Boston, Mass., Jun 11, 2009 / 09:10 am
In a Monday speech at Boston College, Archbishop of San Antonio José H. Gomez addressed a national symposium about the challenges and opportunities facing Hispanic Catholics in the United States. Noting the “aggressive” secular culture and “material and spiritual poverty” among Hispanics, he called for better education about their own history and the “fullness of the Gospel.”
Speaking as chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Cultural Diversity before the National Symposium on the Present and Future of Catholic Hispanic Ministry in the United States, Archbishop Gomez discussed how leaders should address major challenges at a time when Hispanics are poised to become a numerical majority.
In his address, titled “La predicación y la enseñanza: Evangelization, Education, and the Hispanic Catholic Future,” the archbishop mentioned such problems as a consumerist approach to religion and certain Protestant preachers’ exploitation of the “poverty and insecurity” of Hispanics.
He also named racism as a difficulty, saying its impact had been exposed in the country’s “ugly, unproductive, and unfinished” immigration debate. He suggested Hispanics’ feelings of being scapegoated in society and marginalized in Catholic life could make them look elsewhere.