Catholic Territories in a Suburban Landscape: A Case Based Approach for Analysing Parish Expansion in the Belgian Archbishopric, 1945-75

Despite the decreasing impact of religion on society during the first three decades after the Second World War, there was a boom in the infrastructure built by the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium. Following the rapid urbanisation in this period, the Church provided new suburban neighbourhoods with churches, schools, parish halls and so forth, and established consulting bodies for the strategic planning of this infrastructure. Previous research, however, has shown that these plans for the territorial organisation of pastoral care were only applied in a limited way. This presumable lack of systematic planning was a motivation to peruse a number of new parishes in the Belgian Archbishopric in order to determine the mechanisms according to which they were then actually set up. Using a case based approach, this study aims to identify the main actors in the process of parish expansion, analyse their strategies and tactics, assess their impact, and grasp the patterns of interaction between them. Specifically, this paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of such a case based method for the stated research aim. For a start, balancing exceptionality and typicality is a critical point in the selection of cases. In this study, the selection of twenty parishes, from the 148 established in the Archbishopric in 1945-75, primarily considered an even geographical and chronological distribution. In addition, the ongoing analysis of these cases brings up issues such as dealing with contingent factors and the consequences of isolating cases. Nevertheless, an individual case can offer a favourable point of view from which to understand a larger context. For example, the present archival research highlights the effect of the specific urban context on the process of parish expansion. In several cases with a denser urban fabric, broader actors, such as diocesan priests, took over the process from local actors, such as parish priests. By focussing on methodological matters, this paper will assess the suitability of a case based approach for deducing the most representative scenarios according to which post-war parishes were realised.status: publishe