Notes from "The Shared Parish," Center for Migration Studies, Part 2

This post is a continuation of part one.
During Dr. Brett Hoover’s presentation, he raised several learnings from the research that led to his book, The Shared Parish (NYU Press, 2014), and his work since then.

He highlighted the emotional tenor of shared parishes, which are often, borrowing from Fr. Stephen Dudek, “crucibles of grief,” as the different communities involved in shared parishes realize that they cannot readily have some of the important things that they want and need for their faith lives.
Dr. Hoover underscored that the anger felt by many white Catholics in his study was, he argued, related to a sense of grief and loss that may or may not be able to be named due to the tensions in the community and/or lack of opportunities for reckoning with it. African-American Catholics can, he said, feel like their hard-won Catholic communities are being lost forever when they must now be shared with recent immigrants, a “feeling like you’re disappearing,” as Dr. Hoover summarized it. Often the various “sides” in a shared parish feel as if they do not have the power that they should have. Frequently, Latino/a Catholics in shared parishes experience a sense of “not feeling at home,” he said. How can a shared parish be one in which divisions between “hosts” and “newcomers” not lead to breakdowns in ministry?
Dr. Hoover, however, argued that there are reasons for hope. One reason would be the notion of “biblical hospitality” as a resource for shared parishes. In this idea, he suggested, “God speaks through strangers” as seen in various biblical stories. A second reason is that it is possible for dominant-culture persons in shared parishes to be “converted” to activism through hearing stories of immigrant experience. There is work to be done in making these reasons more real in the life of shared parishes.
More to come in future posts…
Tom Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York