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A quarter of US Catholic parishes have a Spanish Mass, bishops’ survey says

 

United States
RNS

More than a quarter of US Catholic parishes have at least one Spanish Mass and another 17 per cent have a Latino presence or ministry, according to a new survey released by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The survey, conducted between April and August of this year, revealed significant diversity in the availability of Spanish Masses and Latino ministry in different US dioceses.


Cardinal Daniel DiNardo presides over a Mass of Ordination for seven candidates for the priesthood at the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Houston on Saturday,1st June, 2019. PICTURE: AP Photo/David J Phillip.

Three US dioceses – the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, Pennsylvania; the Diocese of Duluth, Minnesota; and the Diocese of Marquette, Michigan – had no Spanish Masses or Hispanic ministry when the survey was conducted.

In the Diocese of Brownsville, Texas, along the US-Mexican border, every one of its 72 parishes features a Spanish Mass. In most dioceses in Texas, California and Utah, the vast majority of parishes offer Spanish Masses.

The survey is intended to help the US bishops and other Catholic leaders to implement the National Pastoral Plan for Hispanic/Latino Ministry, a program approved by the USCCB last year that aims to strengthen ministry in Latino communities.

“Surveys like this are vital to understand and address the response of the Church to the needs and aspirations of our Hispanic/Latino communities,” Bishop Oscar Cantú, chair of the bishops conference’s subcommittee on Hispanic affairs, said in a statement.

Cantú, who leads the Catholic Diocese of San Jose, California, cited limited resources and numbers of bilingual priests as common obstacles that Catholic dioceses face in engaging in Latino ministry.



The national pastoral plan emerged from V Encuentro, an earlier four-year nationwide consultation process with Hispanic Catholics in the United States that concluded in 2018. The consultation with Hispanic Catholics has been a tradition in the US church since the 1970s, and Latino theologians have argued that it is an example of synodality – of two-way dialogue between lay Catholics and church leaders – before Pope Francis made the theological concept mainstream.

The national pastoral plan, which is designed to be implemented over a 10-year period, lays out general objectives as well as specific, measurable goals.

One goal is to increase the number of Latino priests and men and women religious by 10 to 15 per cent before December, 2033. In the past decade, the USCCB website notes, only 10 to 20 per cent of newly ordained priests have been Latino, as have been only five to 15 per cent of newly professed religious, despite about a third of US Catholics being Hispanic.

The pastoral plan emphasises the importance of both Spanish- and English-language activities and Masses for effective Latino ministry, especially for the many families where the parents are most comfortable in Spanish while children are most comfortable in English.

Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research Center, told RNS that, among Latino Catholic adults, 34 per cent are Spanish dominant, 37 per cent are bilingual and 29 per cent are English dominant. Latino Catholics are more likely to be Spanish dominant or bilingual than the broader population of US Latinos, according to a survey conducted in November, 2023.


Parishioners attend Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church in the Queens borough of New York on Sunday, 8th May, 2022. According to a report released on Thursday, 13th April, 2023, by the Pew Research Center, Catholics remain the largest religious group among Latinos in the United States, but the number of Latinos who identify as religiously unaffiliated continues to grow. PICTURE: AP Photo/Brittainy Newman, File photo.

Pew research also shows that the percentage of US Latinos comfortable speaking Spanish decreases with each successive generation born in the US. Only 34 per cent of third-generation or higher Latinos speak Spanish “pretty well or very well.”


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In the statement from the bishops’ conference, Alejandro Aguilera-Titus, assistant director of Hispanic affairs under the USCCB’s Secretariat of Cultural Diversity in the Church, celebrated the avid response of diocesan leaders to the survey, which represented all 175 dioceses asked to participate.

“The high participation rate reflects the dedication of our dioceses to Hispanic and Latino communities. It is heartening to see such a widespread commitment to build a more integrated and united Catholic Church in the United States,” Aguilera-Titus wrote.

The survey did not include the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA; the Diocese of St Thomas in the US Virgin Islands; the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter; or the Eastern Catholic Archeparchies and Eparchies in the United States.

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