Parish Priest And The Wider Parish Team

A parish priest is rarely the only cleric attached to a parish. Larger or busier parishes are commonly assigned one or more assistant or associate priests, called curates in some regions, who share the sacramental and pastoral workload under the parish priest's direction but hold no canonical office over the parish themselves; their assignment and removal rest with the diocesan bishop rather than with the parish priest personally. A parish council and, separately, a finance council of laypeople advise the parish priest on pastoral planning and the parish's temporal affairs, though final responsibility for both remains his under canon law.

The distinction between a parish priest with full canonical office and a priest merely serving a parish, sometimes called a parish administrator, matters practically: an administrator is appointed for a limited or interim period, often while a permanent pastor is being sought or during a vacancy, and holds a narrower set of powers than a properly instituted parish priest, particularly over matters that affect the parish's long term temporal goods. Where several small parishes share too few priests to each have their own, some dioceses now group them under a single parish priest assisted by deacons and trained lay ministers, a pastoral arrangement that has become more common as vocations to the priesthood have declined in many Western countries.