The Parish is your Family

Several weeks ago I mentioned in a homily that the parish is not a sacramental Pez Dispenser.  Several people noted the metaphor and I would like to take this opportunity to discuss the image in more detail.  Growing up I remember taking candy from the plastic, mechanical dispenser.  It was so cool to pop the head back on the Pez and shoot a piece of candy into my mouth. 

I mention the instrument of a Pez Dispenser in relation to a parish because a number of Catholics look to the parish as a mere functional dispenser of the sacraments and once the sacrament is received the parish has served its purpose.  The Pez Dispenser model of the parish is extremely functional and impersonal.  It doesn’t matter where I go to Mass on Sunday, rather, the objective is to go to the dispenser or distribution center, i.e., the parish, and receive the required Sacrament. 

The Pez Dispenser model of the parish misses out on a very important component of what it means to be church.  In Pope Francis’ first encyclical, Lumen Fidei, The Light of Faith, he states that “Faith is necessarily ecclesial; it is professed from within the body of Christ as a concrete communion of believers” (Lumen Fidei, 22).  The word ecclesial literally means a people called out to be a community.  We use the word church for this community.  The parish is where this community gathers and it is at Sunday Mass where the parish takes the “concrete” form of its highest expression.

At the 2012 Synod for the New Evangelization the bishops gathered and affirmed that “the parish continues to be the primary presence of the Church in neighborhoods, the place and instrument of Christian of life, which is able to offer opportunities for dialogue among men, for listening to and announcing the Word of God, for organic catechesis, for training in charity, for prayer, adoration and joyous Eucharistic celebrations” (Proposition, 26).

The parish is just as much a “concrete” community of faith as it is a distributor of the sacraments.  To neglect the communal component of the parish is to miss out on the vitality that comes from being a known member of a family of faith.  By regular attendance at Sunday Mass in our own parish we come to understand what it means to be a living member of the Body of Christ that comes to receive the Body of Christ.

Pez Dispensers are old school anyway. :-)


-Fr. John F. Jirak, Pastor