Demographicizing While Rome Burns

The current discussion about what is happening with Hispanic Catholics verges on the comical, even the absurd. The Times puts the main conclusion of a new Pew poll this way:

The seemingly mind-bending result: Even as a rising percentage of American Catholics is Hispanic, a falling percentage of American Hispanics is Catholic.

Mark Gray of CARA, a research center affiliated with Georgetown, puts it this way:

Next Sunday at Mass look closely at your fellow parishioners. Welcome them. Really emphasize “peace be with you” because many of them are clearly from outer space. This has to be true because it is the only way I can make sense of much of the research about American Catholics in recent headlines.

The point Gray is trying to make is that “the sky is not falling”: that contrary to the impressions left by news reports, the number of Hispanic Catholics is growing, not shrinking.

Cathy Lynn Grossman of the Religion News Service puts the same point this way: Hispanic Catholics are a smaller piece of a larger American Hispanic pie.

It’s all clear enough – I guess. But what’s really clear to me is that the challenge facing American Catholics in incorporating the lives of Hispanics and Latinos into the broader life of the church is that for a generation now “Hispanic Catholics” have been seen as a demographic group, not as an aggregation of individuals with distinct religious lives.

For the past twenty years, Hispanic immigration has served as something like hormone replacement therapy in the church in America, with large numbers of Catholic immigrants from Mexico and Latin America “replacing” the large numbers of native-born and -baptized Catholics who left the church for this or that reason.

To me, the upshot of all this demographicizing is the extraordinary lack of attention given to Pope Francis’s role as the first pope from Latin America and the significance of his pontificate for Hispanic Catholics in the U.S.

The best way for this oversight to be set right is for the Vatican to arrange – sooner rather than later – for Francis to visit several cities where Hispanic Catholics predominate when he comes to the U.S. next fall.

To do otherwise is a form of benign neglect – and neglect with real (and clearly measurable) consequences.

The photograph shows a mural outside St. Anselm’s parish on Tinton Avenue in the Bronx.

• 8 May 2014