What comes to mind when you see the word Church with a capital “C?” Most of us probably think of a number of entities such as St. Nicholas community, the Diocese of the West, the OCA, global Orthodoxy, Christianity in a more general sense, or perhaps even a particular foreign ethnicity like Russian, Arabic, or Greek. In spite of all these possibilities, we usually most directly encounter the Church in the context of “parish.”

So what do we really mean when we say the Church is “Catholic?” One of the definitions of catholicity implies the capability of embracing everyone. To paraphrase Fr. Alexander Schmemann: Parishes, however, are conditioned by their environment, and therefore are naturally limited in their catholicity. Parishes can be classified as predominately ethnic, convert, “middle-class,” missionary, urban, suburban, or rural and although ideally none of these qualifications ought to simply determine its life, none of them can be ignored. Therefore, it is from the diocese that a parish receives its catholicity, i.e. the constant challenge to transcend itself as a self-centered and self-sufficient community, to identify itself not only with its own people and their “religious needs,” but with the Church and her eternal needs. The parish can achieve this only together with other similar communities which all together transcend their natural limitations.