Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Download MP3
The Catholic Church in the United States faces many other challenges. Attendance at some of its churches are near empty, while others are full. The growth in the Church has come largely from immigrants, who often want to worship in their own language and style. Older churchgoers don’t always like that. A documentary that airs tonight on many PBS stations documents these tensions. (Audio available after 5PM EST)
Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.
KATY CLARK: The Catholic Church in the U.S. faces many other challenges. Attendance at many of its churches has dwindled. Though in some places it’s grown, that growth has come almost exclusively from immigrants who often want to worship in their own language and style. Other churchgoers don’t always like that. A documentary that airs tonight on PBS as part of the Independent Lens series focuses on these tensions. Here’s The World’s Patrick Cox.
PATRICK COX: The film is called “Scenes From a Parish.” The crew spent five years following several parishioners of Saint Patrick’s in Lawrence, Massachusetts. It’s one of the poorest cities in the country, and a hub for Puerto Ricans and Dominican immigrants.
ELVYS GUZMAN: [In Spanish]
COX: Elvys Guzman is one of the people profiled in the documentary. He was raised in the Dominican Republic, and to the older parishioners at Saint Patrick’s he still looks like the gang member he once was, with his tattoos and street swagger. Guzman is one of hundreds of people at Saint Patrick’s who celebrate mass in Spanish. The church has greatly expanded its services to Spanish speakers, offending older parishioners like Edna McGregor.
EDNA MC GREGOR: When I found out that the mass was being done in Spanish and English, I called and I asked to speak to Father Paul. He was on the other line so I left him a message. And in the message I put, “Father Paul, if the mass is done in Spanish and English, I wish you would get somebody else to take my place because I do not get anything out of the mass.”
JAMES RUTENBECK: I talked to someone who visited Saint Patrick’s in the 1970s and he said it was like being in Dublin. It was a provincial church with a very strong Irish-American identity.
COX: This is James Rutenbeck, director of Scenes From a Parish. He says Puerto Ricans and Dominicans started moving to Lawrence in the 1970s, just as the city’s economy was collapsing, its great textile mills closing. White people left by the tens of thousands. Some stayed but they haven’t forgotten those times.
FATHER O’BRIEN: There’s a whole history there that’s very difficult for many of the older residents to process. And the idea of people not speaking English and speaking Spanish only is a real point of contention for them because the Spanish is so much associated with all that trauma of their pain.
COX: Which is why Father Paul O’Brien, who runs Saint Patrick’s, has faced such opposition. The Harvard educated Father Paul is the central figure in film. He shoots hoops with young Latinos, and he raises money to build a community center. As a Spanish speaking Irish- American, he stands for what the Catholic Church in the United States might become. In the film he defends the changes he has made at Saint Patrick’s.
FATHER PAUL: There are people who tell me how much they resent me for leading a parish that will not be mono-cultural or mono-linguistic. There are rare people who will actually sit down and tell me I’m very angry with you, would you please leave, whatever. Why are you doing this to us? Why are you taking these things away? There are more people who will leave me anonymous voicemails and scream those things at me.
COX: Not that any that dissuades Father Paul from continuing to offer mass in Spanish. It’s his belief that people need to worship in their native tongue, in their own way. Filmmaker James Rutenbeck, himself a practicing Catholic, shares that belief. He’s come to love the Spanish services at Saint Patrick’s.
RUTENBECK: There’s so much more energy and vitality and a kind of spiritual expression there that you don’t see at the 4 o’clock mass on a Saturday where it’s very quiet and reserved and less expressive.
COX: The documentary is full of Spanish language devotional songs. For Paul McManus, another priest at Saint Patrick’s, they represent how the church should move forward in a city like Lawrence, even in the face of opposition.
FATHER MCMANUS: The resistance may have spoken with their feet and may have walked to other places. But the fact is this immigration wave hasn’t ended. It’s been going on for decades and for one reason or another they’re still coming, and they’re coming in great numbers. And so while there are needs in other languages, the greatest need here in Lawrence is to be open and to assist our brothers and sisters who are speaking, some of them only Spanish.
COX: And so, in the space of a few years, this one Catholic parish has flipped its unofficial language of worship from overwhelmingly English to predominantly Spanish. For The World, I’m Patrick Cox.
CLARK: You can hear more coverage of language in our weekly podcast, The World in Words. Just go to theworld.org/language.
Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.
Discussion
No comments for “Immigrants and the Catholic Church”