Letters

Next Latino Catholics

Posted

To the Editor:

The story of the Spanish language in the United States is still unfolding. Whether it follows the same pattern of decline in use as other non-English languages, such as Italian, German or Polish, remains to be seen. (The number of Italian, German and Polish speakers in the United States declined 55.2%, 32.7% and 25.9% between 1980 and 2010, even though the number of Americans who trace their ancestry to Germany, Poland or Italy grew over the same period.)

As the Church moves forward to effectively evangelize second- and third- generation, English-speaking, Latino Catholics, the most important statistic the U.S. Catholic Church needs to know is that nearly 70 percent of Latinos in the United States are not immigrants. (See Timothy Matovina’s article “Latino Catholics: Caught between Two Worlds,” in the March 2013 issue of U.S. Catholic.) 

The Church must understand that (1) in the next 30 years, the number of second-generation Latinos will double and the number of third-generation Latinos will triple; (2) as the share of Latinos who speak Spanish falls, the share that speaks only English at home is expected to rise. About a third (34%) of Latinos will speak only English at home by 2020, up from 25% in 2010; and, (3) in 2010, the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project released a shocking finding that millennials (those born in 1980 and after) were the least religiously engaged generation in nearly 100 years.  

This will be quite a challenge for the newly formulated Archdiocesan Pastoral Advisory Council for Hispanic Ministry.

Epifanio Castillo, Jr.

Yonkers