.
These missions were intended to build up the church, and the church community, to the point where they could transition from mission to parish.