Young Latinos are changing the face of Catholic youth ministry.

Rey Malavé noticed the nervous teenager who had been chosen to say the Our Father at a diocesan youth rally in central Florida a few years ago. The kid was quiet and a little jittery. The veteran youth leader assumed it was stage fright and tried to assure the anxious 17-year-old. But it quickly became clear the problem was much more serious. The teen revealed that he had worried about this moment all night. In fact, he hadn’t slept. And as the emotions welled inside and spilled over, the frightened boy began to cry.

As his moment to say the prayer approached, the young man confessed he didn’t know how to say the Our Father in English. He was fluent in the language of his adopted country, but like many young Hispanics raised within Catholic households in the United States, he only knew how to say his prayers in Spanish.

Malavé, a father of two grown sons and a national leader in the Hispanic youth movement in the U.S. Catholic Church, gently advised the boy not to worry. Just go out there, he told him, and say the prayer the way you know it.

“I felt just like him,” says Malavé, who was born in Cleveland and raised in a devout Puerto Rican Catholic household. “I started analyzing myself: ‘Geez, I do know the Our Father better in Spanish.’ And some of the concepts of church that I know in Spanish I even struggle getting them out in English. You start talking about the Virgin, and I have to switch to Spanish.”

That bicultural sensitivity saved the day, turning what could have been a traumatic moment into an enlightening one. The young man not only said the prayer in Spanish, he also gave a testimonial about his experience, how his ethnic upbringing had suddenly made him feel so isolated and different. The multiracial, multicultural group rose to give him a standing ovation.

It’s time to step up

This minor but revealing incident underscores a major issue facing the Catholic Church in recent years—how to serve the surging population of young Hispanics within its flock and still remain a united faith. The church is at a crucial crossroads. With Hispanics already accounting for more than half of the U.S. Catholic population under age 25, the church’s very future, some say, depends on how it meets the challenge of reaching out to its fastest growing constituency: Hispanic youth.

“I think we are at an important juncture,” says Sacramento Bishop Jaime Soto. “I think we will either bear the fruit of making good investments in our young population, or we will suffer the consequences of not taking advantage of this very significant moment in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States.”

Alarm bells were sounded five years ago when researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill released the results of the largest survey ever conducted on the spiritual attitudes and mores of American youth.

Catholic teens in general, not just Hispanics, “consistently scored lower than Protestant peers on most measures of religiosity,” concluded the study, titled Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press), by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton. For example, Catholic teens were much less likely than their Protestant peers to have experienced a definite answer to prayer, witnessed what they considered a miracle, or made a personal commitment to live life for God.

At the same time, the study confirmed that Hispanics represent a much larger proportion of teens within the Catholic Church than in any other religion. For example, Hispanics represented a mere 2 percent of teenagers surveyed within mainline Protestant denominations. By contrast, Hispanic teens comprised 28 percent of Catholics surveyed, although they were still significantly undercounted and, according to other demographic studies, the proportion actually exceeds 50 percent.

In short, the U.S. Catholic Church is on track to becoming increasingly Hispanic and increasingly young.

In 2006 Hispanic youth groups went a long way toward making their voices heard within the church. They staged the First National Encounter for Hispanic Youth and Young Adult Ministry, which involved more than 40,000 people in a national process that led to a landmark conference at the University of Notre Dame. It was organized by La Red: The National Network of Pastoral Juvenil Hispana, a peer-oriented ministry run by and for Latinos in the United States.

Although Hispanic youth ministry officially falls under the auspices of each diocese, the groups often operate under the radar of pastors and directors of parish youth ministry. But that milestone meeting put Hispanic youth on the map.

“A lot of times our [Hispanic] youth ministries were in their own little worlds and sometimes didn’t even know that there was a regular [official] youth ministry in their parish,” says Malavé, a past president of La Red and the national coordinator of the 2006 gathering, also called the Primer Encuentro. Those working in Hispanic youth and young adult ministries “were strangers to each other. So one of the things the Encuentro did was that it allowed them to discover each other, and made everybody aware that they need to be brought together.”

Del dicho al hecho hay un buen trecho. Easier said than done.

(Graphic: Erin Drewitz; Click here to view larger image.)