Chant Café

Earlier this morning I received an email from my friend (and mentor) Aristotle Esquerra. He’d attached a link to an article in the periodical, U.S. Catholic, the title of which adorns the title of this post, and asked me for my thoughts. My M.O. for doing this sort of thing is to copy it over to word processing, and give a sort of “first blush” consideration and reaction. After I sent that back to Aristotle I figured I don’t have to be a fool privately, I can show my ignorance in public as I am prone to do. The quoted portions of the article are obviously excerpted and therefore out of context. You, dear reader, can take in the whole article here.

When Gini Eagen came to Corpus Christi Catholic Church in Stone Mountain, Georgia three decades ago, the parish had “a very white population,” she says. Now Eagen is the church’s pastoral associate, and things have changed. “We are today the Catholic Church I used to picture in my prayer life,” she says.
“You name it, we got some,” laughs pastor and U.S. Catholic editor Father John Molyneux, C.M.F. “The town next to where we live in Stone Mountain is where Georgia has chosen to settle the refugees; therefore whoever comes we settle into our parish because we’re the closest Catholic parish.”

The community’s diversity might have transformed it into Eagen’s childhood ideal, but it has also created challenges. With a symphony of languages and a collage of ethnicities, culturally specific ministry is difficult to organize. Meanwhile, the sanctuary cannot accommodate the whole parish, so full-community, multicultural liturgies are logistically impossible.

Already implicitly missing from this account is any mention, or presupposition that immigrants of diverse languages are, I believe, socially if not legally mandated to confront the need to acquire basic English language skills (driving licenses and such), whether or not they intend to become citizens. They cannot totally escape the lingua franca imperative in various social and economic environments. So, why does the author maintain a predisposition towards automatic accommodation of linguistic divergence? It seems an extreme prejudice towards PC.

Corpus Christi is not alone with these blessings and challenges. In the increasingly diverse U.S. Catholic Church, emerging multicultural, multilingual parishes are struggling to celebrate liturgical unity in the absence of uniformity

Corpus Christi has parishioners from Sudan, Burundi, Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Eritrea, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia, Cuba, and Peru—among others.“You name it, we got some,” laughs pastor and U.S. Catholic editor Father John Molyneux, C.M.F. “The town next to where we live in Stone Mountain is where Georgia has chosen to settle the refugees; therefore whoever comes we settle into our parish because we’re the closest Catholic parish.”The community’s diversity might have transformed it into Eagen’s childhood ideal, but it has also created challenges. With a symphony of languages and a collage of ethnicities, culturally specific ministry is difficult to organize. Meanwhile, the sanctuary cannot accommodate the whole parish, so full-community, multicultural liturgies are logistically impossible.  Corpus Christi is not alone with these blessings and challenges. In the increasingly diverse U.S. Catholic Church, emerging multicultural, multilingual parishes are struggling to celebrate liturgical unity in the absence of uniformity.“This will become more evident in the next two decades. We are transitioning into a new way of being U.S. Catholics that is more diverse. Instead of hoping for some sort of assimilation, we are giving birth to a new way of being Catholic.”

The above statement is astonishingly ignorant, if not antithetical, to the very definition of being “catholic.” And it has a puerile echo (“giving birth”) to “sing a New Church into being.”

One reason for the demographic shift is immigration. In its statement Welcoming the Stranger Among Us: Unity in Diversity, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops explains, “War, economic distress, the desire to be reunited with families, and the new legal opportunities since the 1960s have prompted a diverse immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific Islands, the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.”
Meanwhile, the 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life finds almost half of all immigrants are Catholic.

Viatorian Father Mark Francis, professor of liturgical inculturation at the Pontifical Liturgical Institute of Sant’Anselmo in Rome says, “The question, then, is raised: How [do we] to minister to these diverse populations? Especially, how is the established monocultural parish to welcome and minister to people who are of different cultures and some who speak different languages?”

How about making sure that understanding “welcoming and ministering” does not automatically constitute a necessarily artificial dismantling of the “established monocultural parish ‘ethos.’” Monocultural is not a narrow, easily defined descriptor. Is a parish comprised of tens upon tens of ethnically diverse and blended faithful that has the apparent ability to worship in one vernacular, or in Latin for that matter, essentially “monocultural?”

Refugees from all over the world celebrate the parish’s English-language liturgies together at Corpus Christi. “When you look out at the Our Father and you see so many different people holding hands, you think, ‘This is what the reign of God looks like,’ ”