AP
September 9, 2015
The
St. John Paul II Pastoral Center, a Roman Catholic mission, sits at the
rough end of a former strip mall in the shadow of an Arby's. The space,
church leaders say,
was once used as a nightclub and movie theater, a history now hidden by
multiple coats of paint, pews brought in from other congregations, and a
stone-and-wood shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of the
Americas especially revered by Mexicans.
This
mission, in the Archdiocese of Atlanta, was built in a hurry, to serve
the many Latinos who labor at the poultry processing plants that form
the economic backbone
of Gainesville. On a recent Sunday, worshippers spilled onto the
sidewalk in rows two and three deep, and by the end of the weekend,
5,000 people had attended Mass here.
Evangelicals
have set up shop here, too. Georgia is Baptist country and a Bible Belt
stronghold where Catholics had a small footprint until the latest
immigration boom.
The Rev. William Canales, the cherubic, Nicaraguan pastor of the
mission, noted with a twinkle in his eye that a Protestant preacher in
the same mall had recently moved on.
"The
Catholic Church in Gainesville — we are waking up now," Canales said,
on the eve of the first visit to the United States by Pope Francis, the
first Latin American
pontiff.
Francis
will arrive in the U.S. on Sept. 22, carrying the hopes of many for
what he might do for American Catholicism. But few of these goals have
as much urgency for
church leaders as affirming the place of Latinos in the church and
inspiring them to stay in the fold.
About
38 percent of adult Catholics in the U.S. are Latino, according to the
CARA research center at Georgetown University, and they are already the
majority in several
dioceses.
Their
numbers are increasing at the same time a steady stream of American
Catholics overall are leaving the faith. Immigration and the high
birth-rate for Latino Catholics
have more than made up for the losses, helping the 68-million-member
denomination continue to grow.
Yet,
Latinos aren't sticking with the church the way they once did. In 2006,
about eight in 10 Latinos who were raised Catholic stayed in the
tradition as adults. That
figure dropped to seven in 10 last year, according to CARA. Like many
Latin Americans back home, U.S. Latinos are joining Pentecostal
movements, or abandoning organized religion entirely, in numbers
significant enough to raise alarm among U.S. bishops.
"One
of the challenges for Latino immigrants is they continue to show up in
places where there's not a Catholic Church nearby," said Mark Gray, the
Georgetown center's
polling director. "Sometimes, they end up in an evangelical church."
Georgia
is one of the more dramatic examples. The Catholic population here had
been so small historically that the state for decades only had one
diocese — in Savannah.
The Atlanta diocese was created in 1956 with just 24,000 parishioners.
Now,
Peter Faletti, Atlanta archdiocese director of research and planning,
is scrambling for space. He has been renting schools, former movie
theaters and defunct car
dealerships so he can turn them into worship sites. Even so, he says
services fill to capacity within weeks. In Lilburn, an Atlanta suburb,
Our Lady of the Americas draws 10,000 mostly Latino Mass-goers each
weekend and is still growing.
"We have Hispanic Catholics who aren't being served because they can't get in the door," Faletti said.
Non-Hispanic
professionals relocating to the Atlanta area from the North and Midwest
have helped increase Catholic numbers in recent years, but Latinos are
the main drivers
of the boom. From 2000 to 2011, the Latino population doubled in
Georgia, putting the state in the Top 10 for Latino growth in that
period, according to Pew.
Latinos
and whites each make up about 44 percent of the 1 million members of
the Atlanta archdiocese, and Latinos are on track to eventually become
the majority.
"People
are excited about the growth. They recall the days when they were such a
minority presence that they were all but unnoticed," said Archbishop
Wilton Gregory. "The
challenge is that we not only have to provide physical space for the
communities who are expanding, but we also need to develop a spirit of
inclusion."
This is an area where the pope, an Argentine native, will help, church leaders say.
Los
Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, the highest-ranking Latino in the U.S.
church, whose archdiocese, 70 percent Latino, has been at the forefront
of advocating for immigrants,
said the role of Latinos "is a big part of the story of the pope's
visit." In Washington, the pope will canonize 18th-century Spaniard and
Franciscan missionary Junipero Serra, who evangelized the territory that
would become California. Gomez called the canonization
a "historic moment in the life of the Hispanic people" in which the
pope is calling on Americans to reflect on "our legacy as immigrants."
"He
knows the face of the church is changing. He knows the country's
Hispanic Catholic heritage. He knows how important Hispanics are for the
future of the church," Gomez
said.
Atlanta
Catholic leaders say no one in the church anticipated how many
immigrants would make Georgia their home. Jairo Martinez, a Colombian
who leads Hispanic ministry
for the archdiocese, said he was stunned they were choosing the state
over Florida or California.
"Georgia
was not a place for people to come. It was, for us, a little of a
no-man's land," said Martinez, who originally came to Atlanta with
Coca-Cola, where he was an
executive. "The archdiocese was not prepared. There weren't Masses,
services or priests who spoke the language."
The
surge in construction jobs ahead of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta
brought a wave of mostly Mexican immigrants. More came to work in the
carpet-making industry
in Dalton, near the Tennessee line, and in the poultry plants in
Gainesville, northeast of Atlanta.
Canales
noted the pope's exhortation for priests to be close to the
marginalized and be "shepherds living with the smell of the sheep."
Canales joked, "I smell like the
chicken here."
Monica
Oppermann, who works in the archdiocese office for teaching and
evangelizing, said she watched as an apartment complex near her parish
began to fill with Latino
families. A priest enlisted a Spanish-speaking nun, along with
Oppermann, who is from Mexico to help the newcomers.
Martinez
said Latinos would call his office saying they'd been praying the
rosary with other families in someone's house because they couldn't find
a Mass. The archdiocese
started a Spanish-language radio broadcast, now called Nuestra Fe, or
Our Faith, to try to fill the void, and sent representatives abroad to
find Spanish-speaking clergy willing to relocate.
The
archdiocese, like dioceses across the U.S., is still badly in need of
Spanish-speaking and bilingual priests. But one out of every three or
four Masses in the archdiocese
are now in Spanish, Faletti said.
Amid all the changes, Gregory acknowledges some friction over the archdiocese's new diversity.
Church
leaders are trying to bridge the cultural divides, but just like the
situation for previous generations of Catholic immigrants arrived in
America from Italy, Ireland
and elsewhere, relationships between different ethnic groups — within
and outside the church — aren't easily built.
Atlanta's
white Catholics are wealthier and better educated, including about
Catholicism. Some of the Latinos hadn't studied beyond elementary school
before they came
to Georgia, and even though they participated in festivals and services
at their churches back home, weren't thoroughly taught about the
religion.
"In
my homilies, I try to do catechesis — biblical explanations — so people
understand what's going on," said the Rev. Mark Starr of St. Clare of
Assisi Mission in suburban
Acworth, who learned Spanish on an eight-week immersion course in
Mexico but says he's not always confident with the language. "I'll
explain where these Mass parts come from scripturally, or explain the
prayers that the priest prays in silence. I've had people
come up and say, 'I never knew that.'"
For
Mexicans especially, being part of the church means participating in
festivals, such as the annual feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, or being
part of religious movements,
including the spirit-filled Catholic Charismatic Renewal, that aren't
necessarily rooted in a parish, where they could connect with people
from other backgrounds.
And
many of the Latinos in the archdiocese are in the country illegally,
bringing the polarizing debate over immigration policy into parish life
in an immediate way. This
past summer, a pregnant woman from El Salvador who is in the country
illegally sought sanctuary in the Lilburn church from federal
immigration authorities. Atlanta church officials believe it was the
first time anyone had sought sanctuary over immigration
status in their archdiocese. She left the church soon after and is
receiving help from a lawyer, the archdiocese said.
"These
people who are here and may be undocumented are loving Catholic people
and we have to welcome them and make sure people understand the Gospel —
and that the church
has always stood with people who are new arrivals," Gregory said.
Guzman
Carriquiry, vice president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin
America and a friend of the pope's, said Francis on the U.S. trip will
uphold Latinos not as an
"add on" to church life, but at the heart of American Catholicism, in a
message meant to carry throughout the country and beyond.
The
plight of immigrants, and the need for wealthy nations to be generous
and welcoming to newcomers, will be a constant theme throughout Francis'
visit. He is expected
to discuss immigration in his Sept. 24 remarks to a joint meeting of
Congress. Francis will give several talks in Spanish and is scheduled to
meet immigrants in Washington and at an East Harlem Catholic parish in
New York, before heading to Philadelphia.
At
the St. John Paul II Pastoral Center in Gainesville, mission members
are hoping for some local inspiration from the papal visit. They have
taken up an activity more
often associated in the U.S. with evangelicals: going house by house
through the city inviting Latinos and others to Mass. Canales said one
woman was so stunned to see Catholic evangelizers on her doorstep, she
asked several times whether they weren't, in
fact, Protestant.
Parishioner
Jose Vera, who has worked in local poultry plants for about 20 years,
said he especially appreciates Francis' emphasis on warmth and
compassion as a way to
bring fallen away Catholics back to the church.
"We
don't have to be an expert to talk about God. We just go there and give
the biggest smile to the person," Vera said after mid-morning Mass. "We
don't need a big school.
We don't need to learn the whole Bible. You just have to hear what they
have to say."
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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