Polish Catholic Priests in Canada and Ireland: Migration, Leadership, and the Mobility of Strangers

Abstract

Scholars investigating the relationship between migration and religion have tended to focus on the role of churches and the experiences of lay immigrants when conceptualizing assimilation and transnationalism. While the role of religious leaders has received some attention, scholars have rarely considered clerics a migrant population worth examining. In this study I draw on 30 in-depth interviews with Polish Catholic priests in Canada and Ireland, ethnographic research, and content analysis of Catholic Church documents in order to investigate the experiences and narratives of clerics in terms of their own personal migrations and the role they took on in their own ethnic communities and beyond. I find that leaving Poland enabled the priests to reflect on their on Polish identity, embrace pluralism, and embody the universalism of the Catholic Church that emphasizes shared faith rather than socially constructed categories of race, ethnicity, culture, gender, etcetera. I conceptualize the migrant priest as a Simmelian stranger who interacts with a diverse group of migrants, while at the same time undergoing similar processes of assimilation and transnationalism. A Simmelian lens is useful, I argue, because it draws our attention to the simultaneity of these processes, encourages us to consider the individual experiences of priests rather than focusing solely on church structures or immigrant communities, and gives us the language to talk about different ‘strangers’ at different stages of their migration. Moreover, this project underscores the importance of context and local migration histories. Specifically, while the highly integrated Polish community in Canada meant that priests there had to shed their cultural/ethnic identity so as to fit into other communities, the priests in Ireland, where the Polish community was less settled and perhaps not there for the long term, had to balance maintaining their Polish identity with a readiness to work in other communities. It is my hope that this research illustrates the utility and malleability of classical theory for migration and religion scholars and that the focus on the narratives of priests stimulates more discussion on the experiences of individuals and their “lived religion” which occurs outside of structures in everyday life.