Lay Movements And Love For God: Keys To Evangelizing Hispanics

Lay Catholics should play a bigger role in evangelization and to reach out to Hispanics in the United States, while incorporating Hispanic spirituality and traditions, say Catholic evangelizers.

Addressing the influx of Spanish-speaking people in the United States and what has been understood as decline of the Catholic faith among them has been a top concern for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

According to a 2014 Pew Research Center survey, while most U.S. Hispanics remain Catholic, the number has dropped. Of the 35 million+ Hispanics, 55 percent were Catholic but had dropped from the previous 61 percent. It showed that 24 percent of Hispanics counted themselves as former Catholics. Also, net gains were noted at the same time among Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated.

As the overall percentage of American Catholics identified as Hispanic rose to 33 percent by 2013, the USCCB has responded by naming more than two dozen bishops of Hispanic heritage. Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, for example, is a native of Mexico who recently led U.S. bishops and is on the forefront evangelizing immigrants.

Among the USCCB’s efforts since 1974 has been the Encuentro – Spanish for ‘encounter’ – process of ecclesial discernment and collaboration, predating the current global synodal process. In a video produced for the Fifth Encuentro meeting in 2019, USCCB Assistant Director of Hispanic Affairs Alejandro Aguilera-Titus said, “The principal goal of Encuentro is to find new ways of responding to the Hispanic/Latino presence in the Church and for Hispanics/Latinos to better respond as missionary disciples in service to their brothers and sisters.”

Recognizing its importance, Pope Francis told the 2019 Encuentro participants: “I see that the Fifth Encuentro is a concrete way for the Church in the United States to respond to the challenge of going beyond what is comfortable, business as usual, to become a leaven of communion for all those who seek a future of hope, especially young people and families that live in the peripheries of society.”

The Pope recognized the “specific gifts that Hispanic Catholics offer today, and will continue to offer in the future, to the Church in their country,” and hoped the entire Church “continues to accompany this process with its own reflection and pastoral discernment.”

The role of laity

Lay movements have been notable in evangelizing, including Divine Renovation, Charismatic Renewal, Instituto Fé y Vida, and the National Catholic Network of Pastoral Juvenil Hispana. “Many ministries shut down, and young people didn’t return because of COVID. But they are returning. That’s the challenge we’re experiencing and it is a joy that young people are seeking Christ and that Christ is seeking them too,” Yazmin Maní Malone of the Pastoral Juvenil Hispana said in an interview.

The network assists evangelization throughout the U.S. and encourages faith and leadership among Hispanics ages 18 to 30. Cooperating organizations include Young Adults for Christ, Charismatic Renewal, Catholic Volunteer Network, and Encuentro.

“One challenge is how to reach teenagers,” Malone said. “They speak a mixture of Spanish and English, but they continue to pray in Spanish, which is how their parents taught them to pray. Their faith is in Spanish,” she continued. “Their devotions are Hispanic,” said Malone, who described the Latin American tradition of novenas in honor of the Virgin Mary, patron saints, and to obtain graces, especially for departed family members. “Here in the U.S., this isn’t as well known, but continues among Hispanics although they now live in a different place,” she said.

 “Unfortunately, the U.S. has an individualistic culture, and an interiorized faith, that is not communitarian,” Malone said, adding that it is unlike Latin America and Spain, where expressions of Catholic faith such as Holy Week processions can involve an entire community.

“The Holy Father is asking us to be a communitarian Church and share our faith for the benefit of everyone rather than keeping something inside of us, but to express it communally. The Pope is inviting us to make our faith visible, instead of a private,” Malone said.

“Young immigrants arrive here and are not enriched by the very tangible traditions that they had at home, which are expressed vividly and every day, but by a more interior faith. There are some who feel that they have to choose to be either American or Hispanic. Those who embrace a Hispanic identity tend to embrace its religious tradition,” said Malone.

“Many Americans have lost touch with their ancestral roots,” Malone said, and added, “Maybe they don’t understand that we Hispanics are still very tied to our culture. However, some Americans do want to know about the faith of their own ancestors.”

However, Malone said some elderly Texans remember the prayers their grandparents said in Czech, describing a February 20 commemorative Mass celebrated at Holy Trinity Catholic parish in Corn Hill TX. “I thought it was very beautiful for the priest to say the Mass in Czech and remember parish origins and traditions. That’s something people long for: their roots, their history,” she said.  

Deacon David Delaney PhD said in an interview, “One of the challenges faced in the U.S. is that outreach to Hispanics is dominated by those who see it more as a sociological concern than one of the faith. Too often the priority is more almost exclusively about integrating Spanish-speakers into society, gaining necessary skills and providing for basic needs, but with too little concern for their faith life.” While saying this description does not fit most bishops, Delaney said some bishops and much of Catholic social services “are generally not as concerned adequately concerned for their spiritual needs or for of their Catholic faith.”

“Evangelization should address both material and spiritual needs,” he said.

Delaney – founder of the Mother of the Americas Institute and former academic dean of the Mexican American Catholic College, San Antonio TX – emphasized that an integral approach which begins which begins with the particular circumstances of individuals, addressing their most pressing issues but always with the priority given to their spiritual good should be the foundation of any evangelization effort among Hispanics and other Americans.

The institute describes itself as think-tank for the new evangelization, "through theoretical and practical research, publishing, education and training. The results of research are applied through concrete strategies, methods and compelling approaches for expressing the faith. MAI’s unique contribution is that we believe we can improve the fruitfulness of current and future evangelization efforts by adjusting the predominant focus on outcomes driven strategies by providing new means and methods which arise from an adequate theological anthropology.”

Hispanic Diversity

Using the terms ‘Hispanic’ and ‘Latino’ can mask the diversity of people Latin American immigrants, cautioned one evangelizer. “There is no single kind of Hispanic immigrant in the U.S.,” Dr. Ricardo Grzona said in an interview. He is CEO of the Ramón Pané Foundation in Florida, which offers its dubbed Christonauts spiritual formation and scriptural reading for young people in Spanish, English, Portuguese, and other languages in 20 countries. “So, I can’t speak of just one challenge that faces the evangelization of Hispanics,” he said.

Grzona noted that Cubans are concentrated in Miami, while cities such as Phoenix, Chicago, and Seattle attract immigrants from other Latin American countries. “We can’t speak of ‘the Hispanics’ in the U.S. because they come from very diverse social and cultural backgrounds,” he asserted. “Not all of them come for the same reasons or have the same hopes,” he said. “A Cuban fleeing communism is not the same as a Guatemalan fleeing poverty. They’re very different,” he said. “Not everyone is looking exclusively for economic gain. Some seek freedom and peace,” he said.

“There are people who come here from Latin America who don’t speak Spanish. North of Miami, there is a diocese where Guatemalans settled and found work. They speak their own language: K’iché. They hardly understand Spanish, and communicate with each other in K’iché,” Grzona said. “A big challenge for the Church is to find priests and catechists who speak that language,” he said.

When asked to account for the apparent drop in the number of Hispanic Catholics, he asked, “What sort of Catholicism did they have in their country in the first place?” While analysts claim there is a decline in the number of Hispanic Catholics, he said, “Of Latin American immigrants who join Protestant churches, one should ask whether they were Catholics back home.”

“Someone who comes from Costa Rica, which has a very strong framework of catechism and education, is not the same as someone from Guatemala,” Grzona said. He observed that only 45 percent of Guatemalans are Catholic, and that Protestant sects there are now well-financed and deeply rooted.

Grzona applauded a number of Catholic evangelization efforts in the U.S. especially those led by laity, but singled out the Iskali Community of the Chicago suburbs as a model. Iskali describes itself as a Catholic organization that “exists to empower and equip young Latinos with high-quality faith formation” and leadership. “Iskali believes in young people, and the power of faith and community to help individuals reach their full potential,” its website said.

Referring to Iskali, Grzona said, “They decided to adopt Spanglish, a mixture of Spanish and English, Spanish or English, and invite young people to meetings and activities. They have had great success with thousands of young people, helping find decent jobs and go to school. But while one successful movement in one diocese does a good job where it is, it’s not enough. We need more people with determination to do more work like what they do.”

“We need to give ongoing faith formation and people need to get together. The pandemic greatly affected the Church because people need to meet. Hispanics need to get together in reality and not just virtually on Zoom,” he said. “Having Mass in Spanish is wonderful, but not enough. We need permanent evangelization in Spanish,” he emphasized. Casa Iskali, near Chicago, has a chapel, dorm rooms, and a conference center operated by the movement to teach the Catholic faith and form evangelists in a group setting.

Movements like Iskali, Grzona said, are successful because they provide ongoing faith formation. “The Church in the U.S. emphasizes sacraments and events,” he said. “An event such as the Religious Education Congress, recently concluded in Los Angeles, is marvelous and like a three-day-long bath in renewal.”

“But those events are like buckets of water wasted if there is no permanent structure for teaching the faith,” he said.

As a young man in his native Argentina, Grzona received spiritual direction from Fr. Jorge Bergolio – the future Pope Francis. Grzona took up his friend’s challenge to devote his life to lay evangelism. Grzona’s foundation honors the name of Ramón Pané: a lay hermit the Hieronymite Order who accompanied Christopher Columbus’ second voyage to America in 1493. Pané was a pioneer missionary and anthropologist who learned the language of Caribbean natives and wrote the first book by a European in the Americas: “An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians.”

What is Evangelization?

“In a broad sense, evangelization is everything the Church does to bring Jesus into the world: including proclaiming the Gospel, ministering the sacraments, acts of charity, transforming the culture, serving the poor,” Dr. Mary Healy of Sacred Heart Seminary of Detroit said in an interview. “But it’s very important to not lose sight of the strict, proper sense of evangelization, which is used in the New Testament, to proclaim the Good News of Jesus to those who don’t know Him with the goal of leading them to the faith and ultimately to communion with Him in the Church,” the best-selling author and speaker said.

Healy teaches courses on Scripture, chairs the Doctrinal Commission of International Catholic Charismatic Renewal Services (ICCRS), and is a member of the Pentecostal-Catholic International Dialogue and the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

“In the strict sense, we haven’t been good at that for centuries,” Healy said in reference to evangelization. “For centuries, the Church mostly was in a part of the world that was essentially Christian with a few pockets of other faiths. But we lost the art of proclaiming the basic kerygma – the core Good News of salvation of Jesus Christ – to those who don’t yet know Him. That’s what the Church has been re-learning since the Second Vatican Council,” she said. Kerygma is ‘proclamation’ in Greek.

“All of the popes since Vatican II have called for a new evangelization, and that every Catholic should be a missionary disciple. It’s a skill we have to re-learn, and a mission we have to understand better and equip ourselves better to carry out. Once we do that, we realize that we can’t do without the Holy Spirit,” Healy said.

“The Holy Spirit is the primary agent of evangelization, and the Acts of the Apostles is our model. The Holy Spirit is the initiator, the force, the guide, the energy of the whole mission of the Church. But there is a temptation to do it on our own: to create a program, a strategic plan, and do our thing, and then ask the Holy Spirit to bless what we’re doing, rather than a radical reliance on Him as the initiator and guide of everything we do,” Healy affirmed.

As for methods that Catholics, especially the laity, should use, Healy said, “It’s simpler than you think. You don’t need a theological degree. The number one criterion for an evangelist is to fall in love with Jesus Christ. Love is attractive. Romance is attractive. People who are in love with Jesus don’t need to take a course in how to evangelize: they just start talking about Him because they can’t help it. They want people to meet their best friend. It becomes a natural thing.”

For his part, Grzona called on church leaders to evangelize by using aspects of Latin American folklore and religiosity. “Mexicans celebrate the Virgin of Guadalupe, Dominicans have the Virgin of Altagracia, and celebrate their feast days with food and culture,” he said. Saying that many Catholics celebrate St. Patrick’s Day by going to Mass or filling the bars, he suggested that clergy could offer Masses in honor of the Virgin Mary with festivals incorporating Hispanic food and culture.

Grzona said, finally, that the namesake of his foundation practiced daily reading of the Lectio Divina. “He became the first evangelizer of the Americas, this lay associate of the Hieronymites. Ramón Pané did not seek to impose a culture but understood that to evangelize he had to learn the natives Taino language rather than expecting them to learn the Gospels in Latin. It’s important to note that he was a layman, not a priest. Likewise, we want to recover the laity’s evangelical mission in the Church.”

Martin Barillas is a retired diplomat, and author of the historical novel 'Shaken Earth.' It is available at Amazon. Autographed copies are available by contacting martinbarillasdelapena@gmail.com