by Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo
Pope Benedict XVI
Pope Benedict XVI arrived in the United States under the theme of “Christ Our Hope.” His overall message is cast as hope for peace, for justice and freedom. No doubt all of this will be amply covered by the mainstream media. What will probably escape mention is the importance of Latinos and Latinas to the Roman Pontiff.
In the video provided on-line by the visit’s coordinators, the pope dedicates an entire portion of his message to Latinos and Latinas – and he makes his greeting in fluent Spanish (www.uspapalvisit.org/stories/vmessage.htm ).
In other words, the pope “gets it.” The future of the Catholic Church in the United States depends on how effectively Catholicism identifies with its growing majority membership – which is Latino.
For more than 20 years, this message has been delivered by a host of Catholic activists. Initially, our declaration was greeted with skepticism by the non-Hispanic leadership of bishops and priests. Later, we had to fight with confusing numbers and statistics as to whether all Latinos and Latinas were “really” Catholic; whether we received “too much attention” that divided the Church. We had to fight the canard that as unfaithful and disloyal Catholics we were leaving the Church in droves to become Pentecostals.
Theologians like Virgilio Elizondo of San Antonio and Alan Figueroa Deck of Los Angeles emphasized the role of popular religion in making us Latinos and Latinas among the most devout of all U.S. Catholics. Sociologists like Ana María Díaz-Stevens showed how demographic growth patterns were more relevant to pastoral planning than anecdotal reports from parish priests. And the PARAL Study proved that Pentecostals had not increased their percentage of Latino and Latina believers over the past ten years. In fact, our research showed that the percentage of Protestants had actually dropped from the 1990s.
These are just some of the reasons that alone among the many languages spoken by Catholics in the United States, the Roman Pontiff gave special attention to Spanish. He clearly identifies us with his message of hope for the future. In fact, without Latinos and Latinas, the future of Catholicism in the United States would be bleak.
The task will be to put people with last names like Díaz, Rodríguez and Sánchez in leadership positions.
In very many parishes, this is already the case. Gradually the tide has been rising to higher and higher ranks within Catholicism. But by speaking in Spanish, the pontiff symbolically requested that we be not assimilated and thus lose our identity, but rather that we preserve and continue our transformation of American Catholicism. Hispanic Link.
(Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo is Professor Emeritus of Puerto Rican & Latino Studies at Brooklyn College. Author and scholar, he serves as member of the Pennsylvania Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Email him at stevensa@pld.com.) ©2008
