They're not immigrants, but they don't feel fully "American" either: U.S.-born Latinos are struggling to find their place in the U.S. Catholic Church.

As a former Catholic who had given up his faith, Aurelio Manuel Montemayor could not understand why he was weeping at the sight of the Virgin of Guadalupe. He wasn't seeing a vision. The bilingual educator with a master's degree was watching television at his home in San Antonio, Texas, tuned to the Spanish-language station that carried the weekly Mass from the historic San Fernando Cathedral. On this December day about 15 years ago, the church service was celebrating the Guadalupe feast day, which marks the 16th-century apparition of an indigenous, copper-skinned Mother Mary to a poor Aztec peasant at the start of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

The Mass, complete with Mexican mariachis, reminded Montemayor of his days growing up in the border town of Laredo during the 1950s, an era of booming growth for Catholicism. He was the adopted son of a Mexican American couple who worshiped at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, where his mother was the organist and where he served as an altar boy. As a boy, Montemayor recalls, that he became "probably more Catholic than my parents."

Even after moving away from home and becoming a high school teacher, he remained "a real Bible-thumping Catholic for a while," teaching Bible study at night and serving as a padrino at Baptisms by day. But all that changed in the 1970s when Montemayor took up the banner of the Chicano movement, the political and cultural uprising that swept the barrios of the Southwest.

"The institution I aimed my first tirades at was the Catholic Church," he says. At meetings, marches, and in manifestos, he lashed out against what he considered the church's "institutionalized support for peonage."

By the time he found himself crying while watching that Guadalupe Mass, he had long stopped confronting the church. It was now the mid-'90s and he was no longer angry. He just didn't care. He had lost his faith and was drifting.

So why the tears?

"It kind of caught me off guard," remembers Montemayor, 64, who now works for a nonprofit dedicated to improving public schools. "There was obviously still a very strong attachment, but it's funny because in my mind I said, ‘Well, I don't believe in this any more.' It's a deep fond memory. It brings up emotions, but my emotions are not the center of who I am. Old habits die hard."


Wanted: Gente puente
The rocky religious journey of Montemayor, who now practices Buddhist meditation, represents a critical challenge for the Catholic Church in 21st-century America-how to keep itself relevant for the U.S.-born offspring of Latino immigrants as they merge successfully into mainstream U.S. society.

Unlike their immigrant parents, who have been the almost exclusive focus of Hispanic ministry for the past quarter century, these second- and third-generation Latinos speak English, have college degrees, buy homes in the suburbs, and get jobs as professionals.

They are hyphenated Americans who have blended into society to a large degree but who retain a deep-seated connection to their cultural roots and a visceral attachment to a Latino way of worshiping.

Reaching-and retaining-these successful, assimilated Latinos is considered a priority for the church in the coming century. At stake, some say, is nothing less than the future of the Catholic Church in the United States.

Meeting that challenge will require breaking with the old assumptions, political paradigms, and pastoral practices that helped the church serve previous generations of immigrants.

Instead, it will require a multi-faceted, local approach that defies a single national plan. Many parishes have made attempts-youth groups, networking among professionals, special youth retreats called "Chicano Search." So far, though, these efforts have been scattered and results spotty.

When faced with the great influx of immigrants flooding U.S. parishes over the past three decades, the church responded by recruiting Latino priests and ministering to the newcomers in their language. Serving subsequent generations will also require a special recruitment, observers agree, but not one based on language or ethnicity.

The key to serving this Latino American population lies largely in identifying and developing what experts call gente puente, or "bridge people." They can be clergy or lay, Latino or Anglo, young or old. The only requirement is that they be comfortable with dual cultural identities and allow this growing number of bicultural Catholics to be as American or as Latino as they need to be.

"To some extent, it's a new challenge for us," says Bishop Jaime Soto, a U.S.-born Latino recently named coadjutor bishop of the Diocese of Sacramento (who is interviewed on pages 18-22). "There are many of my generation, going back to the '50s and '60s, who feel that the church at that time did not always respond to them or include them. Many of them, if they didn't leave the church or just leave religion altogether, just kind of stayed at the margins of their parishes.

"It's an issue for us now because they are there and they want to exercise leadership in the church. But they want to do that in a way that allows them to express their culture and their own religious values."


Latino spirituality
Part of the problem is that second- and third-generation Latino Catholics are too dispersed to address as distinct congregations concentrated in specific geographic areas. So the solution is more subtle and elusive than simply starting Spanish Masses.

Sometimes even Latinos themselves have trouble expressing the causes of their disaffection, partly because success has required them to suppress the cultural manifestations of their faith.

Yet some see hope in the fact that these cultural forces keep tugging at the souls of Latino Catholics, even those who leave the church. The trick is to find a way to tap into those strong cultural roots before they leave.

Many Latino Catholics, for example, cling to the sacramental and devotional rituals they grew up with, no matter how assimilated they become. Their Catholicism still relies on the symbols, customs, and traditions of their past, which, if not acknowledged or respected, can make them feel alien in their church.

"Their way of being Catholic doesn't completely go away," says Jesuit Father Allan Figueroa Deck, a Mexican American recently appointed director of the new Office for Cultural Diversity in the Church at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "That persistence tells you that they are holding onto something."

Statistics show that among U.S.-born Latino Catholics there is a developing disparity between the church's membership and its leadership.

In the United States today half of all Catholic children under age 10 are Hispanic. Yet Hispanics account for just 1 percent of U.S.-born priests, according to statistics from the Instituto Fe y Vida, a research and advocacy group based in Stockton, California. That gap is alarming, even taking into account the church-wide priest shortage, which has resulted in one priest for every 1,375 parishioners. Among U.S.-born Latinos, the priest-parishioner ratio is one for every 27,000.

If the trend continues and those Hispanic children enter adulthood without entering the priesthood, the church hierarchy will become more and more unlike its flock. Already, for the first time in history, more U.S. Latino Catholics were born in the United States than in a foreign country.

"This is the future of the Catholic Church, and there is no way to walk away from it," says Deck. "We're going to have to target English-speaking Hispanic ministry."


Unmelted
For the past quarter century, the church's Hispanic ministry has concentrated almost exclusively on the burgeoning population of immigrants that has flowed across the border and filled barrio parishes from Santa Ana, California to San Antonio, Texas and most recently cities of the Southeast, the region with the fastest growing Latino population in the country.

Through an array of pastoral approaches-instituting Spanish Masses, fostering devotion to Guadalupe, developing youth groups, encouraging popular religious rituals like the Posadas or the Day of the Dead-the Catholic Church has not only welcomed this growing congregation but has helped make aspects of Latino culture more familiar and accepted within U.S. society at large.

To meet the challenge, the church was able to fall back on a well-rehearsed game plan from the past. To serve previous waves of Irish, Italian, Polish, and German migration, the church created national parishes organized around language and ethnicity, a sort of separate-but-equal pastoral segregation that respected the distinct cultural and spiritual practices of individual communities.

Now the demographic sands are shifting. The children of hard-working, marginalized, often oppressed Latino immigrants are growing up in a different world with a vastly transformed set of circumstances. Many have dissolved into the proverbial American melting pot, assimilating just as Irish and Italian Americans did before them.

But it would be a serious mistake, warn many Latino church leaders, to assume that the paradigm of assimilation that worked with European immigrants in the 19th century applies to the children of Latino immigrants today. Conditions and attitudes are radically different, and so is the cultural hold of the old country on second- and third-generation Latino Catholics.

Globalization, instant communication, increased mobility, speedier transportation, more tolerance for multiculturalism, all of these conditions affect how-and how far-Latinos will assimilate in the 21st century. And that process will shape the church's future.

In the 1950s the church tried to move away from the national parish, worried that it slowed the integration of immigrants into American society. New York's Cardinal Francis Joseph Spellman spelled out a new policy of quick integration and a new role for the church as a mediator in that process. But it was a pastoral reversal that had unintended consequences.

"If you tell people, as the church used to, that you have to become good Americans, well, the good Americans are WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) and they go to Ivy League schools and they're secular and they're Episcopalians," says Anthony Stevens-Arroyo, professor emeritus of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Brooklyn College. "So if you tell people to become more American, then they stop being Catholic. Now the church has caught itself and said, ‘Wait a minute! We didn't mean it that way.'"