It has been nearly 18 months since Bishop Anthony B. Taylor challenged parishes in communities with significant or growing Hispanic populations to offer Spanish or bilingual Masses.
To date, 40 parishes celebrate Spanish or bilingual Masses in Arkansas. Five of those parishes began offering the Masses in the past 14 months. Among parishes, results are mixed.
Some congregations, such as St. Stephen Church in Bentonville, have been drawing crowds in the hundreds. But not far away in Tontitown, St. Joseph Church drew only one family on average and has since discontinued the Spanish liturgy. Most others have shown numbers somewhere in the middle. Bishop Taylor is encouraged by the effort but acknowledges there is “a long way to go.”
“Many of our parishes are doing a fine job of welcoming Hispanic Catholics into their communities, making adjustments so that everyone can truly feel at home,” he said. “But of course, this often involves a process of conversion, which sometimes takes some time for each group of people to get to know each other and to feel comfortable with each other.
To make serving Spanish-speaking Catholics easier, the bishop began a program to train priests in the language and culture at seminaries and schools in Mexico and Texas. To date, 11 Arkansas priests have attended the training, which lasts for one to three months.
As one of the diocese’s success stories, St. Stephen Church observed the one-year anniversary of offering a regular Spanish language Mass Sept. 26. Pastor Msgr. Scott Marczuk estimated regular attendance of between 350 and 400 each Sunday at 11:45 a.m.
Msgr. Marczuk said he couldn’t pin down the exact cause for the immediate and sustained success of the Spanish Mass, particularly in the absence of a full-time staff person in charge of Hispanic outreach. Instead, he gave the credit to the congregants themselves.
“They are a very loving, very devoted group of people,” he said. “They represent a wonderful close-knit group, very much the way we used to be as a culture in this country. We feel blessed to have them here.”
Some of St. Stephen’s congregants were in the parish all along but traveled to nearby St. Vincent de Paul Church in Rogers to attend Mass in their native language. Last year, St. Vincent de Paul Church reported more than 250 Hispanic families with Bentonville addresses.
Proximity has also buoyed attendance in another Arkansas parish. St. Rose of Lima Church in Carlisle added a Spanish Mass two months ago not to serve a resident population, but a growing Hispanic community in nearby Lonoke.
“The folks in Lonoke were looking to build their own church, but they found out that was a taller order than they at first thought,” said Father Thomas Keller, pastor of St. Rose of Lima Church. “We were happy to invite them to our parish.”
Like St. Stephen, the roughly 150 Hispanic congregants at St. Rose of Lima take the lead in planning many elements of the Mass, especially the music. Msgr. Marczuk said the upbeat and joyful music is the most striking difference between English and Spanish Masses, a point with which Father Keller agrees.
“They do their own music and frankly, we’re jealous,” he said. “We tough it out for music at our other Masses.”
Unlike Msgr. Marczuk, one of the Arkansas priests who took part in Spanish language immersion training last year, Father Keller doesn’t speak Spanish. Instead, St. Rose of Lima asks Father Jason Tyler and Father Jose Yoban Lozano Burgos from St. Edward Church in Little Rock to celebrate the Masses.
Father Keller said the visiting priests are familiar faces to most of the congregants, many of whom were driving to St. Edward for Mass prior to St. Rose of Lima’s Spanish liturgies. Their desire to switch to the Carlisle church is significant as St. Edward’s Hispanic ministry has been well-established for years. As other Little Rock churches are discovering, this creates worship patterns that are hard to alter, even when bilingual services are offered closer to home.
“Our overall attendance at the bilingual service is growing very slowly,” said Nelson de Villiers, director of Hispanic ministry at Christ the King Church in Little Rock. “Part of that has to do with awareness, but I also think there are people in this part of town who are already used to attending St. Theresa or St. Edward, and they have made friends at those places and they aren’t willing to switch.”
Since the 12:15 p.m. Sunday liturgy was launched in January, attendance has built up to about 50 Spanish-speaking Catholics.
Such crossover between groups of congregants has been limited but remains a goal of these outreach efforts, according to Bishop Taylor. “Once people feel ownership, they invest themselves in their parish and work hard with others of any language or ethnic group to make their parish truly alive and Christ-like,” he said.
