Hispanics revitalise parishes and keep cities alive, clinging to their faith in God, their family and the church, which they see as a fiesta, according to Washington Auxiliary Bishop Evelio Menjívar.
“As Hispanic Catholics, we have much to offer the church,” he said. During Hispanic Heritage Month, commemorated from 15th September to 15th October every year, the first Salvadoran bishop in the United States emphasised that popular religiosity is the treasure of God’s people and urged Hispanics to appreciate what they are and be ambassadors of their traditions.
“We do not celebrate the past but what we are and the legacy we are going to leave to future generations,” he added in an interview with El Pregonero, the Spanish-language publication of the Archdiocese of Washington. He sees Latin American immigrants as the recipients of a wealth of culture, religion, traditions and ancestral wisdom and as the heirs of that wealth.
“We are not only talking about a historical legacy of the past, but what we are today and what we can contribute from our Hispanic heritage to the rest of society and to the future,” he said. He acknowledged that it is difficult to define in a few words what Hispanics represent for the church.
“We are a cultural mosaic. To be Hispanic is to be part of that mosaic, of that cultural diversity that exists even within the Hispanic community itself,” he said. “We are white, Black, Asian, Indigenous, so we cannot be defined as a race. We are more than anything else; we are a culture, a way of living in this world immersed in a richness.”
Picture: Washington Auxiliary Bishop Evelio Menjívar celebrates Mass in honour of the Divine Savior of the World in the Crypt Church of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington 12th August 2023. (OSV News photo/Javier Diaz, El Pregonero)