Irapuato
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Blessed Didacus/Diego of Cádiz March 26 breski1 Mar 26, 2010 Blessed Didacus Joseph (Diego José) of Cadiz was born on March 29, 1743 and given the name Joseph Francis. His lineage dated from the …More
Blessed Didacus/Diego of Cádiz March 26
breski1 Mar 26, 2010 Blessed Didacus Joseph (Diego José) of Cadiz was born on March 29, 1743 and given the name Joseph Francis. His lineage dated from the Visigoth
kings.As a youth, Joseph could make no progress at school, receiving the nickname of the "dunce of Cadiz". Later a classmate from the seminary, a Dominican friar named Antonio Querero, testified how difficult study had been for him. Initially rejected by the Franciscan Order (Order of Friars Minor) due to this perceived limitation of intellect, Joseph was accepted by the Capuchin Friars and entered their novitiate in Seville, Spain, where he was given the name "Didacus". Later he was ordained to the priesthood, for which he prepared himself by a holy life. His first appointment was to the task of preaching. His biographers stated that the congregations marveled at the singular power of his words, which swayed his audiences and left an impression on their lives
Irapuato
Te Deum, por último, aquí está un collage de Valencia y otras partes que visitamos hace unos anyos, que subí: Collage:Visita a Lanciano, Valencia, Gandía, Colonia 2008 🤗
Irapuato
👍 En Valencia visitamos la Catedral y vimos el Santo Cáliz- 👏
En Gandía visitamos a San Francisco de Borja-!qué gran santo!-pero cómo cuesta encontrar algo sobre de él en el Internet. Pues fíjate que estudié un semestre en Espanya-hace mucho tiempo...!Que pases buenas noche! 🤗 (!Cómo se me antojan los churros para el desayuno, a veces). 😉
Te Deum
Yo soy de la Comunidad Valenciana. Vaya..si que conoces España ! 🤗
Irapuato
🤗 !Qué tal, Te Deum! ?De qué parte de Espanya eres? Me encanta viajar por Espanya--Madrid, Segovia, Salamanca, Barcelona, Valencia, Santiago de Compostela, Alcázar de San Juan, Ávila, Mérida, Guadalupe (el Monasterio), Sevilla--en fin, mi esposo me ha llevado por todas partes, y tengo amigos en Sevilla. Me falta Cádiz--ojalá algún día, Dios mediante, pueda ir a venerar a este santo... 😇
Te Deum
👏 ¡ Gracias, Irapuato, querida hermana ! No conocía esta historia.
Irapuato
March 25, 2011
www.nytimes.com/…/26mexicans.html
Mexicans Fill Pews, Even as Church Is Slow to Adapt
By
Two years ago, St. Joseph’s Church in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, seemed to be headed for extinction. Attendance at Sunday Masses had fallen below 100. The 159-year-old parish’s buildings were crumbling and its coffers were empty.
Today, the scaffolding outside bustles with workers. Sundays draw …More
March 25, 2011
www.nytimes.com/…/26mexicans.html
Mexicans Fill Pews, Even as Church Is Slow to Adapt

By

Two years ago, St. Joseph’s Church in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, seemed to be headed for extinction. Attendance at Sunday Masses had fallen below 100. The 159-year-old parish’s buildings were crumbling and its coffers were empty.
Today, the scaffolding outside bustles with workers. Sundays draw more than 300 worshipers, many of them families with small children. And where the prevailing language heard in the pews was once English, it is now overwhelmingly Spanish, with a Mexican accent.
As the
“If we lost all our Mexicans,” said the Rev. Francis Skelly, pastor of Immaculate Conception Church in the Bronx, “we’d be in big trouble.”
Yet while no one expects anything that drastic, some clergy members, parishioners and even bishops say that decades after Mexicans began streaming into New York, the city’s two dioceses still have not done nearly enough to attract and hold on to Mexican Catholics, particularly younger immigrants and their children.
Timothy Matovina, a professor at Notre Dame and a specialist in United States Catholic and Latino theology, said that just as other groups have strayed from the church as they have become more assimilated, Mexicans, too, are leaving the church in growing numbers — though apparently at lower rates than other Latino immigrant groups.
Religious experts familiar with the challenge say that archdioceses in Los Angeles, San Antonio and Chicago have focused more attention on Mexicans, providing comprehensive social services and referrals, and advocating for political causes like immigrants’ rights. Some dioceses have worked to recruit seminarians from among Mexican immigrants.
The Archdiocese of New York made a promising start: In the 1990s, under Cardinal John J. O’Connor, it began developing a strategy to cater to these new arrivals, including bringing priests and nuns from Mexico. But those efforts faded after several years.
“They are still in the process of formulating a more effective way of reaching out,” said Mario J. Paredes, a native of Chile who is the founder and former president of the Northeast Hispanic Catholic Center. This weekend,
Parishes, meanwhile, are adapting on their own. Many have added Spanish-language Masses and Spanish-speaking clergy. They have redrawn worship schedules, adding Mexican celebrations and Masses at unusual times — like weekday evenings — to accommodate many Mexicans who work long hours.
The transformation of St. Joseph’s is due in no small part to the arrival in 2009 of the Rev. Jorge Ortiz-Garay, a Mexican-born priest whose presence has drawn new parishioners from as far away as Coney Island, an hour’s trip by subway.
But that resurgence happened almost by accident. Father Ortiz-Garay was sent to the faltering parish because it needed a priest, not necessarily a Mexican one. That he has unexpectedly attracted Mexicans from all over the city is partly a testament to their craving for a personal connection to the church, said Msgr. Kieran E. Harrington, the parish administrator and the spokesman for the Brooklyn Diocese.
“That’s what makes it a home for them,” Monsignor Harrington said.
Angela Reyes, who travels an hour each way to the church from her home in Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn, said that while Mexicans might adapt to non-Mexican priests, they felt a deeper connection to a countryman. “It’s very important,” she said. “It’s good for the community.”
Still, Father Ortiz-Garay is the only Mexican-born priest in the 192 Brooklyn and Queens parishes that make up the diocese. The Archdiocese of New York — with 370 parishes in Manhattan, Staten Island, the Bronx and seven upstate counties — has five priests from Mexico.
Recent studies attest to Mexican immigrants’ fidelity to the Catholic Church; of major Latino groups, they are the most likely to call themselves Catholic and the least likely to say they have no religion. A 2008 survey by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life found that about 72 percent of Mexican immigrants were Catholic, compared with 51 percent of other Latinos.
Officials of the New York Archdiocese and the Brooklyn Diocese said they did not track their parishioners’ ethnicity. But the change that Mexicans have brought is easily visible in churches where they sit on parish councils, lead prayer groups and observe their own cultural and religious customs.
Chief among those practices is a deep devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico, that has helped to anchor the Mexican population in the Catholic Church. At parishes around the city, Mexicans have won permission to hang Guadalupe paintings, install Guadalupe shrines and celebrate the Virgin every December.
Though it is unclear whether Mexicans have given the church a financial boost — many are barely scraping by — they have contributed in other ways. In churches needing repairs, Mexican parishioners, many of them in construction work, have stepped forward to volunteer their labor.
“They may not be dropping their money in the collection plate every Sunday, but they’re still going to get involved,” said Alyshia Gálvez, an assistant professor at Lehman College whose recent book “Guadalupe in New York” explores Mexican devotion.
Their reception in parishes where they have bumped up against more established groups has not always been brotherly. Some parish councils have tried to block the creation of Guadalupe shrines. Priests have had to remind their congregations that the Catholic Church in New York has always accommodated new immigrants.
For much of the 20th century, Puerto Ricans were the dominant Latino Catholic population in New York. But in the 1990s, as Mexicans started showing up at services, a delegation of three priests working in East Harlem and the South Bronx began meeting regularly with Cardinal O’Connor to discuss the newcomers.
“We would say to him, we lost the Puerto Ricans and we didn’t want this to happen again,” Father Skelly recalled.
The cardinal invited Joel Magallán, a Mexican Jesuit brother, to help devise a plan to assist Mexicans and integrate them into the church. Seminarians were sent to Mexico to study Spanish and Mexican culture; the cardinal invited clergy members from Mexico City to work in the archdiocese. The church also helped Brother Magallán create Asociación Tepeyac, an umbrella group for dozens of Mexican church-based committees that had formed to organize the Guadalupan celebrations.
But Cardinal O’Connor’s task force disbanded after the cardinal’s death in 2000. Tepeyac soon grew apart from the church, shifting its aim from religious concerns to secular issues like education and political advocacy. The network of Guadalupan committees fell apart, and the concern about Mexicans gave way to the larger challenge of attracting and ministering to all Latinos.
Juan Carlos Aguirre, a former staff member at Tepeyac, said that since then he had not seen any comprehensive effort to organize and support Mexicans in the archdiocese. “Nothing has really happened, and the Mexican population continues to grow,” he said. “They really have a lot of potential to become influential.”
Today, Mr. Aguirre is executive director of Mano a Mano, a Mexican cultural group that is organizing this weekend’s conference, which he hopes will lead to a rebuilding of a support network for Mexican Catholics.
Bishop Josu Iriondo, the archdiocesan vicar for Hispanic affairs, said that so far most of the initiative for reaching out to Mexicans had been left to pastors. “They have to have much more powerful input from the archdiocese,” said the bishop, who was born in Spain.
Mexicans, he added, “are calling to us.”
In the Brooklyn Diocese, Bishop Octavio Cisneros, its Cuban-born vicar for Hispanic concerns, said he was assembling a committee of Mexican representatives from across the diocese “to see if we can recognize the difficulties and give more unification to the Mexicans in the parishes.”
Church leaders say they would like more Mexican priests — though recruiting priests from any background has been a challenge.
One obstacle to recruiting seminarians in the United States, Bishop Iriondo said, is that many Mexicans are here illegally. He said he was exploring the possibility of opening a seminary in the Dominican Republic where illegal immigrants could study for the 10 years the United States requires immigrants to wait before they can apply for re-entry.
The allure of a Mexican priest can be seen close up at St. Joseph’s, which held its first Guadalupan celebration in December. The parish is in a fast-gentrifying neighborhood with a declining Latino population, far from the city’s biggest Mexican enclaves. When Father Ortiz-Garay arrived, there were only about 10 Mexicans in the congregation. Now there are at least 150.
But Father Ortiz-Garay, 39, cautioned that even a host of new Mexican priests would not be enough to save the Catholic Church.
“It will fill some holes, but the water will still come in,” he warned. Robust evangelization was the key, he said, and then reached for another metaphor: “We need to look for the lost sheep.”
Roman Catholic Church in the United States struggles with an exodus of American-born faithful, its ranks have been replenished by recent Latino immigrants — most of them Mexicans, who have brought an intense faith and a youthful energy. That buoying effect is especially evident in New York City, where the Mexican population has grown more than 25-fold since 1980. In parishes where they have settled, they have flocked to church, replacing worshipers who have died, moved away, defected to evangelical congregations or abandoned religion altogether. the archdiocese is collaborating on a conference at Fordham University and Lehman College that will examine the role of Catholicism in the lives of Mexican New Yorkers. KIRK SEMPLE