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A parish church (or parochial church) in Christianity is the church which acts as the religious centre of a parish. In many parts of the world, especially in rural areas, the parish church may play a significant role in community activities, often allowing its premises to be used for non-religious community events.
A parish church is a church built to meet the needs of people localised in a geographical area called a parish. The vast majority of Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran church buildings fall into this category. A parish church may also be a basilica, a cathedral, a conventual or collegiate church, or a place of pilgrimage.
A proto-cathedral (lit. ' first cathedral ') is the former cathedral of a transferred see. Despite its size and historic importance, St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, the Holy See of the Catholic Church, is not officially a cathedral. [7] The cathedral church of a metropolitan bishop is called a metropolitan cathedral.
A parish has two constitutive elements: a body of Christian faithful and a parish priest (called the pastor in the United States) to serve their spiritual needs. The parish is a "juridic person" under canon law, and thus recognized as a unit with certain rights and responsibilities. [14] It is not autonomous, however.
Church architecture refers to the architecture of Christian buildings, such as churches, chapels, convents, seminaries, etc.It has evolved over the two thousand years of the Christian religion, partly by innovation and partly by borrowing other architectural styles as well as responding to changing beliefs, practices and local traditions.
A cathedral might be as small as the historic Newport Cathedral, a late medieval parish church declared a cathedral in 1949. That said, size, height, capacity, and architectural prominence are all categories in which most cathedrals excel (at least comparatively within the municipal context of each building).
Parish boundary markers for St Peter's and St Owen's in Hereford. Broadly speaking, the parish is the standard unit in episcopal polity of church administration, although parts of a parish may be subdivided as a chapelry, with a chapel of ease or filial church serving as the local place of worship in cases of difficulty to access the main ...
Religious—who can be either lay people or clergy—are members of religious institutes, societies in which the members take public vows and live a fraternal life in common. [97] This is a form of consecrated life distinct from other forms , such as that of secular institutes . [ 98 ]