CHARLOTTE — Twelve delegates from the Diocese of Charlotte are ready to participate in the fifth National Encounter of Hispanic Ministry Sept. 20-23 in Grapevine, Texas.
The national event, themed “Missionary Disciples: Witnesses of God’s Love,” is expected to be a crucial turning point for the Catholic Church in America and its response to the growing numbers of Latino Catholics in the United States.
It will focus on discerning ways in which the Church in the U.S. can better respond to the Latino presence and strengthen the ways in which Latinos respond to the call to missionary discipleship. It will be led by U.S. bishops and delegates in diocesan leadership roles from across the country as well as leaders of Catholic ecclesial movements and Catholic organizations and institutions.
The 12 delegates have been commissioned by parishes and vicars of western North Carolina to be the bearers of the voices of thousands of Hispanic Catholics, practicing or not, about their spiritual and material needs in the Charlotte diocese.
Of the 64 parishes in the diocese which serve the Latino community, 42 – counting organized groups – sent final reports of conclusions and suggestions reached during a series of meetings held at the vicariate and regional levels over the past several months.
For Eduardo Bernal, coordinator of the Hispanic Ministry for the Charlotte vicariate, these grassroots-driven recommendations deal with familiar challenges: how to engage youth, improving adult faith formation, and training more lay leaders to assist priests in serving the fast-growing immigrant community of approximately 225,000 Hispanic Catholics in the diocese.
“The development of youth ministry is a very important issue,” Bernal said.
While there is a diocesan youth ministry office, it is predominantly geared to English-speaking youths, he noted. Parishes with large numbers of Hispanic youth have separate youth and faith formation programs in many cases, but the initiative is left to the parishes.
“Although 58 percent of our Catholics under 18 are Hispanic, we do not serve them as we should,” Bernal said. “And we limit ourselves, in the majority of cases, to offering them catechesis.”
“It is true that almost all of them speak English,” he added, “but the idea of some pastors that these children should go to the group in English is not necessarily correct, because there are many cultural differences and they do not feel comfortable.”
Other diocesan priorities that will be brought to the National Encounter are the need to: increase formation and spiritual direction programs for adults, the promotion of religious vocations, an increase in the number of bilingual ministers, training of lay leaders, development of family ministry, and expansion of evangelization efforts.
But not everything the Charlotte group will present are obstacles to overcome. The regional meetings thus far have been valuable in compiling suggestions and proven success strategies that they want to share with other groups, delegates have said.
As Sister Joan Pearson, delegate for the Salisbury vicariate, pointed out, “Now we have to prepare ourselves to be true delegates of our diocese and region.”
At the national level, the V Encuentro process has involved more than 250,000 missionary disciples in organization, collection and processing of information. More than 2,500 lay delegates, 250 bishops, representatives of the Vatican and observers from the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM), the Episcopal Conference of Mexico (CEM) and the Canadian Catholic Bishops Conference (CCCB) are expected to attend the event.
— César Hurtado, Hispanic Reporter