Being Catholic and Living in the Burbs

I very much enjoy this picure I got from Hallowed Ground. The one above is Ozone Park in Queens New York. Needless to say events such as this such as Corpus Christi Processions in the neighborhood are rare events nowadays.

I truly don't live in the past but the above picture shows a tad of what we lost. The problem is that you really can't fight people moving out of cities and into the suburbs. I remember looking at old pictures of St Joeseph's Church in Shreveport and seeing similar phoots. St Josephs is still one of my favorite Churches because it is smack dab in the middle of a neighboorhood and thus still retains some of that old dynamic. The Parish is still to a certain extent iable to be part of the neighborhood life.

That is one reason why the hurricane that hit New Orleans was so devasting to me. New Orleans was one of those last bastions of urban Catholicism where things like Parish fairs were still very much a part of the life of the community. Even that was to a certain extent dying out as people fled to adjacent Parishes.

Perhaps some of the problems we had Post Vatican II can be traced to a Catholic Parish model that did not adapt well to the surburb thing that was starting to take off at this time.

Of course rural Catholicism has always been around and needless to say people could not walk to Church and such. But the dynamic is different there because rural people tend to be more close to their neighbors. Or at least they used too before we were able to watch 1000 Channels at home. A couple of decades back our neighbors were a big source of our fun. As I mention before on this blog my parents entertained people all the the time. Nowadays it seems that my generation does not do that nearly as much.

Anyway this is a tad of rambling post , but the picture caught my eye this morning.