‘Pastoral Migratoria’ will bring social justice and community service training to four parishes

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A new initiative on evangelization as part of the V Encuentro process will bring to the Archdiocese of Baltimore a highly successful model for incorporating Catholic social teaching into the Latin-American immigrant community. It begins online for four parishes Jan.16.

At one of those parishes, Christ the King in Glen Burnie, Father T. Austin Murphy Jr. acknowledges that its majority population of Latin American immigrants has brought a different lens to how he sees the roles of his congregation and himself.

He said the immigrant parishioners arrived from their home countries with perspectives on the place in the church of lay people and priests that are different from those to which he had been accustomed. The Latin American immigrants also tend to have a deeper understanding of church dogma and rubrics than their fellow parishioners who were born and raised in the United States.

But when it comes to living out Catholic social teaching, the connection between immigrants’ actions and faith is more one of instinct than formal education, he noted.

Those factors are among the reasons he believes Christ the King is an ideal place to launch the archdiocese’s training in “Pastoral Migratoria,” an immigrant-led, lay leadership ministry that focuses on Catholic teaching on social justice, service and accompaniment as ministry.

Elena Segura is director of the Office for Immigrant Affairs and Immigration Education at the Archdiocese of Chicago, where Pastoral Migratoria has been rooted for more than 10 years. More than 200 lay leaders have been trained and commissioned for 40 Hispanic parishes there. In the last few years, an English version of the program has been developed, after its success in Latin-American immigrant parishes made other communities eager to participate.

She explained that the program has its roots in the 2007 gathering of Latin American Catholic bishops at Aparecida, Brazil, which led to the creation of a historic document that sets out pastoral guidelines for evangelization in Latin America. Then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, was the principal author, the “architect” as Segura called him.

A key principle embodied in Pastoral Migratoria, Segura said, is that “we people of faith are called to be actors of our own destiny, we are to evangelize through our lives.” The program guides participants through Catholic teaching on social justice and how to live out those teachings in the community.

The burgeoning population of immigrants from Latin America in the Baltimore region has brought parishioners who already are accustomed to a more active role in their parishes than many of their non-immigrant counterparts. That’s partly a factor of the lower ratio of priests to population common in Latin America, where lay people are accustomed to managing many tasks that the ordained staff handles in other parts of the world.

As Father Murphy put it, “Anglos tend to treat the church as a place where you go for religious services. For Hispanics, the church is where everyday life happens.”

But as Segura observed, those same immigrants who may have been a part of traditional catechesis most of their lives may not be educated in church teachings about social justice and how to live that out.

Father Murphy said he learned that his parish’s immigrants had different expectations of priests than did the non-immigrants, being more reliant upon them for spiritual guidance in a variety of settings, with faith-centered events every single day – even during the pandemic. “There’s kind of an embarrassing value placed on the priest … absolute trust and faith in what the priest says,” he said.

“They’re well-catechized, certainly more so than most Anglos,” Father Murphy told the Catholic Review. While the non-immigrants in his parish are “hungry for knowledge of the Catechism, the Latinos have been learning it all along. They know the dogma and rubrics. But Catholic social teaching is a relatively new animal, something the U.S. church can be proud of developing.”

Segura said that after a parish’s leaders become a part of Pastoral Migratoria and they are able to enact its approaches, she hears from the priests that they “have time to do other things, because the community is doing so much more.”

Lia Salinas, director of Hispanic Ministry for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, said the training sessions will run weekly from Jan. 16 through March 6. The online sessions will be led by trained teams and include participation from partners such as the Esperanza Center and several consulates. Participation is limited to 15 invited leaders per parish.

The other parishes participating in the pilot sessions beginning this month are St. Joseph in Hagerstown, Sacred Heart of Jesus/Sagrado Corazón de Jesús in Highlandtown and Sacred Heart in Glyndon.

Parishes interested in training their volunteers in future sessions and starting Pastoral Migratoria should contact Lia Salinas, director of Hispanic Ministries, at hispanicministry@archbalt.org or 410-547-5423.

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