Parochial mission (Catholicism)

A parish mission or parochial mission is, in the terminology of the Roman Catholic Church, a term applied to certain special pastoral efforts among Catholics. These are "home missions", distinguished from the apostolic missions sent to make conversions among pagans and heretics. Such missions may consist of systematic preaching and instruction, extending over a stated number of days, performed by authorized missionaries.

Until the beginning of the seventeenth century there existed no organized form of Catholic popular missionary work, as it is now understood. The preaching, for example, of the mendicant orders, was not reduced to a system until the foundation of the Congregation of Priests of the Mission by Vincent de Paul. That was in France; in Italy, a century later (1732), Alphonsus Liguori founded his congregation of Redemptorists. About one hundred years later Gaspar Bufalo (died 1837) founded in Rome the Congregation of the Most Precious Blood to devote itself exclusively to parochial mission work.

The work was taken up by other orders whose primary end was different: the Jesuits, who were the foremost, the Dominicans, Franciscans, Capuchins. After the Bourbon Restoration in 1815, a new impetus was given to missionary work by the Abbé Forbin-Janson, who, with his friend the Abbé de Rauzan, founded the Missionaires de France, and by Charles de Mazenod, who founded the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, at Marseille, in 1815. In Germany parochial missions had been given sporadically, chiefly by the Jesuits and the Redemptorists, before 1848; after that date they became more general. The bishops everywhere encouraged and urged them. The Cardinal Archbishop of Mechlin, in 1843, maintained that the people of every parish are entitled to have the benefit of a mission. During this period the German Church had missionaries who devoted themselves entirely to popular mission work: Peter Roh, Klinkhofström, Pottgieser. On the expulsion of the Jesuits, Redemptorists and other orders from the German Empire, in 1872, there was an interruption.

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