There isn’t much that distinguishes the gray, blocky church in a working-class Northwest Side neighborhood from hundreds of other Catholic sanctuaries in Chicago.
Like other congregations, it serves a polyglot mix of the devout, from Italian-Americans to Irish-Americans, from Polish-Americans to Hispanics–a typically spicy cross-section in the religious landscape of a city that has just received its first new archbishop in 15 years.
But what happened on Easter at St. John Bosco Catholic Church was anything but ordinary. And it says a lot about a sea change that is rocking the Archdiocese of Chicago and, by extension, the Catholic Church nationwide.
The sermon erupted into an ugly shouting match. A group of Hispanic parishioners charged the pulpit and complained bitterly that their spiritual needs were not being met. They protested that a Hispanic deacon had been unjustly removed. They charged that the church’s heat had been turned down during Spanish masses. And those masses have since been canceled.
“We want equality,” explained Ana Cervantes, 45, who has attended mass at St. John Bosco for the past three years. “We just want the same rights they give white Americans.”
Just as Madison Avenue has discovered the growing buying power of the nation’s 22 million Hispanics, and just as politicians have begun tapping into the burgeoning Hispanic vote, the U.S. Catholic Church is struggling to keep abreast of the spiritual and cultural repercussions of an exploding Hispanic presence in its ranks.
In Chicago, the trend already is well advanced: nearly a third of the 2.3 million self-declared Catholics in the diocese are Hispanic, and that percentage is swelling fast. Nationally, the proportion of Hispanic Catholicsis estimated to reach between 30 and 40 percent.
Yet numbers alone hide the complex swirl of emotions and anxieties churned up by the Hispanicization of the United States’ largest organized church.
Though Catholic leaders are jubilant about the new energy and vitality Hispanics are bringing through their church doors, some older urban parishes–especially those feeling the brunt of recent waves of immigration, like St. John Bosco–are proving resistant to, or unsettled by, a brand of Latin spirituality that is more mystical and earthy than many white congregations are used to.
Hispanics, meanwhile, murmur that the church hierarchy–though it is making strides to be inclusive–remains primarily in the hands of white leaders. And some complain that the church lags far behind the curve when it comes to meeting the special needs of its expanding, Spanish-speaking flock.
“The sense of alienation is definitely the fault of both sides,” said Stephen Holler, a professor at Thomas More College in Crestview Hills, Ky., who specializes in Hispanic Catholicism. “You’ve got to remember, few other institutions in the world are as diverse as the Catholic Church. Hispanics say they’re feeling neglected, but the hierarchy says it has its hands full. In (extreme) cases, people worry about two different Catholic Churches evolving out of this split.”
Archbishop Francis George, Chicago’s newly appointed prelate, seemed to anticipate those concerns when he delivered parts of his first news conference in Spanish–an act of spiritual bridge-building that drew cheers from some quarters of the city’s Hispanic community. The track record he brings from his diocese in Yakima, Wash., also gives some local Hispanic leaders cause for hope; he worked closely with the Mexican immigrant community, many of them low-paid laborers in Washington’s apple orchards and vineyards.
“They were half the church,” George said of his Yakima diocese in an interview last week. “Obviously you’re going to minister to them, and you’d better know where they’re coming from.”
Yet knowing where they are coming from, local church leaders say, is the daunting challenge that George will face in the cultural kaleidoscope that is Chicago. Accommodating that diversity has never been an easy task for the archdiocese, even though it has a history of juggling the competing demands of immigrants dating back generations.
What are some of the Hispanic community’s frequently cited needs?
Latino Catholics tick off everything from a woeful lack of Hispanic priests to the fact that mainstream church services often seem too formal and “cold.” They ask for more archdiocesan literature to be printed in Spanish. They want the church bureaucracy to help with each parish’s social needs– whether it be immunizations or advice to fight slum lords.
Yet sifting the needs of the city’s Hispanics is anything but easy, mainly because Hispanics are anything but a single, monolithic group. Though two-thirds of the 700,000 Hispanics in the diocese are Mexican-American, there are also large populations of Central Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, South Americans and others.
Throw in a wide geographical distribution–from 70-year-old Mexican-American parishes on the South Side to brand-new churches popping up in the northern suburbs–and the concerns of any two groups rarely match.
“We even worship differently,” said Jorge Rivera, a Hispanic coordinator for a section of the archdiocese that covers the immigrant potpourri of the North Side. “Every nationality has its own favorite icons and Virgins–Mexicans have the Virgin of Guadalupe, Ecuadoreans have Christo Gran Poder.”
“In the past, there has been this one-size-fits all category for Hispanics,” agreed Jack Keehan, the priest at Saint Ann’s Catholic Church in the Pilsen neighborhood. “The church bureaucracy didn’t recognize that these are not monotone, middle-class congregations. You’ve got Hispanic churches up in Ravenswood that are celebrating the fact that nine women members have gotten Ph.D.’s, and down here in Pilsen there are churches where many members don’t even have a Social Security card.”
To build stronger ties with Hispanic communities, and to overcome what many Hispanic parishes say is a feeling of benign neglect, the archdiocese has started a panoply of Hispanic ministry programs, most of which focus on giving cultural training to priests and teaching them to recite Spanish mass. Church authorities have also launched a concerted drive to recruit more Hispanic seminarians, because Hispanics form only a tiny fraction of all archdiocesan priests, Keehan said.
There is a deeper skepticism, however, among Hispanic church leaders who feel that when it comes to the bottom line, archdiocese resources haven’t been allocated evenly.
Members of St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church on the Near West Side, for example, still rankle at the memory of the archdiocese’s plan to close their church–one of dozens of older churches in poorer neighborhoods that were targeted during a recent fiscal belt-tightening.
“We have a lot of hope that with the new archbishop there will be change,” said Aureliano Bermudez, 51, vice president of St. Francis of Assisi’s preservation committee. “It’s beautiful that he speaks Spanish, but we will see if he uses his Spanish to really help the community.”
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Bermudez said the church, founded by German immigrants but primarily serving Latinos since the 1920s, is limping by without a live-in priest, stained-glass windows and structural repairs.
St. Francis of Assisi was saved from demolition last year when parishioners protested and camped out in the decrepit structure, even in sub-freezing temperatures.
But if many Hispanic churches in the city’s traditional urban immigrant enclaves are struggling, then a whole new generation of Hispanic congregations is popping up on the suburban horizon.
The suburbanization of Chicago’s Hispanic immigrants is a relatively recent trend, church experts say, with small enclaves of Mexicans, Central Americans, and some South Americans taking service jobs in once all-white neighborhoods that had never dealt with ethnic minorities before.
“Most of the Hispanics don’t even attend the local worship because they don’t feel welcome,” said Graciela Contreras, a Hispanic coordinator for northern Cook County and all of Lake County. “We need to educate these churches to receive them. Otherwise, we’re going to lose them to other denominations.”
In her region, Contreras said, 16 of 54 Catholic parishes have begun offering Spanish mass.
One of those parishes taking the lead is St. Joseph the Worker in Wheeling, a predominantly white, middle-class community that is seeing a small but steady influx of Hispanics.
“The Hispanic people we see are hungry for religion,” said Rev. Frederick Brandstrader, the pastor. “Most people believe the influx of Hispanics is a positive thing. We are a tolerant people.”
Brandstrader has begun offering mass in Spanish. He recently hung a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe to make his new members feel at home.
Even such small gestures are a matter of survival, archdiocese sources such as Contreras said. The irony of Hispanic growth in the Catholic Church, she said, is that if Catholicism doesn’t reach out, Hispanics will eventually shop around.
That certainly was the case with St. Fidelis Catholic Church, whose Puerto Rican congregation in Humboldt Park has been dwindling after the archdiocese closed the parish school and yanked its full-time priest. Many of the members have since switched over to a Pentecostal church across the street.
“(The Pentecostalists) seemed to help fill a void in a lot of people,” said Victor Acevedo, who has been attending St. Fidelis for 20 years. The local Protestant church had Hispanic ministers, he noted.
Though no numbers exist locally, academic expert Holler said that some 15 percent of Hispanic Catholics had made the switch nationwide.
Gerardo Reyes, who is helping lead the struggle to reconstruct St. Francis of Assisi, sees both a cautionary tale and a glimmer of hope in the way the archdiocese has dealt with its booming, restless minority.
“If the new (archbishop) looks at the Hispanic community, he will see we are the future of the U.S. Catholic Church,” Reyes said. “We have faith that his coming to Chicago is a blessing, not only for us but for all of the Archdiocese of Chicago.”