True and sort of funny! Sounds like my parish.

The future of the Episcopal Church….may be a bit different than progressives imagine if Hispanics become a growing part of our church. Many Hispanics are conservative on social issues which are dear to liberals in TEC. Time will tell…Blessings!

Be interesting to see in a few decades if God is using Hispanics to bring the EC back into the Roman Church. Many baptist ministers are now rueing bringing in Hispanic Catholics as they are calling ministers “father”, and candles and images of Gudalupe are appearing in their churches.

I never thought I would be doing this, but I need to correct the news story and say this in defense of our PB.  I knew Katherine Jefforts Schori in Oregon, where part of her ministry (when she wasn’t Dean of the Adult Sunday School at Good Samaritan Corvallis) was to lead a Spanish language service in a nearby town.  She is fluent in Spanish (not just a two week immersion program), in fact she led the recent Executive Council meeting in Spanish. 
She has been way ahead of this trend—although I doubt many of the Spanish speaking parishioners will be particularly in favor of her agenda…

Thanks, Bill (#4), I’m glad to know that the PB can speak Spanish.  Alas, she just can’t seem to speak orthodox Christianese.

It may surprise some readers that the denomination that’s doing the best job of reaching out to immigrants and starting new congrebgations for them is the Southern Baptist Convention.

I was struck by the embedded detail in Duin’s article that a 2008 Pew Forum Survey shows that 20% of Hispanic immigrants also migrate from Catholicism to a conservative evangelical or Pentecostal church.  Although I think calling the huge numbers of Hispanics “low hanging fruit” was a little crass.  But certainly, “the harvest is plentiful, but the (Hispanic) laborers are few.”

David Handy+

NRA- Do you really think that converting Catholics to Protestants was what Jesus had in mind when he spoke of “the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few”?

It’s a valid point that such immigration is keeping Rome’s numbers up in the US.

Of course I like comments 2 and 3.

Note: this has happened with the Episcopalians before. About 85 years ago. Only with Italians.

A few ‘independent’ (or loosely affiliated with the Polish National Catholic Church) Italian congregations, like the PNCC formed in reaction against heavy-handed treatment by the Irish bishops, became Episcopal.

Obviously they, the PNCC that later was affiliated with the Episcopalians for 30 years, and the WASPs’ Midwestern biretta belt didn’t manage to turn Episcopalians into Catholics.

Most of the Italian parishes are closed now except St Anthony’s, Hackensack, NJ, which as 2 and 3 said of Hispanics (St A’s has them now too) is conservative, at odds with the Episcopalians today.

My guess is the Piskies will bottom out at about a million members on the books.

P.S. Make that under a million but they won’t go out of business.

P.P.S. There’s a lot to be said for coffee hour and a priest who knows his people so I see this group’s point even though I don’t agree with them.

5. New Reformation Advocate,

Thank you for the lead-in, Fr. Handy,

she just can’t seem to speak orthodox Christianese.

Based on her reading of some of the canons of TEC, it would appear that she spent all of her time learning languages on those other than English. That is the only possible charitable explanation, of those which occur to me, that might explain her habitual misapplication of the canons.

Pax et bonum,
Keith Töpfer

I apologize for my snarky comment in No. 6.  I’m sure NRA doesn’t think this.