Peter Costello
Becoming a Pastoral Parish Council: How to Make Your PPC Really Useful for the Twenty-First Century by Patricia Carroll, foreword by Archbishop Dermot Farrell (Messenger Publications, €9.95/£8.95)
This is a short book, but intentionally so, for it is very much to its purpose which is to promote and encourage the emerging parish pastoral councils, which have been a response to Pope Francis’ Evangelii Gaudium.
At the heart of all this are ambitions for direct lay involvement in the daily life of the parish, which all are delighted with. Lay governance, however, which some might see as another important objective, will have to wait for its own day, like some other things.
Scottish-born author Patricia Carroll is the director of mission and ministry of the Archdiocese of Dublin, and the book carries a foreword by Archbishop Dermot Farrell. It is very much a call for changing ways in changing times.
To reach the widest possible audience the book is quite straightforwardly presented. In some seven chapters Ms Carroll outlines what is actually involved. She begins by defining the parish and the role of the parish pastoral council within it. There are valuable overviews and insights in every chapter, though perhaps chapters two, four, and five may be found the most valuable.
Early in the text, Ms Carroll poses the question ‘What is a Parish?’ This, of course, goes to the heart of the matter. But the parish can mean different things to different people in different circumstances, I suspect. Is such a parish council to concern itself only with those who are in church each Sunday? This clearly leaves out those who define themselves as Catholic, but are perhaps infrequent church goers? Often these are the parents of the children attending the local school associated with the church: these two groups cannot be left aside in considering parish life everyone would agree.
But in a definition of parish I have something more in mind.
Lately Google, the great arbiter of so much of what people know and think today, has taken to defining addresses in Dublin city and elsewhere by giving the parish name. Now this, like so many things on the internet, derives from US and Canadian practise. There, in such places as Quebec and parts of New England, the parish is more clearly a definition of a political or civic area.
But what Google are using here is the civic parish designation for local government use derived from the Norman administrative system of Ireland. These definitions were, and are, used in the civil administration of the city council. But the civic parish boundaries are now no longer exactly those of the ecclesiastical parishes, either Catholic or Anglican, which have been set and revised from time to time with boundaries of their own.
Significance
Brooding on this lately, the Google move seemed to me of significance. We all seem to have lost sight of this civic dimension when thinking about parishes. Ms Carroll refers in passing to the dangers of ‘parochialism’, but a definition that loses sight of all those who live in your civic parish is to lose sight of a very important dimension of local life. Though these inhabitants of the parish may not be Catholic parishioners they are certainly neighbours.
‘Who is my neighbour?’ was the query posed to Jesus by a man with a legalistic mind. Jesus’ answer can be found in Luke 10: 30-37, where he relates the parable of the good Samaritan (one of the much abused outsiders of Biblical society), and urges the querist, in the words of the Rheims version, “Go, and do thou in like manner”.
So, as a matter of everyday life, members of parish pastoral councils concerned about their religious parishes should also have a continuing concern on a daily basis for their neighbours, all of them, of every kind, in the civic parish.
These days, by having a mind for everyone in the civic parish, it will prevent a religious parish council becoming in any way at all ‘too parochial’.