G
gilliam
Guest
GAINESVILLE, Georgia (AP) — The St. John Paul II Pastoral Center, a Roman Catholic mission, sits at the rough end of a former strip mall in the shadow of an Arby’s. The space, Church leaders say, was once used as a nightclub and movie theater, a history now hidden by multiple coats of paint, pews brought in from other congregations, and a stone-and-wood shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of the Americas especially revered by Mexicans.
This mission, in the Archdiocese of Atlanta, was built in a hurry, to serve the many Latinos who labor at the poultry processing plants that form the economic backbone of Gainesville. On a recent Sunday, worshippers spilled onto the sidewalk in rows two and three deep, and by the end of the weekend, 5,000 people had attended Mass here.
Evangelicals have set up shop here, too. Georgia is Baptist country and a Bible Belt stronghold where Catholics had a small footprint until the latest immigration boom. The Rev. William Canales, the cherubic, Nicaraguan pastor of the mission, noted with a twinkle in his eye that a Protestant preacher in the same mall had recently moved on.
“The Catholic Church in Gainesville — we are waking up now,” Canales said, on the eve of the first visit to the United States by Pope Francis, the first Latin American pontiff.
Francis will arrive in the United States on Sept. 22, carrying the hopes of many for what he might do for American Catholicism. But few of these goals have as much urgency for Church leaders as affirming the place of Latinos in the Church and inspiring them to stay in the fold.
About 38 percent of adult Catholics in the United States are Latino, according to the CARA research center at Georgetown University, and they are already the majority in several dioceses.
cruxnow.com/church/2015/09/10/pope-francis-will-find-a-us-church-struggling-to-hold-onto-latinos/
This mission, in the Archdiocese of Atlanta, was built in a hurry, to serve the many Latinos who labor at the poultry processing plants that form the economic backbone of Gainesville. On a recent Sunday, worshippers spilled onto the sidewalk in rows two and three deep, and by the end of the weekend, 5,000 people had attended Mass here.
Evangelicals have set up shop here, too. Georgia is Baptist country and a Bible Belt stronghold where Catholics had a small footprint until the latest immigration boom. The Rev. William Canales, the cherubic, Nicaraguan pastor of the mission, noted with a twinkle in his eye that a Protestant preacher in the same mall had recently moved on.
“The Catholic Church in Gainesville — we are waking up now,” Canales said, on the eve of the first visit to the United States by Pope Francis, the first Latin American pontiff.
Francis will arrive in the United States on Sept. 22, carrying the hopes of many for what he might do for American Catholicism. But few of these goals have as much urgency for Church leaders as affirming the place of Latinos in the Church and inspiring them to stay in the fold.
About 38 percent of adult Catholics in the United States are Latino, according to the CARA research center at Georgetown University, and they are already the majority in several dioceses.
cruxnow.com/church/2015/09/10/pope-francis-will-find-a-us-church-struggling-to-hold-onto-latinos/