Thread: Catholic Crossroads

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/14756487.htm%3E

Catholic Crossroads : LATINOS
A tenuous grasp Huge numbers of mostly Catholic Latino migrants flow to this region. The church faces many obstacles in keeping them.
By David O'Reilly
Inquirer Staff Writer

In fast-developing Chester County, there is a growing Catholic presence that is plain to see, and another that is not.

One is manifest in the 30 parish churches and 14 parochial schools set among sprawling fields of subdivision homes. They brim with 153,000 suburban church members, a 60 percent increase since 1990.

The beating heart of the other is tucked into an Avondale strip mall, in basement rooms lush with polychrome crucifixes and images of the Virgin Mary. Behind a travel agency and a tanning salon, it is nearly invisible from Route 41. But if you are a Latino immigrant in need of food, clothing and shelter, you soon find your way to La Misión Santa María, Madre de Dios - and into the gravity field of the American Catholic Church.

The Philadelphia Archdiocese opened this social-services outpost in 1992, when it counted 2,000 Hispanic Catholics in the county's south end, the mushroom capital of the world. Most were Puerto Rican men who labored in the dank sheds while their families waited 1,200 miles away.

By 2004, the number had more than quadrupled to 9,500. Nearly all were Mexican and Mexican American, with many young couples, and many babies. "We must be well past 10,000 by now," said Msgr. Francis Depman, the director. "Last year, we had 348 baptisms."

Those drawn to the mission are a small portion of the five-county archdiocese's Hispanic Catholic population, estimated at 150,000 but possibly as large as 190,000.

They are an even tinier fraction of the 30 million buoying the rolls of the U.S. church.

Since 1970, Latinos have accounted for a remarkable 90 percent of the church's growth nationwide. They already make up 42 percent of the Catholic population in this country, and if their immigration and birthrates stay at current levels, they will be the majority by midcentury.

The nation's bishops are protesting congressional efforts to turn the immigrant tide. But at the same time, they acknowledge that their church is generally ill prepared to meet its full force.

Often poor, conversant only in Spanish, and - in the case of as many as nine million - undocumented, Latino Catholics can be hard to reach, and harder still to hold.

Rare is a place as resourceful as La Misión Santa María, one of a kind in the archdiocese.

Every day, between 50 and 100 people come to it for the basics of survival, as well as legal and medical assistance and translation services.

On a spring weekday, a muscled young Mexican stood nervously with his wife and toddler son at the desk of Janette Gaytan, the social services director.

"Sólo su nombre está bien," she assured them. "Just your first name is OK."

Reluctantly he answered, "Roberto." His wife was Soledad, their 3-year-old child Domingo.

"Estamos buscando un lugar para vivir," he said. "We are looking for a place to live."

"Drive around and look for 'for rent' signs," Gaytan told them in Spanish, "and write down the phone numbers. Then come back and I will make the calls for you."

They disappeared through the glass doors, with no mention having been made of religion, no pressure applied to sign up.

"We don't want them to think they have to go to church for us to help them," Gaytan said. "But they will be back."

A wave of change

Roberto and Soledad have far more influence than they might imagine.

While nearly half of Latinos in the United States are not fluent enough to follow an English-language Mass, they are more likely to shape the future of the American Catholic Church than all its other ethnic groups - including those that have led it during the last 200 years.

This epic shift is grist for scholars' speculation. There are those who foresee Latin religious expression eventually defining the U.S. church, and those who predict that generations of immigrant offspring will be homogenized, as the Irish, Poles and Italians were a century ago. Others envision the evolution of two separate, culturally distinct churches.

R. Stephen Warner, an authority on religious communities and immigration, sees them slowly meeting partway.

Latinos are "Americanizing, and at the same time, I think, the church is moving toward them," said Warner, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The result will be "a little less puritanism, a little more Pentecostalism, and a lot more exuberance."

Where Latino concentrations are heaviest, particularly in the South and Southwest, Catholic worship and parish life already have changed. One of the most vivid public signs has been the growing popularity of the outdoor passion play "Via Crucis." Hispanic men writhe on crosses on Good Friday, as three did in April in front of the San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas.

Inside Latino-influenced churches, things also are vastly - if not quite so graphically - different.

Before coming to the Camden Diocese in 2004, Bishop Joseph Galante spent 16 years in three Texas dioceses. There he found a style of worship "which is totally participated in, with music and singing and gestures."

"It doesn't fit the American ideal," he said, but "it's very strong, very powerful, very good, very needed."

In regions where immigrant populations are smaller or newer, the impending "de-Europeanization" of the church, as Warner terms it, is not yet so obvious.

In Southeastern Pennsylvania and South Jersey, Latinos tend to be isolated in rural enclaves, or in the suburbs' urbanized downtowns, such as Norristown in Montgomery County and Bridgeton in Cumberland County. In Philadelphia and Camden, many have settled in the poorest neighborhoods - the ones hit hard by parish closings.

Hispanic Catholics are far less likely to attend Mass than people in any other major ethnic group, according to a 2001 study in Philadelphia by Ram Cnaan, a professor of social work at the University of Pennsylvania.

Poverty. Weekend jobs. Large families. The language barrier. Cultural traditions of at-home worship. Undocumented status. All contribute to making the majority "Catholic by identity, not by activity," Cnaan said.

Consider 19-year-old Miguel and his uncle Manuel, landscape laborers who were in the crowd at an immigration rally this spring in LOVE Park. Miguel had covered himself shoulder-to-ankle in a banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico.

Were they churchgoers?

"We go in Mexico," replied Manuel, who, along with his nephew, declined to give their last names. "Here, we don't have time."

Unless they speak fluent English, those who do attend Mass typically worship apart from Anglo, Asian and African American Catholics.

"I've been in parishes where someone is trying to get the Hispanics out of the parking lot so a [non-Latino] group can come in" for Mass, said Galante, whose 488,000-member Camden Diocese includes an estimated 120,000 Latinos.

The Latino presence also is masked by the ethnicity of the clergy - almost entirely European American. Nationwide, only 4 percent of priests and 7 percent of bishops are Hispanic, and most of them are posted where the immigrant communities are largest.

"Imagine if 40 percent of [clerics] were Latino. Then you'd see it," said Gaston Espinosa, assistant professor of religious studies at Claremont McKenna College near Los Angeles and an authority on trends in Hispanic spirituality.

Were that the case, the church would not now be quite so "overwhelmed" - a word that recurs often when Catholic leaders speak of a challenge that seems to grow by the day.

"It's been like a six-foot wave pouring over a two-foot wall," said Sister Kathleen Brown, director of Hispanic ministries for the Camden Diocese. "We've only been able to harvest some of the fish."

The Philadelphia Archdiocese also is not equipped for the Latino "explosion," said Msgr. Hugh Shields, whose title, vicar for Hispanic Catholics, was created only last fall.

Of about 1,000 active priests in the archdiocese, only 38 speak Spanish, and just 10 of those are ethnically Latino.

"We're discovering we're not linguistically or culturally prepared," Shields said.

"The other day I said to the rector of [St. Charles Borromeo] seminary, 'So you're going to make Spanish a requirement for graduation, right?' " he recalled with a laugh.

In the Los Angeles Archdiocese, new priests must speak Spanish. There is no such plan here, "but they're starting to get it," said Shields, who is talking to seminary officials about creating a task force to study Hispanics' pastoral needs.

In his office, someone has stuck a small Irish flag atop a wall of Latin American national flags, a wry nod to Shields' own immigrant roots in the old sod. But he was a missionary for eight years in Bolivia and Peru, and pastor for two years in a predominantly Hispanic parish, Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in the city's Kensington section. He knows better than most that the church's old ways are a poor fit.

In the Philadelphia Archdiocese, as in Camden, an estimated two-thirds of Latino Catholics are not registered with any parish, in part because it was not the custom back home.

Neither diocese has a detailed strategy for reaching them. But leaders say the answer, especially in urban neighborhoods, is obvious: street-level evangelization - a concept not in the standard American Catholic repertoire.

"We used to be an 'on-call' church," Shields said. "People would knock on the rectory door or go to Mass, and we'd be there. Now we're the ones who have to knock on doors."

But when he launched a door-to-door evangelization campaign in Visitation parish last summer, some longtime members were aghast.

"They said, 'This is not the Catholic way,' " Shields recalled. "I said, 'It is now.' "

He organized 26 two-person teams to visit 1,000 homes. They invited the 300 or so who answered the door to attend services, and left behind brochures in Spanish, English and Vietnamese on the others' doorknobs.

"We're trying to say to them, 'This is your church,' " Shields said. "We're not inviting you to be North American Catholics. We want you to help us re-create the church."

'We will hear tongues'

Sunday Mass is supposed to follow a sequence prescribed by the Vatican and detailed down to the color of the altar cloths (white).

There, Latino exuberance confines itself to hugging, hand-holding, and swaying to music.

Weekday prayer services are another matter.

It was a Wednesday night at La Milagrosa, a Spring Garden Street mission founded in 1912 by Vincentian priests to minister to Spanish sailors. In a "baptism in the spirit," Deacon Victor Seda laid on hands and anointed 30 adults who were renewing their commitment to the faith.

"Hopefully, we will hear tongues," Seda said before the service began.

Indeed, in no time, most of the assembled had their eyes shut and their hands in the air, calling out in random, wordless syllables.

Seda moved among them with a flask of holy oil, anointing foreheads with the sign of the cross. Many fell backward into the arms of others, who laid them out in the pews. One man sat virtually motionless for about 15 minutes with his arms outstretched, eyes closed and tears streaming down his cheeks.

The service closed with dancing in the aisles.

Within Catholic confines, there are few places like La Milagrosa to offer fervid worship.

Outside those circles, though, there is Protestant fundamentalism.

As in Latin America, it is proving to be a powerful competitor for Hispanic souls.

A spate of studies has shown that about 75 percent of Latinos are Catholic when they enter the United States. By the third generation, the figure has dipped below 60 percent. About half of those who leave Catholicism join Protestant Pentecostal or evangelical churches.

Though often small and poor, those congregations are also "energized and rigorous," said Cnaan, the Penn sociologist. "Those looking for meaningful religious experience are going to move into" them.

As did Confesora Vazquez, baptized Catholic in St. Bonaventure parish in Kensington in 1969.

It was her mother, Fermina, who first visited a Latino Pentecostal church on North Fifth Street in 1991. Soon, she was taking Confesora's 5-year-old son, George, to Sinai Assembly of God.

The boy came home with stories of people at Grandma's church calling out prayers, shaking tambourines, and trembling with excitement.

"He said, 'Mom, you have to come!' " Confesora, 36, recalled. "I said OK."

Within weeks she stepped forward and "accepted the Lord as my personal savior."

"I feel better in the way we pray up here," she explained, standing on the crowded sidewalk outside Sinai on a Sunday morning. "I feel the Holy Spirit inside of me."

Three generations of the Vazquez family had left the Catholic Church.

Arguing assimilation

Juan Bernal can't imagine leaving.

A stocky man of 49 with a white mustache, he stopped by La Misión Santa María one recent day in the hope of finding a bed. He, his wife and their five children were moving to another apartment, he explained through a translator.

After 18 years in the United States, he still works on a Chester County mushroom farm. And he still speaks almost no English.

Bernal didn't find a bed, but for 90 minutes a mission worker helped him change his telephone and utility accounts.

The linguistic divide helps keep many of the mission's 10,000 Latinos in its orbit - and on the farthest edges of mainstream church life.

"They're all welcome to join the parishes in Kennett Square and Oxford" and other nearby towns, said Msgr. Depman, the director. But the predominantly Anglo congregations and clergy "can be intimidating," and so most do not join.

It is the stuff of an intense debate nationwide.

"It's very important that young priests learn Spanish," said George Weigel, a conservative Catholic author. "And the first thing they should learn to say, in impeccable Spanish, is 'Learn English.' "

Latinos will remain a segregated subculture within the church "if the leadership decides foolishly to treat this [immigrant] wave as if it were unlike any other," he said. "The sensible approach is not to be paternalistic, to say, 'Oh, the nice little brown guys can't do what the white boys did and learn English.' There has to be a concerted effort by the church to be a mainstreaming agency. It's good for the church, and good for the country."

It may be too much to ask too quickly, said Camden's Bishop Galante.

For "Latinos who come to work [in the United States] and have families back in Mexico, that assimilation is far slower because they really have one foot in both countries...," he said. "I don't think they see themselves as people who are settled in America."

Galante's own grandparents were Italian immigrants and spoke no English. Now, he said, there is little patience for assimilation.

"A lot of people today expect the first generation of immigrants to be like the third...," he said. "It's like, 'If they're going to come to this country, they're going to have to speak English.' "

Each weekend, Depman rides the circuit of five parishes that overlay La Misión Santa María's territory and whose pastors do not speak fluent Spanish. Though few Latinos are registered members, about 1,500 of the mission's clients gather in the churches for Depman's Spanish-language Masses. He usually says three on Saturday evenings and several more on Sundays.

In March, help arrived in the person of the Rev. Andres Garcia Arambula, on a one-year chaplaincy visa from Mexico.

On a recent Sunday, Garcia said Mass at St. Mary's Chapel, a 19th-century brick church in West Grove. It is part of - yet culturally segregated from - the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary parish, whose modern campus sits on a hill two miles away.

St. Mary's was standing room only, with children making up about a third of the crowd.

Depman spent half an hour shaking hands with every adult, calling youngsters by name, blessing infants, and, along the way, sprinkling holy water on new crucifixes and rosaries.

After a service filled with the sounds of guitars and drums, the children lined up at the communion rail to be blessed. Depman and Garcia moved among them, clutching each child's head and bending close.

"Jesús te ama siempre," they whispered.

"Jesus loves you always."

Since 1970, Latinos have accounted for a remarkable 90 percent of the church's growth nationwide. They already make up 42 percent of the Catholic population in this country, and if their immigration and birthrates stay at current levels, they will be the majority by midcentury.

I guess that explains why the Catholic Church has become so intense in its push for illegal immigrant amnesty!