Polish Catholic Priests in Canada and Ireland: Migration, Leadership, and the Mobility of Strangers
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".