Will Our Lady of Guadalupe Have A Chance To Witness In the USA ?

Whispers in the Loggia has two good posts up showing the drastic and indeed exciting changes as to the immigrant nature of the USA Catholic Church . During the past year I highlighted the size able and exciting Vietnamese segment.

Whispers has a nice post up on the Filipino influence. See Merry Simbang: The Church's "Doorbuster" Returns.

However we are now in the midst of the biggest public religious showing of this change. That is the NINE NIGHTS. See Rocco's piece here at Nine Nights.

Rocco has a very good piece up this morning with vids from around the United States showing demographic change via this celebration. See Una Semana Mas..... which also has some good commentary and facts in it that show the exciting times we are in .

He has an interesting observation:
It's no secret, Stateside church -- at least, it shouldn't be -- that we live in amazing days... and even if -- as a handful have, admittedly, cabled in -- the exponents of a loud, albeit small and exhausted "Boutique Catholicism" among us have dared to say "Lord help us" on seeing the change in our midst, even that response is telling, for it fails to grasp our time's most powerful lesson of all: namely, that in sending this mass infusion of youth and energy (and, above all, renewal) among us, He. Already. Is...

...and, clearly, to a degree far more significant than any critics -- especially those ad intra -- could ever hope to muster.

Boutique Catholicism was a term of course used by Pope John Paul the II as a criticism of those that had a pick and choose Catholic faith.

Rocco seems to be saying (I think) in a rather sophisticated way that this infusion will help with that.

However let me be the "GRINCH" here for a second. I think the jury quite honestly is still out if this demographic change will effect the Catholic Church or evangelical protestants more.

This infusion of largely Hispanic immigrants into the USA is for the Worldwide Catholic Church both a blessing and indeed a curse because of timing.

There is no doubt as Rocco has pointed out that this has been a source of renewal and will continue to be so.

However the timing of this migration has been at a rather inopportune time. That is it occurred at a time when the Church has tried to tried to recover from a period of low vocations, general breakdown in it ability to teach the Catholic Faithful the basics, a sex abuse scandal, and just general confusion

The result was a large number of these Catholic immigrants becoming Pentecostals, Evanglicals, Baptists, Fundamentalist etc. I get the impression that local Sunday Morning Church worship shows do not occur as much outside the South. But if you are down here one Sunday morning click on the TV and note the Latino faces in the crowd.

Even now the Church seems to be five steps behind in dealing with this. From the Southern Baptist Convention to other evangelical and pentecostal bodies one just has to look at that their yearly budgets that are devoted to "missionary" activity in certain areas to know we better up it a few notches just in defense!! However from the looks of the United States Catholic Bishops office there seems to be little of a game plan to tackle this yet.

In my rather small Diocese (The Diocese of Shreveport) the Hispanic population is still rather low. However that has not stopped a rather sophisticated and relentless operation ranging from the pentecostal to the most conservative of Southern Baptist congregations of targeting them.

So the question is this. Will Our Lady of Guadalupe have a chance to evangelize the United States for her son or will she be undercut by those former Catholic Latinos that now preach with some zeal that she is nothing more than a pagan goddess.

Well my bet is with Our Lady but if the Church does not get it's act together there will be massive faith casualties. Our Lady can do her part but she needs a little help from us. Which means as Rocco points out means we Anglos better start engaging it more and more.