Reconquering the city. Pastoral agency and spatial impact of workers' parishes in Belgium, 1884-1914.

In the three decades before World War I the number of Catholic parishes in Belgium grew remarkably. More or less a third of the new ones were situated in (sub)urban working-class neighborhoods. This remarkable phenomenon indicates deeper transformations at work. By founding these so-called 'workers' parishes', the Church tried to counteract the secularization of the fast-growing working class and to reassert its claim on the urban territory. Using newly available source materials and studying a balanced set of case-studies across four dioceses, our project will foster an in-depth understanding of the changes in parish life and socio-pastoral care and evaluate their impact on community identities and the everyday experiences of religion. The foundation of a parish and the building of its infrastructure, the church in particular, was a wide-ranging undertaking, requiring a lot of effort and vast resources. We will study the administrative and financial governance of the parishes in question, including the interactions with public authorities and other socio-political actors. Innovatively, we will connect all this to an evaluation of their material and spatial impact. Our transdisciplinary approach interconnects expertise from Church, architectural and socio-political history. By resolutely applying a bottom-up perspective, this project aligns itself with the growing scholarly interest in the construction of urban collective identities around a sense of religious belonging.