BY HOSFFMAN OSPINO, P H .D.
Path © Sr. Pat Willems, CSJ, ministryofthearts.org
“How do you imagine heaven?” This is a question I like to ask children and adults in the parish where I teach catechesis. I also like to pose the question to my graduate students as they prepare for ministry or teaching careers.
The answers I hear often reflect the vivid imagination of writers, creative artists, and the rich biblical and theological worldviews that sustain Christian spirituality. “Heaven is like a beautiful city with streets paved with pure gold,” some say. Others imagine heaven as a space with people wearing white robes eternally praising God through prayer and song.
Other people say that they imagine heaven as a family, a place to spend eternity with their loved ones. This is one of my favorite images. However, I am mindful that we all have our own understanding of what a family can be. When we think about who is in our family, there is an implied assumption of who is not or cannot be included. But heaven is universal—everyone
and everything will be there, contemplating God with undivided attention. Not just some, or those who we like or understand, or those who agree with us. Everyone.
I recall this vision of heaven when thinking about parish ministry, specifically in multicultural churches. Of the 16,412 Catholic parishes in the United States (as of 2023), about 40 percent or more than 6,500 are multicultural parishes, most serving Hispanic Catholics.1 These are parishes that offer liturgical services in both English and at least one additional language, and they intentionally serve the spiritual needs of several racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse groups.
1 USCCB Committee on Cultural Diversity in the Church, Subcommittee on Hispanic Affairs, Diocesan Survey on Parishes and Hispanic/Latino Ministry (Washington, D.C.: USCCB, August 2024), https://www.usccb.org/resources/Diocesan%20Survey%20on%20 Parishes%20and%20HispanicLatino%20Ministry%202024.pdf
Multicultural parishes invite us to expand our understanding of what it means to be church. The differences that have historically defined us will be embraced in full as we contemplate God in eternity as a diverse community. God made us diverse and will save us as a diverse community. Just as it is tempting to reduce our understanding of heaven to pristine images and homogeneity, so it can be tempting to reduce the idea of parish life to spaces where difference is avoided or treated as a problem.
Although every parish offers us a glimpse of heaven, we are privileged to have about 6,500 faith communities that invite us to experience heaven on Earth through cultural diversity. When I imagine heaven, I start with my faith community: St. Patrick Parish in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
St. Patrick’s is a multicultural and multiracial Catholic parish. We worship and share the faith in three languages: English, Spanish, and Vietnamese. We have parishioners whose families have been in this land for many generations and parishioners who migrated to the United States in recent years.
We don’t always agree on every detail when planning the liturgy or determining what language we should use for social events. Our parishioners have very particular views about one another. Just because we are Catholic, we don’t stop being human! Sometimes we look at one another with suspicion or puzzlement; there are many times when we don’t understand one another—literally—as we speak or do certain things. Nonetheless, we are one parish, one family.
Despite our differences—I am proud of these differences, because they make us who we are—I am truly inspired by the realities and convictions that make us one.
One, we believe in the same one God who made everything, who sustains us with the gift of grace, and who calls us to salvation in Jesus Christ. In the Eucharist, celebrated in various languages every week and multilingually every now and then, we find meaning as a community of faith.
Two, we are committed to passing on the faith to the next generations and thus invest generously in various programs of faith formation in different languages. We share our faith with urgency in the present with a profound sense of hope for the future.
Three, we intentionally strive every day to see the face of Christ in those who are most in need. Lawrence, Massachusetts, is one of the poorest cities in New England, and our people struggle with many needs. Yet, those same people enrich everyone’s life and that of our faith community with countless gifts.
Photos used with permission of
In our multicultural parish, the face of Christ we encounter every day is white, Black, Asian, Hispanic, young, old, citizen, undocumented, poor, rich, sad, happy, eager, tired, hopeful, hopeless, professional, laborer, unemployed, homeless, fulfilled, hungry, able, disabled, highly educated, illiterate, etc. One of our most powerful ministries is the Cor Unum Meal Center, which feeds about 500 people of all backgrounds every day.
When I ask people to share how they imagine eternal life, I often invite them to think of St. Patrick’s as a glimpse of heaven. Some receive the idea with hesitation. Others quip in disbelief: “Our community is rather messy and too diverse; we don’t see eye to eye on many things.” Yet, these three convictions make us one: We all know ourselves as called to be in relationship with the God of life, we believe it is vital for the future of our church that the next generations know and live their faith, and we constantly welcome Christ in the other without making any exceptions. Once I share these commonalities, then everyone agrees: Yes, our multicultural parish gives us a glimpse of heaven and an experience of everyone and everything in God, here and now.
Hosffman Ospino, Ph.D. is a professor of theology and religious education at Boston College, Clough School of Theology and Ministry, where he serves as the chair of the department of Religious and Pastoral Ministry. Email: ospinoho@bc.edu If you want to learn more about how St. Patrick Parish anticipates heaven for the nearly 7,000 families that live in its territory, visit saintpatrickparish.com