Parish and Place

Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church

Tricia Colleen Bruce

First book to explore the phenomenon of personal parishes
Challenges dominant understanding of Catholic congregations
Features interviews with top religious leaders

Parish and Place

Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church

Tricia Colleen Bruce

Description

The Catholic Church stands at the forefront of an emergent majority-minority America. Parish and Place tells the story of how America's largest religion is responding at the local level to unprecedented cultural, racial, linguistic, ideological, and political diversification. Specifically, it explores bishops' use of personal parishes - parishes formally established not on the basis of territory, but purpose. Today's personal parishes serve an array of Catholics drawn together by shared identities and preferences, rather than shared neighborhoods. They allow Catholic leaders to act upon the perceived need for named, specialist organizations alongside the more common territorial parish that serves all in its midst.

Parish and Place documents the American Catholic Church's movement away from "national" parishes and towards personal parishes as a renewed organizational form. Tricia Bruce uses in-depth interviews and national survey data to examine the rise and rationale behind new parishes for the Traditional Latin Mass, for Vietnamese Catholics, for tourists, and more. Featuring insights from bishops, priests, and diocesan leaders throughout the United States, this book offers a rare view of institutional decision making from the top. Parish and Place demonstrates structural responses to diversity, exploring just how far fragmentation can go before it challenges unity.

Parish and Place

Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church

Tricia Colleen Bruce

Parish and Place

Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church

Tricia Colleen Bruce

Author Information

Tricia C. Bruce is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Maryville College, whose books include Faithful Revolution and Polarization in the US Catholic Church. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California Santa Barbara, and has conducted research for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Parish and Place

Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church

Tricia Colleen Bruce

Reviews and Awards

2018 Distinguished Book Award Honorable Mention, American Sociological Association's Religion Section
First place, Immigration category, 2018 Catholic Press Association book awards

"The work of Parish and Place opens up a door for important further pastoral and ecclesiological investigation. In these fragmented times, it is genuinely difficult to discern how best to support people and communities across differences while also building inclusive communities. Bruce's study provides valuable information and interpretative frameworks for continuing conversations about how best to deal productively with diversity and fragmentation within the Catholic Church. Readers interested in the promise and problems involved in personal parishes will be provoked to think more deeply and critically about these important issues." --Julia H. Brumbaugh, Reading Religion

"[T]he work as a whole will be useful to both academic and professional readers Recommended."--CHOICE

"Parish matters, but so too does diocese. This book brilliantly shows us how the Catholic Church as an institution has made decisions about how to respond to the diversity and voluntarism of American religion. Combining vivid ethnographic detail with astute organizational analysis, Parish and Place adds a critical piece to the puzzle that is contemporary religious practice."--Nancy T. Ammerman, author of Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and their Partners

"Bruce's innovative investigation of personal parishes-an important but under-studied dimension of Catholic life-draws on a rich mix of primary data to insightfully illuminate the negotiation of purpose and place, community and diversity, and hierarchical control and lay determination in contemporary American Catholicism." --Michele Dillon, author of Catholic Identity: Balancing, Reason, Faith, and Power

"Tricia Bruce's groundbreaking work is destined to shape important conversations about U.S. Catholic parish life. Personal parishes, defined not by territory but by purpose, remain an interesting alternative to serve the spiritual and pastoral needs of an increasingly diverse Catholic population nationwide. Parish and Place demonstrates that personal parishes are spaces of hope, pastoral creativity, and identity negotiation from which the rest of Catholic faith communities can learn much."--Hosffman Ospino, Associate Professor of Hispanic Ministry and Religious Education at Boston College