(RNS) — More than a quarter of U.S. Catholic parishes have at least one Spanish Mass and another 17% have a Latino presence or ministry, according to a new survey released by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The survey, conducted between April and August of this year, revealed significant diversity in the availability of Spanish Masses and Latino ministry in different U.S. dioceses.
Three U.S. dioceses — the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, Pennsylvania; the Diocese of Duluth, Minnesota; and the Diocese of Marquette, Michigan — had no Spanish Masses or Hispanic ministry when the survey was conducted.
In the Diocese of Brownsville, Texas, along the U.S.-Mexican border, every one of its 72 parishes features a Spanish Mass. In most dioceses in Texas, California and Utah, the vast majority of parishes offer Spanish Masses.
The survey is intended to help the U.S. bishops and other Catholic leaders to implement the National Pastoral Plan for Hispanic/Latino Ministry, a program approved by the USCCB last year that aims to strengthen ministry in Latino communities.
“Surveys like this are vital to understand and address the response of the Church to the needs and aspirations of our Hispanic/Latino communities,” Bishop Oscar Cantú, chair of the bishops conference’s subcommittee on Hispanic affairs, said in a statement.
Cantú, who leads the Catholic Diocese of San Jose, California, cited limited resources and numbers of bilingual priests as common obstacles that Catholic dioceses face in engaging in Latino ministry.
The national pastoral plan emerged from V Encuentro, an earlier four-year nationwide consultation process with Hispanic Catholics in the United States that concluded in 2018. The consultation with Hispanic Catholics has been a tradition in the U.S. church since the 1970s, and Latino theologians have argued that it is an example of synodality — of two-way dialogue between lay Catholics and church leaders — before Pope Francis made the theological concept mainstream.
The national pastoral plan, which is designed to be implemented over a 10-year period, lays out general objectives as well as specific, measurable goals.
One goal is to increase the number of Latino priests and men and women religious by 10% to 15% before December 2033. In the past decade, the USCCB website notes, only 10% to 20% of newly ordained priests have been Latino, as have been only 5% to 15% of newly professed religious, despite about a third of U.S. Catholics being Hispanic.
The pastoral plan emphasizes the importance of both Spanish- and English-language activities and Masses for effective Latino ministry, especially for the many families where the parents are most comfortable in Spanish while children are most comfortable in English.
Parishioners attend Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church in the Queens borough of New Yorky, May 8, 2022. (AP Photo/Brittainy Newman, File)
Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research Center, told RNS that, among Latino Catholic adults, 34% are Spanish dominant, 37% are bilingual and 29% are English dominant. Latino Catholics are more likely to be Spanish dominant or bilingual than the broader population of U.S. Latinos, according to a survey conducted in November 2023.
Pew research also shows that the percentage of U.S. Latinos comfortable speaking Spanish decreases with each successive generation born in the U.S. Only 34% of third-generation or higher Latinos speak Spanish “pretty well or very well.”
In the statement from the bishops’ conference, Alejandro Aguilera-Titus, assistant director of Hispanic affairs under the USCCB’s Secretariat of Cultural Diversity in the Church, celebrated the avid response of diocesan leaders to the survey, which represented all 175 dioceses asked to participate.
“The high participation rate reflects the dedication of our dioceses to Hispanic and Latino communities. It is heartening to see such a widespread commitment to build a more integrated and united Catholic Church in the United States,” Aguilera-Titus wrote.
The survey did not include the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA; the Diocese of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands; the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter; or the Eastern Catholic Archeparchies and Eparchies in the United States.