Urban Churches Face Challenge, Handlin Declares

The Catholic Church in the city faces its greatest challenge today in adjusting to the changing social structure of America's urban centers, Oscar Handlin, Winthrop Professor of History, told the Harvard-Radcliffe Catholic Club last night.

Speaking at the first of a series of lectures on "The City and the Church," Handlin explained how the ethnic nature of most city churches has been destroyed over the half-century by the movement to the suburbs and the curtailment of large-scale foreign immigration.

Church and Parish

He then questioned whether the Church can "still fruitfully regard itself as a parish-based institution as it did in the 19th century when individual churches possessed strong ethnic identities."

Handlin divided the development of the Church in urban areas into three stages, reflecting the gradual growth of the cities and the steady deterioration of the union between parish and community.

Social Center

In the first period, running to the end of the 18th century, the city parish was the social as well as religious center of the local community and was closely identified with it.

However, with the influx of immigrants in the 19th century, the territorial nature of the parish began breaking down, and was replaced by an ethnic orientation, as may still be found in predominantly Irish-Catholic and Italian-Catholic churches.

This ethnic homogenity stayed off for a while the collapse of the parish as a meaningful unit.

Cultural Community

The immigrant from Europe, said Handlin, wanted a Church with the social and communal peculiarities of his homeland and looked on the parish church as a part of his cultural community.

Today, as the Church in the city faces a disintegration of the ethnic based churches, it must turn to new groups of city-dwellers, often Negro, who, Handlin says, are often "historically, economically, and socially remote from the Church." "It is the kind of relationship which the Church establishes with these new people that will determine the Church's role in the rest of this century," he said.