THE PARISH AS A PLACE OF MEETING OF AND COOPERATION BETWEEN BELIEVERS' ASSOCIATIONS, CHURCH MOVEMENTS, AND PARISH GROUPS

Starting with the terms parish, believers' associations, Church movements, and parish groups, the article discusses possibilities and challenges, when it comes to their mutual cooperation on the parish level. The parish appears as an important place of meeting and affirmation of these forms of ecclesiality that, taken together, can introduce new vitality into the parish pastoral care. Pastoral activity is realised fully in the parish communion: in the proclamation, testimony, celebration, and service. Believers' associations and Church movements, as well as various parish groups, can introduce new enthusiasm in evangelisation into sometimes ossified parish structures whose work, sometimes and in some places, is reduced to providing religious services, bureaucratic management of believers and parish property, and mindless performance of rituals. The desire of Catholic believers to share and testify their faith has found a new expression precisely in contemporary believers' associations and Church movements. This new expression should not, however, disregard the traditional and classical rootedness in the parish community as a fundamental, but not the only, unit of living out one's faith. Apart from that, the life of the contemporary parish community is progressively marked by various and numerous parish groups, lively circles of believers and communities that find their full meaning only when rooted in the parish. Thus, the parish can and should be a place of meeting and cooperation of all forms of participation in the Church life and this meeting ought to be marked by getting to know each other, respecting and affirming specific charismas, as well as by readiness to dialogue and cooperate.