National Study of Catholic Parishes with Hispanic Ministry

Recently, Boston College (in collaboration with the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate) has published a significant study on Hispanic Ministry in American Catholic parishes. One can read the summary report of its findings at http://www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/schools/stm/pdf/2014/BC-NatlStudyParishesHM-Rep1-201405.pdf. It is well worth reading in full!


Of course, any study of parishes with Hispanic Ministry is ultimately a look at the present and future of the Church in the U.S. As the report itself acknowledges right away: "What we learn about parishes with Hispanic ministry today gives us a sense of what Catholic life in the United States already is in many places where Catholicism is growing vibrantly - of course, not without challenges. Considering current demographic trends and the steady growth and influence of Hispanic Catholicism, these communities also provide us with a glimpse of what U.S. Catholicism will be like in vast regions of the country - at least during the first half of the twenty-first century."

Indeed, I think one of the most amazing things about post-conciliar Catholicism in the U.S.  has been the inability or unwillingness in some quarters  to recognize the full implications of this simple, yet so significant demographic fact!

The second thing that is noteworthy, of course, about the study is that it is about parishes. As the documents itself declares: "Parishes matter. Parishes continue to be privileged places where most active Catholics learn, live, and celebrate their faith."  That too should be obvious! For the most part, that has been the story of the Catholic Church in the U.S. for most of its history. It remains the case now and likely will be for the foreseeable future. There ought to be no more important project for those concerned with the evangelization of American society than the strengthening and supporting of American Catholic parish life.

Where this basic parochial reality and the current Hispanic American reality intersect so significantly is in the widespread experience that, for the most part at least, the greatest vitality in American Catholic life is to be found in parishes with Hispanic ministry.

Thus, for example, the study notes that weekend Mass attendance in parishes with Hispanic ministry "is about 22 percent higher than the average for all parishes nationally," with a median weekend Mass attendance in such parishes of 1110  compared to 750 for attendance in parishes overall.

In my experience, of particular importance in contributing to the vitality of Catholic life in such parishes is the presence and role of apostolic movements and of Hispanic permanent deacons, both of which receive appropriate attention in this report.

The study also notes that almost 40% of adult American Catholics self-identify as Hispanic, and that 93% of under-18 Hispanics are American born. Hence the consequential conclusion: "Much of the Catholic experience in the country during the next few decades will be significantly shaped by how the Church reaches out to this last group and whether young Hispanic in this age bracket, at least those growing up in Catholic households, decide to self-identify as Catholic."  In my limited experience, it sees to me that much pastoral effort has gone into meeting the many immediate needs of immigrant populations and that the Church has responded creditably, even if not quite sufficiently, to the task of serving many of the Spanish-speaking adults in our midst. My guess is that there is much more to be done, however, to meet the distinctive pastoral needs of younger, American-born, English-speaking Hispanic populations, who experience some of the same challenges to faith that their non-Hispanic peers are also experiencing.

Given the youthfulness of the Hispanic Catholic community in the United States, the study highlights "a disquieting gap between parishes with large Hispanic populations and Catholic schools." Catholic schools may not provide all the answers to the Church's many and varied challenges, but it is hard to imagine a seriously successful transmission of an informed, active, and committed Catholic faith to the next generation without a strong network of Catholic schools. Nor, I think, should we ever underestimate the energy a vibrant parish school brings to the ongoing daily life of a parish.

In conclusion, the study identifies 12 areas requiring immediate attention. Two which I have already highlighted are a need for pastoral outreach to American-born Hispanic youth and the widening distance between Hispanic parishes and Catholic schools. Regarding the former, the study concludes: "Lack of appropriate investment in ministry with this population at a time when most young Catholics in the country are Hispanic is self-defeating." Regarding the latter, the study warns such a gap "may undermine the development of a 'Catholic school culture' among Hispanic Catholics."

Among the other areas identified as calling for immediate attention, I would highlight two obvious and very problematic ones. The first is the demographic fact that in the near future "thousands of culturally competent pastoral leaders" will be reaching retirement age. I don't see any way around this (to me) most obvious point that dioceses and religious communities that are serious about the future of the Church in the United States must ensure that present and future cohorts of new priests, deacons, and lay ecclesial ministers are adequately prepared to meet this challenge.

The second is the problematic financial sustainability of so many Hispanic parish communities. We should never make money the most important consideration in pastoral planning. But neither can we ignore the consequences of a lack of it!

 

Bleak Prospects

In his column in today's NY times, "The Streamlined Life," David Brooks looks at recent research comparing incoming college freshmen with those in previous generations. One of the first things Brooks notes is that American high school seems to be getting easier. That is not just a matter of serious grade inflation but problematic trends such as fewer hours spent doing homework we as a society we would do well to delve into this further. Certainly high school laxity and the overall decline in American literacy and education that seem connected with it ought to be a major concern - and not just for reasons of international economic competitiveness.

 

But, back to Brooks' main concern, which is how the American college context has changed - not gotten easier in the sense high school has, but definitely worsened in that college admissions are more competitive in a context in which students are increasingly anxious about their eventual job prospects.

 

Brooks recalls ho comparatively "benign" the 1950s and 1960s labor market was in comparison with today's increasingly anxiety-ridden environment. He notes the resulting change in college students' values: "In 1966, only 42 percent of freshmen said that being well-off financially was an essential or very important life goal. By 2005, 75 percent of students said being well-off financially was essential or very important. Affluence, once a middling value, is now tied as students' top life goal."

 

As a member of that 60s generation myself , my take on that is that it reflects the extent to which my generation could largely assume an affluent future, and so felt more free to focus on other goals. Today's students don't seem to feel they have that kind of luxury.

 

Changed circumstances change values. I recall, for example, how marrying one's  equals was, in better times, an absolute priority among German and other continental royalty. But in the economically distressed aftermath of World War II, Princess Cecilie von Preussen (1917-1975), grand-daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II, married an American from Amarlillo, TX, who told her father, the former Crown Prince, that while not a rich man he "could feed her."  

 

It is not surprising that in today's more stressful circumstances concern about one's economic future occupies a more central place in people's calculations than it did in the 1960s when the future seemed so much more secure. But what should be more worrisome, whenever and however that happens, is the collateral moral damage such a state of affairs can create. For example, "today's students score about 40 percent lower in measures of empathy than students did 30 years ago."

 

Brooks concludes that today's youth seem to be "trying to armor up" for living in a world which we have made harder for them than it was for us. He writes "people clearly feel besieged. There is the perception that life is harder. Certainly their parents think it is harder. The result is that you get a group hardened for battle, more focused on the hard utilitarian things and less focused on spiritual or philosophic things; feeling emotionally vulnerable, but also filled with resume assertiveness."

Settling into the Dusk?

The latest issue of The Economist features an eagle perched on a globe and the headline question: What Would America Fight for? The question haunting its allies. Recent events in Ukraine and earlier the US's failure last Fall to use force against Syria after having in effect threatened to do so, have heightened doubts about America's international resolve and reliability. That American policies seem to be reflecting an increasing isolationism among American voters itself adds to the discomfort of this baby-boomer who was raised and came of age in an internationalist era, where American power in the world was not just a fact but also understood as a political and moral responsibility.

Of course, there have always been isolationist tendencies in American society, although they seem stronger now than at any time in many decades. What is particularly troubling is how such sentiments seem to resonate with a growing loss of confidence not just in American power but in America itself, in what, for lack of better words, we commonly call the "American dream." Thus political strategist Doug Sosnik has located "the core of Americans' anger and alienation" in their "belief that the American dream is no longer attainable." This change in belief is rooted in a historically startling reality. "For the first time in our country's history," Sosnik writes, "there is more social mobility in Europe than in the United States." As the grandson of immigrants and as someone who grew up in the golden age of middle class progress that spanned the quarter-century after World War II, I find that an amazing revelation, a real challenge to wrap one's head around.

Frank Bruni quoted Sosnik in his column in yesterday's New York Times, revealingly titled "America the Shrunken." It is not just that Americans increasingly fear their children will live in a less prosperous society with fewer opportunities than their parents, it is how our aspirations have correspondingly atrophied. As Bruni expresses it, the 2014 edition of the American dream seems to have become: "Squirrel away nuts for a leaner tomorrow. The worst is yet to come, so insure yourself against it if you're among the lucky few who can."

It reminds me somewhat of a dystopian vision that seemed briefly to have some traction back in the 1970s of an America in which the rich retreat to their protected enclaves, while the rest of society decays - which is, in fact, not all that different from what is actually  happening, except that the rich now are way, way richer than anyone in the 1970s might have anticipated.

But it is not just the material impoverishment of our society that is so problematic for both American and the world. It is most critically the loss, in Bruni's words, of "the optimism that was always the lifeblood if this luminous experiment, the ambition that has been its foundation, the swagger that made us so envied and emulated and reviled."

The British Empire likewise once embodied an optimism and ambition that made it also envied and emulated and, yes also, reviled. But when the sun set on the British empire in the wake of World War II, there was some comfort that its place as maintainer of order in the world was being taken by a very optimistic and ambitious post-war United States. Now, however, as America's sense of itself and of its responsibilities in the world seems to shrink, what is there to replace it? From Africa to the Middle East to Ukraine to the Pacific, we are witnessing the feeble structures of international order becoming even more enfeebled, with the result that everywhere chaos - military, political, economic, and moral - seems increasingly on the rise.

It may well be that the 1980s myth of "morning in America" was a fraud that distracted us from facing up to the challenges of a changing world. But, as Bruni observes, "we're no better served by settling into the dusk."

In the Breaking of Bread

When something truly terrible happens, one response is to try to get away – away from the people, the places, the memories we might otherwise have cherished but which have now become painful. At the same time, we are often quite eager to talk about our troubles. So another response is to want to talk about it, to want others to know just how badly it hurts.

 

That seems to be what the two disciples did in today’s gospel [ Luke 24:13-35]. They had followed Jesus all the way to Jerusalem, where the most terrible thing had happened. We all know what that’s like. We hope for something, work hard to get it. Then something goes wrong, and the path is blocked - by accident, or illness, or injustice. So it is no surprise that the two disciples decided to get out of Jerusalem as fast as they could – clearing out of town on Sunday, the day after the Sabbath. Maybe they had to get back to work! After all the excitement they had had and the enthusiasm they had felt as followers of Jesus, what a let-down it must have been to return to their regular, ordinary work!

 

But, however eager they were to get away, Jesus’ memory was still very much with them, and they couldn’t help talking about him to the stranger who had suddenly joined them. And the stranger let them talk. He listened to their disappointment and disillusionment as they told of the dream that had lifted them up – only to let them down. But then the stranger didn’t just listen. He also had an answer.

 

Of course, the disciples did not realize who the stranger was. Obviously they were not expecting to see Jesus. He was dead, after all. And dead with him were all their hopes for Israel’s future. In fact, Jesus would be the one to redeem Israel. But, before they could recognize him, they had to relearn what it meant to be the one to redeem Israel, to be the Messiah. And who better to teach them than this stranger? Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them what referred to him in all the Scriptures.

 

We have a short version of what Jesus’ homily might have sounded like in Peter’s Pentecost sermon, part of which we just heard [Acts 2:14, 22-33]. What Jesus did on the road had quickly become the Church’s standard way of reading the Old Testament, understanding the Old Testament through the lens of the Risen Christ and learning to recognize Christ through the lens of the Old Testament.

 

In re-interpreting the familiar scriptures, Jesus was refashioning an image that of course, they already had – because, rather than see things as they are, usually we see things as we are. The disciples had seen Jesus through their existing image of a messiah. Now they had lost both him and that image. Without quite comprehending it, they had reached one of those crises in life when everything seems to break down and a change is required. Without yet recognizing him, they were getting him back. And he was giving them a new image to hold onto and have hope in.

 

And so they urged him to stay. They were beginning to get back their lost hope and didn’t want to lose it again in the night’s darkness. Once inside, the stranger revealed himself with a familiar gesture, which has since become the Church’s trademark. But this time they didn’t lose hope when he disappeared. He wasn’t gone. The darkness was. He had been with them on the road, a companion in their grief. He had been with them in his homily on the scriptures. And he was with them now for keeps in the breaking of bread. So now they couldn’t wait to get back to Jerusalem, that place of pain they had earlier been so eager to leave.

 

And there they heard from the others, “The Lord has truly been raised and has appeared to Simon.” Simon Peter, their leader, would proclaim Christ’s resurrection for the rest of his life. And so would these two ordinary disciples, ordinary people like us.

 

And how is the Risen Lord here today for ordinary people like us? The same way he was then with them – in the world we live in, in the people around us in whom we too fail to recognize Christ (and whom we may in fact fail to recognize at all). Our preoccupation with ourselves and our problems may hinder us from recognizing him. Still, he walks with us in our disappointments, hears and feels our frustrations, and keeps stride with us as we struggle to hope. He explains himself in the scriptures and stays with us in the breaking of bread, where we finally and fully recognize his Real Presence. And then he sends us, filled with the bread of his body, to announce to the world - in union with Peter and the rest of the Church - that our hope is not just a wish and is more than merely a memory, and that in spite of everything, The Lord has truly been raised – and lives with us still.

 

Homily for the 3^rd Sunday of Easter, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, May 4, 2014.

Still Talking about Saints

The calendar may have turned another page to a new month today, but much of the media remains still stuck in what a distinguished student of saint-making Kenneth Woodward calls a "misleading metaphor." (See "The Making of a Misleading Metaphor: No 'big Tent' in Recognizing Popes as Saints" http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/04/the-making-of-a-misleading-metaphor). Woodward is the author of Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn't, and Why (1990).

On the whole I agree with Woodward's "misleading metaphor" analysis, although I wonder whether he too may inadvertently risk succumbing to that "misleading metaphor" when he refers to Pope Saint John Paul II's joint beatification of Pope Pius IX and Pope John XXIII in 2000 as "an extremely odd coupling of a liberal and a reactionary pope." Aside from the stereotyping of past popes in contemporary political categories, what is also ignored is the fact that Pope Saint John XXIII himself had hoped to be able to beatify Pope Pius IX at the close of the Second Vatican Council.

That said, Woodward's more important point, which I think cannot be repeated too often, is that the focus on the Church as being divided between conservatives and liberals "is largely the fixation of Catholic partisans in North America and parts of Western Europe, where only a minority of the world's Catholics now live." As the first Pope from Latin America, Pope Francis represents, reflects, and articulates the concerns of a much larger Catholic population. I see that reflected, for example, in the Holy Father's stated concerns about increasing economic inequality - not just his famous recent tweet, but his more formal statements in Evangelii Gaudium and elsewhere.

The joint canonization was certainly an important moment in the life of the contemporary Church, and it is, I think, legitimate to read it as a somewhat official interpretation of the charisms and contributions on Saints John XXIII and John Paul II - an interpretation which rightly recognizes both pope-saints as being basically on the same page on earth even as they are now in the same place in heaven.

Meanwhile, I look forward to celebrating the new saints' feast days when they come around in October. Until then, enough said on the subject!