NEWS FEATURE: Archdiocese seeks to train a new generation of Hispanic leaders

c. 1999 Religion News Service UNION CITY, N.J. _ In a restored classroom once filled with immigrant German Roman Catholic students, Veronica Chavez sat in rapt attention with 44 other Latino adults as the Rev. Fernando Gomez offered pointers on the best way to lead a prayer group. Chavez, who leads a weekly charismatic meeting, […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNION CITY, N.J. _ In a restored classroom once filled with immigrant German Roman Catholic students, Veronica Chavez sat in rapt attention with 44 other Latino adults as the Rev. Fernando Gomez offered pointers on the best way to lead a prayer group.

Chavez, who leads a weekly charismatic meeting, nodded in agreement as Gomez stressed the importance of participation. She was not afraid. After two decades of active participation in the church here, she had jumped at a chance for more formal religious education. “I tell you this center is a dream realized for us,”she said during a coffee break at the recently opened Centro Guadalupe here. “It’s so very important. I’m very happy to have the center here.”


As the fastest-growing segment of the Catholic church in America, credited, in fact, with keeping the U.S. Catholic population rising, Hispanics are increasingly recognizing they must produce more lay leaders.

For their part, U.S. bishops are beginning to acknowledge the increasing importance of Hispanics to the church. The students in Gomez’s class, for example, came from across the Newark Archdiocese to study at the center, which takes its name from the Mexican shrine, Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The center, also called the Hispanic Pastoral Institute, is housed in what was once a four-story Catholic elementary school built by Holy Family Church when its congregation was made up mostly of German immigrants. The archdiocese spent more than $1 million to turn its high-ceilinged classrooms into bedrooms, offices, a chapel and conference rooms.

The bedrooms will be used for marriage retreats conducted in Spanish, and a number of other Latino lay organizations already are reserving space at a fast pace.

“Nearly every weekend of the year is already booked,” said the Rev. Josi M. Juango, director of the center. “This was really and truly needed. Everyone wants to use it.”

Chavez, who arrived in New Jersey two decades ago from El Salvador, is exactly the kind of person Juango and Gomez had in mind when they came to the United States from Spain two years ago to get the center up and running. It opened officially in December but has just begun offering leadership classes.

Chavez volunteers as a Eucharistic minister, assisting her parish priest with Mass two weekends a month, and she is the leader of a charismatic group of about 65, which gathers at the church for prayer services and folk singing. She said she signed up for the four-month class that began last week because she wants to be a better leader.


Other members of the class said the center is a symbol of recognition by a church that wasn’t always so welcoming. When Lomberto Diaz arrived in this country three decades ago from Cuba, he said, there was resistance to Spanish culture and language.

“In the last 10 years we have had increased participation,” said Diaz, of North Bergen, N.J., who with his wife, Beatriz, coordinates the statewide Marriage Encounter program in Spanish. “They have opened doors to us. They have become more worried about our education.”

The exploding Latino Catholic population has created a great demand for lay leaders, Juango and Gomez said. Hispanics account for an estimated 40 percent of the 60 million U.S. Catholics, and, if current growth rates remain unchanged, that figure could jump to 50 percent by 2020. In the four northern counties that make up the Newark Archdiocese, an estimated 30 percent of the 1.35 million Catholics are Latino. “There is an incredible need for well-trained Hispanic lay leaders who will become catechists (teachers) and evangelizers, who could become staff for a given parish, who would provide leadership at the local level,” said Alejandro Aguilera-Titus, associate director of the U.S. Catholic Conference’s Secretariat for Hispanic Affairs.

Hispanic Catholics have complained in the past that the church often turned a cold shoulder to them as new immigrants, and the church has acknowledged this reception drove some Latinos away. Across Latin America and in the United States, thousands of Hispanics have fled the church of their birth to join evangelical Protestant churches that were more welcoming and incorporated more of the music and culture into the worship service.

Aguilera-Titus said that in recent years the Catholic hierarchy has responded to the rising Latino population by introducing numerous Hispanic ministries and programs devoted to training lay leaders. He said 80 percent of the nation’s 189 dioceses have Hispanic ministries.

The church has also attempted to counter the attraction of music by tailoring Masses to Latinos and encouraging charismatic groups that meet after the Mass and often resemble Pentecostal services.


“The number of dioceses with pastoral institutes catering to Hispanic Catholics is booming,” Aguilera-Titus said. “Centro Guadalupe is another example of a very relevant choice … to look at the formation of Hispanic lay leaders as a priority.”

The archdiocese considers Centro Guadalupe the first center of its kind to unite all programs for Latinos under one roof, and Aguilera-Titus praised it as an ambitious project that is in keeping with national trends.

He and others said they hope the increased participation of Latinos in their church will lead to an increased number of Hispanic priests and nuns. There are an estimated 2,500 Hispanic priests _ slightly more than 5 percent of the 47,500 priests working in America _ but only about 500 of them were born in this country.

Josi Fernandez of Elizabeth, N.J., heard the call and became an ordained deacon. He and his wife, Aleida, are taking the course at Centro Guadalupe so they can provide better leadership to their community.

Aleida has coordinated Renew 2000 programs, small prayer groups that focus on evangelization in the millennium, at Blessed Sacrament Church, but as a full-time Spanish and French teacher at Bloomfield High School, she had trouble keeping up with religious education.

“This Centro Guadalupe is such an appropriate answer for meeting the needs of the Spanish-speaking community in the archdiocese,” Aleida said. “I don’t have time to go looking all over to see which parish is offering a class. This is a point where we all meet. I was really hungry for this kind of learning.”


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