To say she was a practicing Catholic would be an understatement. For years, Maria Aparecida Calazans was a mainstay at her Long Island church, joining dozens of fellow Brazilian immigrants for the Portuguese language Mass on Sunday mornings. She and her husband, Ramon, were married at the church. Their two daughters were baptized there, and every Friday she attended a prayer meeting that she had helped organize.
But six years ago, her husband went to a relative’s baptism at a Pentecostal church in a warehouse in Astoria, Queens, and came home smitten.
The couple made a deal. “We would go to the Pentecostal service on Thursdays and to Mass on Sundays, and then we would decide which one we felt most comfortable with,” Mrs. Calazans said.
Within 40 days, they had given up Roman Catholicism and embraced Pentecostalism, following the path of the estimated 1.3 million Latino Catholics who have joined Pentecostal congregations since immigrating to the United States, according to a survey released in February by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
“I feel whole here,” Mrs. Calazans, 42, said one recent Sunday in the Astoria sanctuary, the Portuguese Language Pentecostal Missionary Church, as she swayed to the pop-rock beat of a live gospel band. “This church is not a place we visit once a week. This church is where we hang around and we share our problems and we celebrate our successes, like we were family.”
If I were their priest, I would have suggested they attend a Catholic Charismatic Prayer Group before making a decision to leave the Church. I was wonderfully fed not only at the prayer groups but the charismatic Mass I attended every Sunday at St. Paul of the Cross on Singer Island, in south Florida.
One might also try OCA. There is the powerful sense of the Holy Spirit flowing there that is beyond anything I’ve ever experienced in the Episcopal church. I can’t say anything about Catholic mass that I only attended once.
The “happy, clappy congregations” will continue to grow as long as the Baby Boomer’s mantras – do your own thing etc – control the American
ethos. They changed American society from an Apollonian to a Dionysian society – and that it is still where we are fixated. The public display of “feeling” is and has been for forty years a mandatory sign that you are alive. This is not the Holy Spirit, it is a common form of hysteria, a kind of group hypnosis, that makes the participant feel purged and, such people tell me, refreshed. This is not surprising, after all, for American life is so bitterly tense, anxious, threatening, confrontational, facelessly technological, that relief is necessary for many, and pentacostalism is one panacea. I am not unsympathetic, actually, for the problem is painfully real, but one need only go to a rousing pentacostal service to see that Christianity has little to do with what is going on. It is simply an attempt to create what has been utterly lost, namely, the sense of belonging to a face-to-face community, a REAL one, not some manufactured ersatz on the internet. Larry
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In my experience this is something we Catholics do very poorly. I’ve never gotten the sense of welcome or hospitality in any of the myriad Catholic parishes I’ve visited that I got in the most protestant churches. I usually cite Advent Episcopal in Tallahassee as one of the best examples of a REAL “welcoming” parish family. Even though I only attended there once or twice, the parishoners and clergy made me feel as though it had been my church home my whole life.
Perhaps it’s US Catholic culture to just ‘dine and dash’. If so, it’s a pity, for a lot of opportunities to bring people into the Church are lost each Sunday as newcomers feel lost, unwelcome, and out of place.
Dodge City, Kansas has a large Hispanic community, and what struck me as interesting was the large number of Spanish speaking churches (Non denominational) that there were. Just one RC church (the cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe) . Most of the Hispanic Churches were led by Hispanic (obviously) clergy, whilst the cathedral had no Hispanic clergy (maybe a deacon though?). I believe that could be he other reason that the Roman Church is losing ground?
I did the charismatic thing when I was young, and profited greatly. Part of the profit derived from balancing the charismatic with the stability of the institution. Be that as it may, when it became clear that 1.) Jesus wasn’t going to return immediately, and 2.) that I wasn’t going to die young, I experienced a longing for that which lasts, as opposed to the ephemeral sea-storm of feelings, i.e. the objective which grounds the subjective.
So let me second LJim’s #1 and NO’s #2. And I will also note that while the stats are what they are, every majority hispanic parish in my city (including mine) has been (over the past 5 years), or is now in, a building program. At least 4 have built larger worship spaces and/or a complete new campus.