Glory be to Jesus Christ!
There is a RC church nearby and the occupancy is 5000, which is always meet and sometimes exceeded. Someone has told me that this would never be the case in a BC church because once the number parishioners exceed 250-300 people a new church is established. I have never seen any BC churches this size.Is it because of the above reason or is it because there are just not that many BC?
Any insight to this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

P.S. - This is a great site and I feel very blessed to have run across it. I am amazed how much I have learned already.A sincere thank you to all of you!

No, the Cathedral in Lviv is very large as are other parishes in major cities where the people are mostly Greek Catholic. In North America, such concentration does not exist, but many people think this praticial factor is a viture. I understand as a general rule, the Catholic Church would like to see more intimate communities,

I think it's a function of demographics combined with the contemporary vocation situation that has led to this issue.

In the Old Country, for both Eastern and Western Christians, there were two situations: urban cathedrals where several thousand would attend liturgy, smaller parishes in cities, and then the parishes in small towns and villages. This was the pattern for Christianity from the very beginning, actually. Those who say that it is part of the Byzantine tradition to have small parishes must be overlooking Hagia Sophia, for example, where several thousand worshippers would regularly gather for liturgy in its heyday. It is a function of demographics and priestly vocations.

Presently, if you travel around Europe, you will find a large number of churches throughout the countryside, combined with large cathedrals in the cities. Many of the smaller churches are now closed due to a lack of priests to serve them -- but the pattern was for smaller communities to exist as the number of priests allowed.

The current American situation is different for Romans and Byzantines. For Romans, there are large numbers of faithful (apporx. 60 million in the USA, for example) but a relatively small number of vocations to the priesthood. Therefore, you have to cram more people into one parish because there aren't enough priests to go around. As a result, the "newer" Roman churches that are being built in this country are often very, very large -- reflecting the reality of a burgeoning population of Roman Catholics in some areas combined with a lack of priests to serve them. In the older Catholic parts of the USA, like the cities of the Northeast or Chicago, one can still find a good number of small parishes -- but in many cases these are being phased out due to lack of priests. In any case, they reflect what the Roman church was doing when it had more vocations. I don't think anyone in the Roman Church thinks that a 15,000 person parish is the ideal -- but they have no choice given the current number of vocations happening in the Roman Church right now.

In the Eastern Churches, the numbers are relatively small, so the parishes are smaller. That is really a function of demographics. It can be a pleasant experience, compared with the 15,000 Roman parish one may be accustomed to, but it's not accurate to attribute it to a Byzantine tradition of one sort or another. And, as nice as it is in some ways, it makes parishes harder to support. If you have 300 regular attendees, it is harder for the parish to support its own operations and expand than it is for a Roman parish of 15k parishioners.

Orientale

There are several reasons why, historically, Eastern parishes tend to be smaller than their Latin counterparts. First, there is the diocesan structure: Eastern dioceses are very much smaller than Western ones. Greece, with nine mission people, has ninety bishops. This, of course, does not apply in this country, where bishops are as scarece as hen's teeth.



Second, the Eastern Churches have always regarded the Eucharist as a sacrament of the unity of the Church, and the Church primarily as a Eucharistic society. Thus, under Eastern canons and Tradition, there can be only one liutrgy and one Eucharist in one church each day. Multiple masses on the Roman model are, or ought to be, prohibited. Many of our parishes have two liturgies per Sunday simply because their buildings cannot accommodate all members at one time, or because their members are coming over great distances to celebrate the liturgy. But as a rule, one Eucharist a day is the normative.



Therefore, unless one is willing to build and maintain megachurches, there is an upper limit on how many people can be accommodated at a single liturgy. This works out well for us in a number of ways, not the least of which is that the parish does become an ecclesial community, in which everybody knows everybody else, and the priest, acting as shepherd to his sheep, knows his flock as his flock knows him.



I have long insisted that part of the problem in the Roman Church is its excessively large parishes and multiple masses, which tend to fragment the community and break it into factions. It would be better to take a single parish of 5000 served by 2 or 3 priests, and breeak it into two or three smaller ones, on a more himan scale.



Interestingly, the Amish, who also have a very personalist approach to the faith, deliberately break up their communities when they exceed a size of 20-30 families. If they get larger, it is more difficult to maintain a close-knit family and a sense of unity.