What we celebrate together on Sundays, along with all the church’s liturgies, should make an impact both on the community in which they are celebrated and on society more broadly. This conviction finds resonance throughout the texts of Vatican II, especially in Sacrosanctum Concilium, which describes the liturgy as both the source and the summit of Catholic living. How are these sources and summits experienced in Catholic parishes and communities?
Parish-Based Qualitative Research
During the 2024 Lenten season, I conducted a small-scale, parish-level qualitative study in Ottawa, Canada. The parish I selected has a reputation for being very socially engaged. A quick look at their weekly bulletin and website reveals a substantial list of various social justice ministries, including, to name a few, Indigenous reconciliation initiatives, sandwich-making for a local shelter, advocacy work on a range of issues, and support for refugee resettlement. With this extensive commitment to social justice, I believed that this parish would be an ideal site for exploring the relationships between liturgy and social outreach. I engaged with the parish as a participant observer in the congregation during its liturgical celebrations throughout Lent, conducting semi-structured interviews and focus groups with parishioners, and analyzing the content of the weekly parish bulletins. I was very grateful for the parish’s openness to my research; I had more volunteers for interviews than I could manage.
Choosing to engage in qualitative research in a parish community is important to me because it touches upon one of the fundamental assumptions of my research. This is the assumption that academic theology (the academic study of God) is not the only theology or even the most essential theology. There is a lived theology, a lived comprehension of God in each community of faith. This theology is lived in each parish community and is founded on each person’s personal relationship with God. Often, this lived theology goes unremarked upon by its very practitioners, the People of God in the pews on Sundays. This assumption, which underpins my research, acknowledges that each person contributes to the discernment of the Holy Spirit within the Church. Theology should not be the sole purview of academics in institutions; it is a lived reality. A church that is striving for synodality needs to privilege the theology of its members.
Voices of Theology
I have found the work of the Theological Action Research Network to be very helpful in exploring lived theologies. This network works closely with communities to bring the ordinary voices of theology to the foreground. Their approach to this practical and lived theology proposes four voices or sources for theology. The voices are normative, formal, espoused, and operant. Each of these voices represents theology in different contexts and differs in its relationship to power and legitimacy within the church. The normative voice is the magisterial and dogmatic proclamations of the church. The formal voice is the voice of academic theologians reflecting on other sources of theology. The espoused voice is a particular group’s expression of its theological values. The operant voice is the theology that is lived in the practice of the group and that is not necessarily made explicit through the community’s self-reflection. The normative and formal voices are received as more authoritative than the operant and espoused voices. (See Clare Watkins, Disclosing Church.) The hope is that qualitative research can help articulate the espoused and operant theologies of a community, both by giving the community a chance to speak and by observing the community in action. This emphasis on the lived theology of a community seeks to challenge the power dynamics of formal and normative voices in theology.
Connecting Liturgy and Social Justice
One way I explored the parish community’s espoused connection between its liturgical celebrations and social justice commitments was through semi-structured interviews. In most of my interviews, I would pose some form of this question: “How would you describe the connection between social issues most important to you and the Lenten liturgies you have experienced?” Two of the recurring themes that I heard in response to that question were the prayers of the faithful and the homily. These two points in the liturgy are liturgical soft spots, places where there is sufficient flexibility to allow for social justice issues to be addressed directly. And my observations of this parish’s liturgies resonated with these points of connection.
For example on the Fourth Sunday of Lent this intention was included in the Prayers of the Faithful: “For our sisters and brothers in Honduras, who are defending the rights of all those in their communities, whose homes and environment are threatened by large profit-driven economic developments that could force them off their ancestral lands, we pray to the Lord.” Similar petitions to this one were included in all of the Lenten Sunday masses that I observed. These intentions were a primary place of connecting liturgy and social justice. One of the interviewees described the connection in this way:
I see [the connection] reflected in some of the things that Father talks about in that sort of compassionate attitude, I would say as well. You know […] the prayers, the intentions. I see that absolutely reflected in those. And I always find I appreciate that very much that there’s a certain specificity to that, that people are within the church are really thinking about these issues.
The homilies and prayers of the faithful became the places of espoused theological connection between what is celebrated in the Eucharist and the social justice concerns of the parish. However, for many of the parishioners that I spoke with, this was the limit of the connection between liturgy and social justice. Many people struggled to articulate the connection beyond these two concrete liturgical moments.
Disjuncture in Lived Theology
From my position as a visiting academic, I perceived the disconnection between the parish’s liturgy and social outreach as a disjuncture between the espoused and operant theologies of the community. The espoused theology of the community was that social justice is incorporated into the liturgy through two explicit points of contact: the homily and the prayers of the faithful. However, as I participated in many masses and other liturgies, I observed many other points of connection that were not explicitly remarked upon by the parish community. For example, throughout Lent, children were invited to bring up food items for the local food bank in the procession of the gifts. Also, at every Sunday mass, an Indigenous land acknowledgment was read before the opening hymn. These are two small concrete examples of how this parish integrated their social justice convictions into their liturgical celebrations.
What is interesting is that these moments of integration were either not remarked upon or were actively discounted as liturgical. When I spoke with one interviewee about the land acknowledgment at the beginning of mass, she said:
So [the land acknowledgments] were developed outside of the liturgy. And so they don’t necessarily interconnect in any way, other than just as a community showing respect for the history that happened. And, I guess, respecting it and trying, hoping that it doesn’t happen again in the future. So I don’t see that as having a direct liturgy […] connection.
This stark division of what counts as liturgy and what doesn’t was shared by many of the interviewees. Liturgy was often interpreted as a rigid object that could only superficially incorporate the parish’s social justice commitments. This perception of rigidity highlights the tension and, potentially, the disconnect between the lived theology of the community and the normative theology of the church.
The tension with the normative voice was clearly identified in the parish’s report on their participation in the Synod on Synodality: “Members of the laity have been afraid of speaking up; some fear that speaking even in this synodal process is a futile exercise because voices will be ignored, reports will be ‘watered down.” As problematic as this tension is in itself, it becomes even more harmful when it causes the bifurcation of the community’s operant from espoused practice.
This community was living a disconnection between the espoused theology of this parish community and their operant theology. In practice, their liturgies demonstrated a complex interweaving of different social justice commitments throughout the liturgy, while simultaneously, the community described only limited connections between their liturgy and the social issues they addressed as a community. There were some brief articulations of connections, with one interviewee drawing an explicit connection between sharing communion at mass and then sharing in the coffee social after the liturgy and another speaking about caring for the sick as a continuation of the liturgy. However, aside from a couple of limited articulations, there was a general inability to recognize and speak about how the community’s liturgy was interwoven with its social outreach. In their espoused theology, the parish community described the liturgy as separate from their lived social reality, but in their operant theology, they expressed profound connections.
The expressed disconnection may be a symptom of their relationship to the normative voice of theology. Their operant theology was being constrained by the perceived power of the normative voice, and this was potentially creating a gap between what the community was doing and what it was saying. This gap threatens to isolate the Eucharistic celebration from the broader life of the community.
One of the primary places where I observed this gap between Eucharistic liturgy and the Eucharist as a source for social engagement was through the parish’s commitment to making sandwiches for a local shelter. Several of the interviewees described how a team of volunteers would meet on a weekly basis to make sandwiches. One interviewee, in particular, explained how this connected the parish directly with the community:
So you don’t check East Ottawa at the door when you come in, it’s all you take it all in and the church is part of that. That’s why I think, among other things, the sandwich initiative is so important, because it is connecting us very, very directly with people in need, quite apart from the people that come to the door.
From this quote, it is possible to see how the parish community viewed sandwich making as a direct connection to the social issues of its neighbourhood. But for myself as a liturgical theologian, this weekly sandwich-making had many striking parallels to a Eucharistic liturgy: a group of faithful gather together, carefully preparing tables and supplies of food, working together to provide food for others. When described in this way, from the formal voice of theology, making sandwiches every week sounds remarkably similar to liturgy.
Ritualizations as Connections
I think that the gap between the operant and espoused theologies can be addressed by seeking a deeper integration between the liturgical reality lived on Sundays and the social outreach of the parish community. Seeking to bridge this gap is one potential way to address the marginalization of the people’s theology. One potential path towards a deeper integration can be found in Susan Reynolds’ book People Get Ready. In this book, Reynolds conducted a qualitative study of an inner-city parish in Boston. She observes that the parish’s liturgical and social life can be integrated through an ecology of ritualizations. Ritualizations are lived patterns within the community that distinguish a particular activity as important or special. For example, in the parish that she observed, Reynolds sees the regular recitation of the pastoral vision at a parish council meeting as a ritualization. Ritualizations can include larger rituals, such as a Sunday liturgy, as well as other expressions, such as announcements or coffee time. All of these different ritualizations are interconnected within a community. They form a web of different ways that the community lives its values. The ritualizations and the values that they communicate inform each other.
For the parish community I studied, their ritualizations include both their Sunday Mass and their weekly sandwich-making. Both of these are part of the broader network of ritualizations. They are special, repetitive activities that the community uses to communicate its values. The community both forms and is formed by these ritualizations. By considering both parish liturgies and parish outreach activities as ritualizations, it becomes easier to draw connections between the two.
At the end of my study, I had the opportunity to share the results of my work with the parish community after one of the Sunday masses. It was an excellent opportunity to reflect back to the community what I saw as their lived theology. I was excited to see how my observations resonated in the room and sparked questions and conversations. I also took the opportunity to propose the liturgy of sandwich making to the community as a way of articulating their operant theology. It was inspiring to witness this community reflect on how they could articulate and reflect on the links between their prayer and work that they had already forged. The energy and creativity that I experienced during this meeting are part of the fruits of centring the lived theology of a faith community. Naming the places where the community is experiencing disjuncture opens the doors for the Holy Spirit to work in new ways. It is in this new space that the liturgy needs to be incarnated. It can only function as the source and summit of a community’s life if it becomes integrated into the broader ecology of the community. An ecology that seeks a healthy relationship between the various theological voices.
