Demography is destiny: Hispanic Catholics to impact U.S. society
The following column is adapted from Archbishop Chaput’s comments on Sept. 7 to a special gathering of Hispanic Catholic business leaders at St. Malo Retreat and Conference Center. The meeting was chaired by Archbishop José Gomez of San Antonio, former auxiliary bishop of Denver.
I want to put before you tonight a few basic facts.
First and obviously, Hispanics and other immigrants now play a major role in American population and economic growth. Hispanic business owners are essential to this growth. Hispanic-owned enterprises grew 31 percent between 1997 and 2002 — that’s three times the national average for all businesses. Latina-owned businesses are growing at a rate six times that of the national average. Two million Hispanic businesses generated nearly $222 billion in revenue last year; that’s up 19 percent from 1997. Hispanic unemployment is at historically low levels, and Latino workers continue to fill employment gaps and workforce shortages in important sectors of our national economy.
Second, Hispanic buying power in the United States reached a figure of just under $800 billion in 2006. It will likely exceed that record in 2007. By 2015, Hispanic buying power may reach as high as $1.5 trillion annually. The Hispanic community is also beginning to set the dominant trends in American pop culture, music and food. Very few people could have predicted 15 years ago that salsa would outsell ketchup as America’s No. 1 condiment, but it does. And tortillas now outsell white bread in thousands of mainstream supermarkets across the country.
Third, this pattern of rapid growth has a huge impact on our local and national Catholic Church. More than 70 percent of the 42 million Hispanics in the United States are Catholic. Most of them are young. Likewise, about 70 percent of the U.S. Catholic population growth in the last few decades has been due to higher Hispanic birth rates and immigration.
For many years, the ministry, theological reflection and actual participation of Hispanics in the Church had, in some ways, been shaped by a spirit of confrontation; a theology that reinforced the Hispanic sense of alienation and discrimination. Of course, those bitter feelings were often rooted in real suffering and serious injustices. But in the long run, resentment is never a source of life and never a sign of strength. Today, the American landscape has changed. Demography is destiny. In the future, Hispanic Catholics will have a very serious influence on the direction of American society. And this is why I believe it’s time for Hispanics in general, and Hispanic leadership in particular, to take up the role that they deserve, and which they’ve earned, in the mission of the Church.
Hispanic Catholic leaders have an extraordinary opportunity to lead by their example of faith and generosity. America today is very different from America 50 years ago. The time we live in has unique advantages and also very real dangers to human dignity. For American Catholics of every ethnic and geographic background, our faith needs to be our glue of unity and our common identity in making a more humane and just society. Our common Catholic identity does not diminish the importance of diversity in the Church. On the contrary, it should encourage all of us to be grateful for the talents and experiences of others, as well as our own.
But at the end of the day, life is about the beliefs we all share: the importance of family and good friends; the dignity of hard work, the sanctity of the human person, especially the weak, and the goal of knowing and loving God, and being with him when our lives here are finished. There’s no skin color or foreign accent to any of these deep human yearnings. In these things, the important things, we all speak the same language. My hope for Hispanic business leaders is that God will lead each of you to be the truly Catholic leaders God intended you to be.
Printed in the Denver Register of this week.
