RBWords - Volume 24 - Number 4: April 2011
Something to Think About
My travels in the ministry of itinerant preaching of parish missions and retreats have brought me face to face in a new way with a reality that I have read about and encountered occasionally over the past twenty years – the growing Hispanic presence in the Catholic Church in America. I have read the documents by the American bishops (National Pastoral Plan for Hispanic Ministry [1987] and Encuentro and Mission [2002]) which are designed to provide some vision in responding to this new reality, but there’s nothing like meeting the reality in person.
In 1979, I was director of the Catholic student center at the University of Arizona. In the summer of that year I decided I should begin to learn Spanish. I took a conversational course and began a Mass in Spanish at the Newman Center. I moved shortly after that to Memphis, TN, when the Southern Dominican Province came into being (December 1979) and at the time I was one of two priests in the Diocese of Memphis who spoke Spanish! There was one Mass in Spanish offered each month in the entire diocese. I was the celebrant and chaplain to the Hispanic Community in addition to other major duties. Later on I became pastor of an inner city majority Hispanic parish in San Antonio. All of this gradually increased my awareness of the demographic changes occurring in the church. More recently, however, I have experienced this in a personal way in the parish missions that I preach. Although I still conduct the missions in English, I preach at the weekend Spanish Masses as well as the English ones. I hear confessions in both languages. At one parish in California, there were three Spanish Masses out of eight (one in Vietnamese) on the weekend schedule. The combined total of attendance at those three Masses was more than 3,000 persons! I have witnessed similar situations at other parishes.
A recent study of demographics in the American Catholic Church sponsored by the Pew Foundation has been widely noted for statistics that show a steady erosion of Anglo numbers and a vast increase of Latino numbers of parishioners. If the number of former “Anglo” Catholics was turned into a single church, it would outnumber any of the major Protestant denominations. Thus the continued large numbers of Catholic membership can be accounted for by the great increase of Latino membership. The challenge is more than finding enough priests who can speak Spanish. There is a huge cultural challenge because of the tremendous cultural diversity in Latino populations. Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexicans, Dominicans, Colombians, Central Americans – the Spanish and customs are as diverse as the nationalities. The pastoral challenges are clearly delineated in the document “Encuentro and Mission” by the bishops and by a sociological survey that is available on the USCCB website. The reality is far greater than my brief reflections here, but it is truly SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT.
It Has Been Said
[T]he paradox of prayer is that it asks for a serious effort while it can only be received as a gift. We cannot plan, organize or manipulate God, but without a careful discipline, we cannot receive him either. This paradox of prayer forces us to look beyond the limits of our mortal existence. To the degree that we have been able to dispel our illusion of immortality and have come to the full realization of our fragile mortal condition, we can reach out in freedom to the creator and re-creator of life and respond to his gifts with gratitude.
From: REACHING OUT – The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life by Henri J. M. Nouwen