Can i belong to more than one parish

Young adults — ages 18 to mid 30s — may be the most mobile demographic in terms of parish registrations in American Catholic life. They are frequently changing jobs, zip codes and apartments within the same city.

Being in such a transitional state of life means that young adult Catholics are also often moving around to different parishes, whether or not they actually register with them. A ministry leader who organized liturgies and ministries at the campus Newman Center may also find themselves not welcomed to be in a leadership position if they try to get more involved in their local parish soon after graduating. Even young adults who have settled down, gotten married and have kids, can have difficulty fitting in to their geographical parish if there are not many other young families.

Sister Scuth, the professor at the University of St. Thomas, told OSV that traditional concepts of community often appeal to millenials and young adults, who she said tend to be rooted in their local communities.

They crave authentic communities with a shared purpose around service. That poses various challenges, especially to the spirituality of communion that Ahern said is central to the liturgy itself. How do we move past that? Lintzenich, who is single, said he attends Mass at several different parishes throughout the Hudson Valley.

Some towns are more conservative, some are more liberal. You just meet a wide variety of people. Brian Fraga is a contributing editor for Our Sunday Visitor. Priests impact the nature of a parish. Menino also began attending St. John of God Church about a year ago.

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe now. Send feedback to us at oursunvis osv. Customer Service. Renew Your Subscription. Pay Your Bill. Change of Address. New Subscription. Gift Subscription. We don't want to be members of two different parishes, just one, but it is not the closest church to either of us. About AskACatholic. Mass and Adoration. Ask A Catholic Knowledge base.

AskACatholic Disclaimer. Search the AskACatholic Database. Donate and Support our work. New Questions. Cool Catholic Videos. About Saints. Disciplines and Practices for distinct Church seasons. Purgatory and Indulgences. In this way, the members of a particular diocese who are of Brazilian origin could find a Catholic priest who speaks their mother tongue, and worship with other Catholics from their native culture. They might find themselves travelling clear across the diocese on Sundays to attend Mass at their parish—but it would still be their parish.

Imagine, for example, that Catholic immigrants to a new country are being particularly targeted by members of non-Catholic faiths, with a view toward luring them away from the Catholic Church.

Circumstances like these could certainly warrant the creation of a Catholic parish specifically for such immigrants. Similarly, a bishop could erect a parish for the people of the diocese who speak Mandarin Chinese, for instance. The parish priest would celebrate Mass and the sacraments in that language, and any Catholic Mandarin-speaker of the diocese whose family originated anywhere that Mandarin is spoken could be a member of that parish. This would be a personal parish erected not necessarily on the basis of nationality, but rather of language.

Canon also mentions that personal parishes can be erected for those Catholics who worship in a certain rite, and this brings us to the scenario which Peter describes. It appears that in his diocese, the bishop has established a parish specifically for those Catholics who want to attend Mass and receive the sacraments in the Extraordinary Form, following the preconciliar liturgical books.

As with the examples just mentioned, Catholics of this diocese might live anywhere, yet still be considered full members of this personal parish.

By the way, note that when canon is speaking of Catholics of a different rite, it is nonetheless speaking of Catholics of the Latin Catholic Church. These Catholics are not governed by the Code of Canon Law discussed in this space, which pertains to Latin Catholics [cf. But our imaginary St. In the first case, St. All Catholics living on the campus, including not only students but also any Catholic employees and their families who happened to live there too, would ipso facto be members of St.

Let me explain. Many Canadians, while they are registered members of their local Church, they are also registered as members of another Church in Florida, USA. The reason for this is that they spend anywhere from 2 to 6 months of the cold Winter in the South where they own another home.

So they are members of one Church in their country in the Summer and they are members of another Church in another country in the Winter. To complicate the matter, there are those who spend their weekends, from May to October, at their distant Summer cottage. That means in the Summer, they attend a different Church that is located in the district of their cottage.