By Father Robert L. Kinast

Home has many addresses. For the devoted Catholic, the Church is one of them. In the American Catholic tradition, the local Catholic parish has been more than a place of worship and religious instruction. For generations of immigrants and their children, the Church was home, the only familiar place in a bewildering and often hostile environment.

Since Vatican II, the familiarity of the parish church and its offer of home have altered for many Catholics. The changes in church teaching and practice have created some confusion. A new parishioner cannot assume as easily or confidentially as before that everything will be as he or she once knew it. Sodalities may be replaced by charismatic prayer groups, parochial schools by schools of religion, the Catholic Church building by a Protestant church or public facility for worship.

Along with the internal changes in the Church, the increasing mobility of American society has weakened the sense of permanent roots and long-standing identification with a particular parish church.

At its worst, these conditions have created a loss of identity and familiarity with the local Catholic church. At its best, however, this same situation holds new and exciting possibilities, which have ramifications beyond the context of the Catholic parish.

Parishioners must now be more active and take more initiative if they are to participate in church life. It is misleading to assume that a new parishioner knows what activities characterize the parish. He or she must find out, learn what has been happening, "how things are done here," and actively become familiar with the parish.

In addition, for the parish to serve his or her needs, the person must become more actively involved and contribute as much as he or she intends to get. Being at home in today's parish means being involved in it.

A modern Catholic is usually presented a variety of options, but in terms of what may be done and how it may be done. This gives greater room for finding what is personally meaningful to the individual, rather than having to fit oneself in.

These are new challenges for the Catholic who wants the parish to be a home, but they can lead to a stronger and more active involvement of the person in the parish. Besides this, there are some important benefits for the parishioner's involvements in the rest of the community.

In being faced with the diversity within Catholic parishes, the individual must learn to accept differences in others and integrate various approaches in order to have a unified church life. The experiences gained in working this out in the parish have direct application to other aspects of one's life.

Similarly, individual parishioners must develop the criteria to choose from among different options those which best serve his or her needs. Learning how to make choices that are consistent with one's principles is a valuable lesson which the modern parish can help teach.

The person who wants to be really at home in the parish must assume responsibility and take initiative for the church. Cultivating a sense of active responsibility and contributing one's ideas and talent to strengthen the parish is another lesson which can be transferred to other areas of one's life.

In these ways, the modern parish, with its new and sometimes demanding changes, can help prepare its members for more effective service and involvement in the larger world. It also seems likely that as children and young people see their parents accepting and fulfilling an active role in the local church, they will be encouraged to consider a more active role yet, that of official ministry within the church as a priest, sister or brother.

Religious vocations are nurtured in the context of earlier environments. The active Catholic parishioner today is fulfilling a vocation within the church, and doing so in a way that spills over into the rest of his or her life. The parish thus becomes a tremendous source of learning and experience, which will not only improve the quality of life in our society, but also stimulate our young people to consider a more complete vocation to the church as the purpose of their lives.

Home has many addresses. The church address of today's Catholic is the one he or she writes. That's where to begin.