On 19 February, I attended a terrific event at the Center for Migration Studies, on the East Side of Manhattan, titled “The Shared Parish: Latinos, Anglos, and the Future of U.S. Catholicism.” I thought some notes on the session might be of interest to APT members and friends.
The Executive Director of CMS, Donald M. Kerwin, Jr., served as moderator. The main presentation was given by Dr. Brett Hoover of Loyola Marymount University, who has been active in practical theological circles, and who wrote the recently published book, The Shared Parish: Latinos, Anglos, and the Future of U.S. Catholicism (NYU Press, 2014). There were two respondents: Ms. Maria del Mar Muñoz-Visoso, the Executive Director of the Secretariat for Cultural Diversity in the Church for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops; and Fr. Walter Tonelotto, pastor of Our Lady of Pompeii Catholic Church in Greenwich Village in Manhattan.
The topic for the day was the complexities of “shared” Catholic parishes, wherein more than one ethnic-racial-cultural community is present and each community must find ways of relating to the other. This is not the “integration within a parish” model — it is more the “let each community have its own experience of church as much as possible” model. And it is quite common in the USA among Roman Catholic churches.
In my next post, I will give further summary of the session.
Tom Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York
Associate Professor of Homiletics – Boston University School of Theology
September 19, 2024
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