The Church and Latinos

The Catholic Church has undergone a demographic transformation over the past few decades. What does American Catholicism look like today?

There are about seventy-two million American Catholics, and the last time we had a good count—around the year 2018—about thirty-two million of them were Hispanic. So it’s approaching half of American Catholics that are Hispanic, and for those younger than eighteen, 60 percent are Hispanic. In a sense, demographics are already defining the future of Catholicism, and the key will be for us to understand what it means to be a church that eventually is majority Hispanic. Of course, other groups are also transforming the Catholic Church. Right now, the fastest growing group in the Church is not Latinos, it’s Asians. About 5 percent of all Catholics in the country are Asian, and in twenty to thirty years, they will be double that number. There are also growing numbers of African Catholics in the country.

Why does the racial and ethnic composition of the Church matter?

When we say “the Church,” we are talking about people. We’re talking about flesh and blood, people who have names. People who have cultures, languages, traditions, families. And we all are human in a particular way, usually shaped by culture and traditions. There is a way of being a White American Catholic, and there is a way of being a Hispanic Catholic or a Black Catholic. It’s important that as we evangelize to bring people into a relationship with Jesus Christ we recognize that people don’t stop being Black, stop being Latino, stop being White in order to worship God. People worship God in light of who they are.

Why is that important?

From a pastoral perspective, the institutional Church and the body of Catholics have a responsibility to make sure that whoever self-identifies as Catholic has the resources to grow in the faith and maintain their identity. If we don’t do that, then we could call that a pastoral failure. And in the past two or three decades, we have lost more than sixteen million Hispanic Catholics. They walked away, they stopped self-identifying as Catholics. The Pew Research Center has done several studies on this, and these Catholics simply drifted away. They were not engaged, they were not formed. They did not feel welcome in their parishes. And little by little they drifted away. Some of them stopped self-identifying as Catholic because they were angry. They felt there was bias, that there was no interest in engaging them. We currently have about thirty-two million Hispanic Catholics in this country. We could be at around fifty million. It’s astonishing. If you’re in the business of bringing people to Christ and people don’t feel themselves being drawn to Christ by you, then you’ve got to reconsider what you are doing.

That loss of sixteen million Hispanic Catholics stands out at a time when the Church is struggling with declining attendance. According to Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, Catholic parishes in the country have fallen from approximately twenty thousand to about sixteen thousand, and the number of priests has declined from nearly sixty thousand to about thirty-four thousand. Meanwhile, the number of Catholic schools has tumbled from more than eleven thousand to fewer than six thousand. What are the consequences for the Church if it doesn’t continue to improve its engagement with Latinos and other groups?

If we don’t ensure that the Hispanic community stays passionately Catholic, then what’s going to happen? It’s what we’re already seeing. We’re closing churches. We’re closing schools. We’re losing our network of Catholic hospitals nationwide. And that’s because communities that we’ve traditionally thought of as being that sort of base of the Church, whether Irish or Italians, they’re getting older. They’re dying. It’s a generational transition. It’s a demographic transition. We literally need human beings to run these institutions. The Catholic Church has a huge infrastructure. Somebody’s got to run the hospitals, somebody’s got to run the Catholic schools, and somebody’s got to run the Catholic parishes in this country. The median age of White Catholics in the United States of America is fifty-five. The median age of Hispanics is twenty-nine. The question is, how do we take advantage of the treasure of this younger population?

How is the Church doing with promoting Latinos into leadership roles?

In an ideal world, institutions and organizations should represent as closely as possible the populations they serve. But in the Catholic Church, we are behind in achieving that. We have close to three hundred bishops in the country who are active in their dioceses, and only around thirty of them are Hispanic. We know that less than 10 percent of Catholic priests in this country are Hispanic, and the number of Hispanic sisters is very small. So something isn’t clicking, and that’s what I’m trying to figure out.

What are the best ways for us to identify the roadblocks for the Latino community to move into more ownership of what it means to be Catholic in the United States? What do you make of the argument that the reason there are relatively few Hispanic leaders in the Church is because Latinos are still finding their way in American society?

Until the 1990s most Hispanics in this country were immigrants, and most of them were Roman Catholic. Churches had to offer rituals that perhaps they were not used to offering. They had to support Hispanics struggling with poverty, Hispanics that did not have documents. And alongside all that, they had to form people in the faith so they could pass it on to the next generation, which is mostly US-born. Since the 1990s, the number of Latinos who are US-born has increased dramatically. Today, two-thirds of all Latinos in the country were born here. And for Hispanics younger than eighteen—the children and grandchildren of all those immigrants—94 percent are US-born. The Jesuit theologian Allan Figueroa Deck said we have a tale of two churches—we’ve got the church that is established and the church that is emerging. Well, that was thirty years ago when he said that and we still have a tale of two churches—even though Hispanic Catholics are no longer emerging. They are established. Gone are the days when we could say, Well, the Latino community, it’s mostly immigrants and they’re still trying to get a sense of where they are. They’re still learning the land. No, those days are gone. I hear this argument all the time when I tell people we need more teachers who are Hispanic in Catholic schools or more priests, and then they say, “Well, we don’t have that many Latinos who are educated to get to those levels.” No. There’s plenty of talent. There are plenty of people with the credentials. The problem is, there’s a little bit of a bottleneck. There are highly educated, highly capable Latino Catholics who could be running entire programs or institutions or structures, they just simply don’t get there.

And why is that?

From a theological perspective, there is no such thing as the Church and Latino Catholics. Latino Catholics are the Church. And so are White Catholics, Black Catholics, Asian Catholics, and Native American Catholics. So what we are witnessing here is a portion of the Church not fully embracing and appreciating another portion of the Church. And that’s the challenge. There are cultural factors. There are socioeconomic factors. There are political factors. Sometimes it’s bias. There could be just simply the assumption that Latinos are not capable of doing what’s required. And if Latinos are not at the decision-making table in terms of who gets hired and who doesn’t get hired, then Latinos are not going to get there.

Catholic schools have historically been instrumental in helping to launch immigrant groups into upward mobility in America. What does your research say about how they are doing with Latinos?

Catholic schools have for decades been an incredible instrument in helping educate the next generation of Catholics so they can be leaders, so they can form society and build society. And they did very well with the children of Euro-American Catholics—Irish, German, Italian. It’s not news that these Catholics, thanks to factors like education, politics, and hard work, moved from being migrant communities into the middle and upper classes. They have evolved and grown in this country. And Catholic schools were very important to them. By the 1940s, about 55 percent of all Catholic children in this country, most of them Euro-American, were enrolled in Catholic schools. And it’s not an accident that today about 55 percent of adult Euro-American Catholics have at least a four-year college degree. In a sense, Catholic schools catapulted them into the middle and upper classes. Now the question is, when the demographics change, will the Catholic Church and will Catholic schools do the same thing for the new generations? And unfortunately, our Catholic schools and many of the Catholic structures have a poor record of engaging Hispanic, Black, and Asian students and families. The number of children from those groups in Catholic schools has been historically very low. There has been a concerted effort in recent years to increase those numbers, and I think we are doing well, but we can do better. In the US, there are about eight million school-age Hispanic children who are Roman Catholic. How many of them are enrolled in Catholic schools? About 244,000. It blows your mind. That’s around 3 percent of all Hispanic school-age children. The migrants who came to this country, they came here to give their children a better opportunity. And that’s education. They know that education is going to be kind of that holy grail. So the question is, how do we make the best use of Catholic schools that have proven to be effective to educate Euro-American Catholic children, but today Hispanic Catholic children are not there in a similar way? In a sense, Catholic schools are not having the same impact on Hispanic Catholic children as they did upon Euro-American Catholic children.

We’ve discussed the closing of Catholic parishes and schools, but what are the other challenges created by dwindling attendance?

For more than a century and a half, Catholicism has been the largest Church in this country. Until the 1990s, 25 percent of the US population self-identified as Roman Catholic. In the late nineties, for the first time in a century and a half, Catholicism starts shrinking, even though millions of Catholics are arriving every year—you have an influx of Catholics from Latin America, from Asia, from Africa arriving in this country, and still Catholicism as a Church is shrinking. Today only about 20 percent of the country self-identifies as Catholic. When you have 25 percent of the population, you’ve got a voice. Catholic sensitivities—social justice, the idea of the common good, fighting for the rights of minorities, fighting against slavery and racism—when you have that 25 percent, it really tilts the conversation. But if Latinos don’t decide to stay in the Catholic Church, that public voice could be lost.

How can the Church better engage the Hispanic community?

There needs to be a structural, institutional conversion. We need to stop looking at Latinos as just migrants or transients. We need to start looking at the Latino community as essential to who we are as a Church and society. Once you consider a sector of your community essential—the key to your future—then you start investing in them. So we need better faith formation. Better accompaniment of Hispanic families, more investment in Catholic education. Accompaniment is the idea of journeying with people. You walk with them so they’re not on their own. Many pastors, many school leaders see wealthy Catholics as essential to advancing the mission. Why? Because if you cultivate them, they will stay within the Church and they will support your mission and your work. Well, we should be able to manage to do the same thing with Latinos and other groups, people that may not be super wealthy but they have children and they have the gift of the faith. We should be able to see that as a treasure and invest in that particular treasure.

What do those kinds of investments look like?

I have seen it right here at Boston College, which of course is a very important Catholic institution. One example: When I was halfway through the Theology and Education PhD program at BC’s Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry, Professor Thomas Groome asked me, “What can we do to serve Hispanics better and to attract more Latinos?” I put together a number of thoughts and gave him a document. Three months later, Tom Groome called me and said, “We got a grant to support Hispanic Catholics. Do you want to put your plan into action?” A lot of my ideas were about strengthening the Hispanic ministry concentration in the master’s degree program. The concentration had been in the program for nearly twenty years, and only three students had gone through that program. In year one when we launched the new program, we had seven students. I’ll give you the magic formula for how we did it. It’s very simple. Three things. One, you need Latino faculty. You want to talk to Latinos about the Latino experience? You need Latinos. Two, you need to do outreach. Rather than spend $2,000 to advertise the program in the journals and go to events where Latinos were not present, I said, give me that $2,000 and I will use it to go to a community meeting, and I’ll speak to ten, fifteen, twenty people and those people will send us one or two students. And that worked. And the third piece is scholarships. We need to make sure we get resources because a lot of Latinos who are engaging in ministry are raising families and don’t come from the upper-middle class. Many of them are immigrants and they need more resources to do that. Boston College provided all three. They trusted me. And in ten years between 2005 and 2015, we enrolled almost 120 Latinos. I’m proud of that, but I also need to be honest about this: Being at Boston College makes a huge difference. It has provided me a platform, and the support to do this kind of work. It has flourished in a way that it would not have flourished, perhaps, if I had gone to a university that did not have the interest in research, or in the Hispanic community. So, in a sense, things align—the vision that I had, the energy that I had, and the mission of Boston College as a Jesuit, Catholic institution with leaders who believe in this. Fr. Leahy [Boston College President William P. Leahy, SJ], from day one, I mean, as a priest, he has been closely following the work that I’ve been doing. I have sat down with him several times and he’s been incredibly supportive. All four deans the Clough School of Theology and Ministry has had so far have made Hispanic ministry a priority, all of them since the time the school began.

As you pointed out, BC is a powerful institution. What can Catholics do on a more individual level to support and engage all the communities of the Church?

In the broader Church, we also need pioneers, the people that I call the superheroes of Catholic life. Like Fr. Samuel Mazzuchelli in the Midwest. This guy was a new priest, in his early twenties. He volunteered in the 1830s to come from Italy to the United States. He arrived and there was nothing here. There was a group of immigrants, and everybody wanted places to worship. Nobody knew how to build a church. So, Fr. Mazzuchelli rolls up his sleeves and ends up building thirty, forty churches with the people. Then the sisters, these women would just come and start building schools. They would live in the schools they’d just built, in the attics or the basements, and teach thousands of little kids. And they didn’t open just one school, they would open two and three and ten of these schools. And then at some point, these Catholics start venturing into health care and building hospitals. What does a nun or a priest know about running a hospital? But they did it. The pioneering spirit of these Catholics is super inspiring, and I see a lot of that in the Hispanic community.

In a way, one of your more recent research projects involves training those with the pioneering spirit.

About a decade ago, Notre Dame theology Professor Timothy Matovina and I started asking ourselves, What if we formed young adult Hispanic Catholics—college students born and raised in the US who come with a different perspective and with well-trained theology—and we deployed them in Hispanic communities? And so we answered a call for proposals from the Lilly Endowment and we initially applied for $5 million. They gave us $7.9 million for our project, Haciendo Caminos, which launched in 2023 and runs through 2027. Right now we have more than 150 Latino fellows studying in eighteen Catholic universities, including Boston College, who are getting master’s degrees to work in Hispanic communities, engaging in ministry, religious education, and pastoral counseling. This summer we conducted a two-week symposium with thirty-one of those fellows for two weeks in San Antonio, talking with them about a new vision for Hispanic ministry.

You also conducted a separate study about organizations, most of them small and led by Latinos, that are using their own innovative methods and ideas to successfully reach young Hispanic Catholics. What is the secret of those organizations?

In 2021, we launched a study identifying a dozen of the best ministries in the country serving young Hispanic Catholics. We found them by asking pastors and community leaders to tell us which ministries were doing great work. We invited these ministries to open their hearts to us. They opened their programs, their finances, their leadership, boards of directors—everything. We did an organizational analysis of these twelve groups. What was fascinating was that as we went through countless interviews, we began to see that, across the board, the same ten words appeared in every conversation. Words like “community,” words like “family” and “mission” and “vulnerability.” We eventually came to call these words the ten pillars of success. The organizations were successful in their outreach to Hispanic Catholics because they were integrating all these ten pillars. The emphasis on them was different, depending on the organization, but they all were using them.

What else did they have in common?

They were doing a lot with very little. A lot of them began with someone who just had an idea and great intentions. One of the organizations, Fuerza Transformadora, which means “transformative power,” was started by a former gang member in Little Rock. Once he got his act together as a young adult, he wanted to help others like him. He started just inviting people to his house, meeting with them, praying with them. Then others heard the word and it kept growing, growing, growing, growing. They were serving thousands of people every year. A lot of parishes and dioceses really struggle to reach young Hispanic Catholics, but here we had these Hispanic leaders who with very little were reaching thousands of people. So we wanted to know, how are they doing it? How are they creating these communities? We learned that those pillars of success actually were important. It was also amazing how much they were able to accomplish with so few resources. Sometimes only volunteers, or sometimes one or two people on staff. A budget of what, $30,000, $40,000? In the report I wrote in 2023, I said it is a true miracle that these people are doing so much with so little, and imagine if they could build organizational capacity.

What kind of reaction did that report generate?

Well, one day I received a phone call, and it was from an officer with the Lilly Endowment who’d sat down and read the report. We had a meeting in Chicago and he said, “What could you do to help those organizations?” I said, “Just give me a few days and I’ll put some ideas together.” I came up with a plan that became my next project, Nuevo Momento. They gave us $15 million to work with fifteen organizations. Many of them are ones in the report, but there are other ones as well. For five years, we’ll be working with them, providing them with resources. They’ll have partners helping them on questions of fundraising, executive leadership development, board formation, and many other aspects related to organizational life. The idea is that after those five years, these organizations will be in a stronger position to do what they do.

What’s it like for your research to have this kind of impact?

I must say that I’m humbled. There’s an element of trust when you jump into larger projects like this. You don’t know where things are going. You may have a sense of how you want to support the communities, but this is like music. You compose a song, you sing a song, but you don’t know how people are going to receive the song. I feel that doing this work has allowed me to contribute, to give something to my Church and to this society in which I live. In doing this work, something beautiful is that it has attracted other Latinos who want to do something similar. And now they are replicating some of this work and they’re doing it on their own. So it seems to me that this is the work of the Holy Spirit, and it allows me to be an instrument of the Holy Spirit. I have a sense of fulfillment and accomplishment that I have done what needed to be done. And it’s flourishing. And Boston College, the institution that has given me a home to advance this work, is flourishing as well. And for that, I’m very grateful. ◽