TABLE DISCUSSIONS

Participant Comments:

FR. ROBERT ROSSI: My religious community has been working to contribute something to the question of spiritual direction for future ministers in the Hispanic community. And we feel that while there may be initiatives to increase the number of lay leaders particularly, and there will be a huge crowd in the future, obviously, as our Church grows, what about the spiritual accompaniment of these people?

innovations and collaborations could contribute to strengthening current leadership development for Hispanic leaders?” best practices and creative ideas could facilitate organization capacity building for Hispanic ministry groups?”

ANDREA HATTLER BRAMSON:

We see that CALL is obviously reaching out to Latino leaders and have the ability to share that information amongst themselves, and then we see a dearth of information, or dearth of resources perhaps, from NCADDHM, as well as for some of the other organizations. Maybe there is some commonality that we can identify here within ourselves that we could actually leverage some of the networks that we are establishing. We can do this.

So that is part of the conflict that we are experiencing, that we are still functioning under one culture that is no longer dominant, and unfortunately the dominant culture is not being served to the capacity that they should be.

And there is a great thirst for that even today, and a great dearth of resources as we can see – such as training, forming spiritual directors within the Hispanic context - and that is the challenge because the Hispanic context, or the Hispanic understanding of spiritual accompaniment, is not necessarily the same as the Anglo understanding. So in Phoenix, Carminando Juntos is something that we have begun. I think it might be very useful to the Church of the future.

FR. JOHN HURLEY: I was struck by the use of the word “the dominant culture” because the dominant culture in the Catholic Church is not what most people perceive it to be and yet we are still functioning with a culture that is no longer meeting the needs of the majority in the Church. The paradigm shift that is required is something that goes back to the iceberg mentality; it is an issue that most people do not want to acknowledge. When our Holy Father is speaking about going to the peripheries, we do not have to go very far. They are in front of us. They are coming to church, and not always feeling welcomed. We need to address some of those issues. If we were to look at the majority of our diocesan budgets, where are we dealing with leadership development? How do we deal with that within the parish context? It is one thing to form these leaders, but then where are they going to serve?

PARTICIPANT: My suggestion is to improve the relationship with families and youth, to be involved more in developing different activities and learning from the families what their needs are: Listen to the needs they have, and develop leadership programs, and help the members of the Church to understand that every human being has gifts and talents, and help them to accept the gifts and talents and train with the Church to be leaders in their own church.

I believe these are the values we have in ARISE, and we have good responses to the community. And I believe the Church can be very successful too, and involve the youth in helping, and listen then to the needs they have and how they can respond to the needs. But, we believe in building the dignity of the person; they will be more encouraged and have more energy to do what they need to do to be better members of the Church and better members of the community.

My invitation is also to be open to collaborate between other organizations, because we are nonprofit organizations, and when we empower each other, we can do better for our own community. So be open to finding strengths in other organizations. We’re serving all around the Church and sharing trainings, programs, and services we have, because they make more community relationships, and more strong relations between organization, community and Church. level of cultural awareness. And cultural awareness leads to cultural competence. Many years ago the Catholic Church, when it came in to Mexico specifically, found that it needed a cultural icon in order to convert the indigenous people to Catholicism. A miracle occurred and we were introduced to the Virgen de Guadalupe. The Virgen de Guadalupe was a mestizo -looking saint and became the icon, not only of the Catholic Church but of Mexico itself. We know how to sell religion. We know how to sell leadership. And we know how to sell what we have spiritually, economically, and educationally to the people. We just have to make a commitment to follow through.

“This is our strategic plan; how are we funding it and where is that priority?” and get really honest about what that looks like.

From my experience with Catholic schools, someone who has worked with me, who is working in Florida is Hispanic CREO: the Council on Reform and Educational Options. The way they engaged the community in Florida was fascinating to me. They had large health fairs and met people where their needs were and what they were looking for, and had folks come out for blood pressure screenings and all kinds of healthrelated needs and began to talk to them about education and the Church.

PATRICK MCGRORY: What was interesting was when you look at the structure of diocesan offices, what does it say when you have a separate office for Hispanic ministry? And why can Hispanics not just be integrated into the other offices throughout the diocese? And I sort of jokingly said we do not see any diocese with offices for women, to integrate women into the roles within the diocese itself, but rather women are under-represented within diocesan leadership. So how can we include women, and include Hispanics, in the existing structures as opposed to segmenting them out in the creation of their own office?

JIM ESTRADA: I am impressed with the caliber of the people that are presenting relative to leadership. I want to take you back a few years and recount to you the fact that the Catholic Church has a real good

CHRISTINE HEALEY: I think that we should not worry so much about training but inspiring. There are so many great examples of people who are doing great ministry, especially in the city of Camden, where I am from. I do not think we can have this conversation in looking for a seminal shift in the Church to follow the demographics unless we talk about money. We have to unpack the budgets and say,

So there are a lot of different entry points, and we need to open our minds.