Amid polarized politics, Georgetown seminar explores the Latino Catholic voice

An event at Georgetown University put the spotlight on Latino communities and delved into the role of Latino Catholics in U.S. public life, highlighting their distinctive contributions, opportunities, and challenges in the polarized political landscape facing the nation.

In a May 14 gathering, titled “The Latino Catholic Voice in a Divided Nation: Directions Forward in Challenging Times,” panelists participated in an engaging Q&A, moderated by Christian Soenen, the projects manager for the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown. The Catholic leaders in the panel included Santiago Ramos, executive editor of Wisdom of Crowds; Claudia Avila Cosnahan, mission and partnerships director at Commonweal Magazine; Amirah Orozco, a doctoral student in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame; and Hosffman Ospino, a professor of Hispanic ministry at the Clough School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College.

In light of Pope Leo XIV’s historic election as not only the first Augustinian but the first U.S.-born pope who obtained Peruvian citizenship in 2015, where he worked for decades, Ramos noted that the pontiff’s life “forces us to see that the American experience has always been plural, has always been diverse.”

Ramos said this goes against the political ideology that seems to be dominant right now, whose “slogan is pretty much ‘Make America easy to understand again,’ ‘Make America simple again.'”

Emphasizing the dual citizenship of Pope Leo, Avila Cosnahan expressed hope that this new pontificate could provide opportunities not only for Latino Catholics in the United States but for U.S. Americans in general “to examine what it means to live within two cultures, to have two cultures exist within you.”

When Orozco — who has written about how movements within the church and social movements reinforce each other, particularly within the context of Pope Francis’s Synod on Synodality — was asked about how do mission and participation help to advance Catholic social teaching in public life, she touched on Pope Francis’ culture of encounter, describing it as both “the beauty of synodality and also what makes people scared of synodality.”

“It does require us to think really hard about … how even Latinidad is not this sort of romanticized homogenous view, or what it means being LGBTQ, or what it means being a woman in the church,” she noted.

Avila Cosnahan also mentioned how when she was involved in OCIA and parish ministry, usually the conversations she would have with the groups in Spanish (with mostly immigrants) and English (with their children) would be different. She added that the church needs to focus on responding to both, so the younger generations do not feel lost.

“It always would happen that in the English (one) with the second-generation Latinos, their conversations would always lead to social justice issues,” as well as inclusivity in the church, she said. “While in our Spanish gatherings with immigrant populations, we would enter into more exploring, maybe questions of their immigrant experience, right? Because they were trying to kind of explore the spirituality of what they’ve lived through.”

She made the case that faith formation and ministry need to be oriented toward leadership, “towards some kind of response.”

“We are not just coming to experience some form of meditation or an hour of reflection or to learn some kind theological topic for the day, but I am actually coming to feel empowered, to learn about myself and the people who is around me, and to become curious about the world around me,” she said.

For his part, Ospino, leader of the Haciendo Caminos and Nuevo Momento efforts — whose focus is to develop Hispanic/Latino ministerial leadership and which he described as projects helping to create a culture of vocation — dove into how, as Catholic leaders emerge from these programs, they contribute to the church’s public voice on the issues that are central to the church’s social teaching.

“When we speak about a culture of vocation, we are speaking about discernment, we are talking about how we understand ourselves as individuals and as members of a community,” Ospino said.

In this dual dynamic, the individual and the communal, he explained, the first involves discerning who we are in the United States — “Are we immigrants? Are we citizens? Are we bilingual? Are we bicultural? Are we Latinx? Are we Latinos? Hispanic? And so on.” While the second, he said, involves knowing who we are alongside the rest of the Catholic community, including European Catholics, Black Catholics, and Asian Catholics.

“Those two dynamics are key for the Latino community to discern this vocation to public engagement: from a particular place but also understanding ourselves as a community,” Ospino said.

However, Ospino also said that unless we wrestle with two questions — “Do we actually believe we have a voice in the public sphere?” and “Does the church, as an institution and as a community, recognize the vocation of Latinos/Latinas to public life?” — the public voice of Latinos will continue to be marginalized in many sectors, both in the church and society.

Ospino also highlighted three elements that could be integrated into the discernment about a Latino pastoral political vision for action. The first one, he said, is “faithfulness to the Gospel” and the need to be disciples first and form strong families, which leads to strong communities.

“Unless we reclaim what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, unless we are people of the Resurrection, unless we know and contemplate the truth of the risen Christ, beginning with the cross, we will not be able to actually have a credible public life, a public voice in the public square,” he said.

He also stressed the need to understand “that the task of engaging the questions of public life is too big for only one group” and that partnerships are needed.

“We need to work with others. Latinos alone are not going to address the question or the dynamics of political persecution or immigration or economic inequality,” he said. “We need to start working with others as people of faith. We need to work with other organizations, both religious and non-religious, politically, economically, intellectually. So, without alliances, the progress will be very small.”

The third key topic, which was mentioned throughout the conversation is the need — especially for Latinos — to speak up.

“We need to speak and address the questions of our day in this public life, convinced that God walks with us, convinced that when we stand up for the immigrant and the refugee, for the person who is poor, for the mother who has lost a husband or a child, for the person who doesn’t have access to healthcare or education, we are standing for the truth of the Gospel,” he said.

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