Keynote: Catholics, accept the Church's new face

Friday, Oct. 03, 2014

DRAPER — “Cultural diversity is here to stay and we have to learn to live with it.”

That was the message from the keynote speaker at the 2014 Diocese of Salt Lake City Pastoral Congress, held Sept. 27 at the Skaggs Catholic Center.

Hispanics are becoming the majority in the Catholic Church in the United States, along with an influx of immigrants from Asia and Africa, said Hosffman Ospino, Ph.D., in his keynote address, which he presented in both English and Spanish at the congress.

Although this change presents challenges, “instead of fighting this transformation, we need to adopt a different pastoral strategy,” he said.

“We all, despite our differences – language, gender, social location, culture – we all are the one and only Church. There is not such a thing as the Hispanic Church, there is not such a thing as the African-American or the Filipino Church or the White Church. It is only one Church and we all must build it together,” said Ospino, who was born in Colombia but has lived almost half his life in the U.S. He is with Boston College’s Hispanic Ministry and Religious Education; he was the primary author of the “National Study of Catholic Parishes with Hispanic Ministry,” which was released this spring.

The demographic changes that have occurred in the U.S. Catholic Church “are here to stay,” Ospino said. “They are the changes that are transforming what it means to be American Catholic at this very moment in history.”

Forty percent of U.S. Catholic parishes are multi-cultural, and that number is growing, Ospino said; the percentage is much higher in Utah, where about 80 percent of Catholics are Hispanic. Overall, Hispanics make up 47.4 percent of the U.S. Catholic Church. 

Although the vast majority of Latinos speak English as well as Spanish, and are U.S. citizens, they resist the process of assimilation because “over the decades we have grown in our society more conscious about the value of culture and identity in terms of how we are shaped and how we are constituted as human beings,” Ospino said. “In other words, language matters, friends; ethnicity matters, and race matters. Those things are very important.”

Some American Catholics are resisting the transformation of their Church, becoming angry and leaving the Church, or quitting their ministry in exhaustion because of the prospect of change, Ospino acknowledged.

However, the facts remain that 71 percent of the growth in the U.S. Catholic Church is from Hispanics, 63 percent of whom were born in this country, Ospino said; therefore, “instead of fighting this transformation, we need to adopt a different pastoral strategy.”

To do this, parishes and dioceses must develop Hispanic leaders in areas such as the permanent diaconate and lay ecclesial ministry, he said, as well as invest in youth ministry.

“We are being faced with a challenge of being Church and being community in a new way,” Ospino said. “The call to the New Evangelization is an invitation to be a missionary church. … We cannot sit down and whine because our Church is changing. We cannot sit down and wait for this to go back to the way things were. We are called to be the light of the Church in which we are all called to go out and search for those people who are the new Catholics, the new faces that are transforming and giving life to Catholicism in the United States.”