Free Willie
Senior Member
This article is a few years old but it is very telling. Even I didn't know about the growth in Atlanta.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1025176,00.html
Eight years ago, a handful of Roman Catholic families in Huntersville, a suburb of Charlotte, N.C., started a new parish. The home of their church, St. Mark, was a bowling alley. Our Lady of the Lanes, as they jokingly called it, was an apt symbol of the scarcity--and supple ingenuity--of Catholics in a region known as the buckle of the Protestant Bible Belt. Soon St. Mark was gaining a family a day. Now its almost 2,800 families hear Mass in a cavernous gymnasium as they await completion of a new church. Among the newcomers is Ben Liuzzo, 54, a financial-services manager who a few years ago moved his family from New York to North Carolina. He had thought Catholics in the area might be as outnumbered as Jews or Muslims--and that the meager church life that did exist wouldn't engage his 14-year-old son. Instead, the Liuzzos are attending standing-room-only services like St. Mark's teen Mass, complete with a pop-music ensemble that could be mistaken for one of the area's rollicking Christian rock bands. "This I was not prepared for," says Liuzzo, who flashes a smile at a recent service as an altar girl marches a crucifix past 1,000 parishioners.
Yankee transplants like the Liuzzos aren't the only ones helping fill the pews in the Charlotte diocese. Mexican immigrants are the fastest-growing group, and Hispanics as a whole make up half the diocese's 300,000 Catholics. Thousands of Vietnamese and Filipino Catholics are settling in too. "I've wondered often how bishops in the Northeast handled the waves of immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries," says Bishop Peter Jugis, 47, who took over the diocese in 2003. "It's exciting." It also transcends demographics: the newcomers are practicing a more conservative Catholicism than their brethren in many other parts of the country.
That more orthodox approach is proving as popular as a revival meeting. Priests and lay people in traditional Catholic strongholds in the Northeast and Midwest are distressed by a plunge in regular Mass attendance to just 30% of the registered congregation in many parishes, by a chronic shortage of priests and by the financial burden of paying off settlements for sexual-abuse cases. But Catholics in places like Charlotte say the church is being born again in the cradle of born-again Christianity--the South. The Catholic population in Charlotte is growing almost 10% a year, and the ratio of newly ordained priests to parishioners there is 1 to 7,000, more than seven times as high as Chicago's. Bishop Jugis last year blessed five new churches in the diocese.
Charlotte's conversion is hardly unique. The number of Catholics in Houston and Atlanta has tripled in the past decade; the nation's first new Catholic university in 40 years, Ave Maria, is under construction in Naples, Fla. Pizza billionaire and Michigan native Tom Monaghan, a conservative Catholic, is bankrolling the $200 million campus, along with a scholarship program for the children of Florida migrant laborers, and many regard the project as a potent symbol of Southern Catholicism's growing theological and political clout. All told, Catholics still make up only about 12% of the South's population, vs. 22% of the total U.S. population, according to the Glenmary Research Center in Nashville, Tenn. But Southern Catholics saw growth of almost 30% in the 1990s, compared with less than 10% for Baptists, who make up the area's largest denomination.
The success of the church in the South could be influential beyond the Mason-Dixon Line. Southern Catholicism "is changing the nature of the church in America," says Patrick McHenry, 29, a Republican who last month became Charlotte's first Catholic Congressman. "We adhere to a truer and purer view of Catholicism." Roman Catholics, still the largest religious denomination in the U.S., at 65 million strong, will debate what "truer and purer" means. But one thing seems certain: Southern Catholics, influenced in no small degree by their morally hard-line Protestant neighbors, as well as the strong piety of Latin America, are decidedly more orthodox in their faith. Their explosive growth could eventually reverse national polls in which a majority of Catholics say they can disagree with church teachings, even on abortion, and remain good Catholics. Indeed, many Sunbelt Catholics say their mission is to rescue the church from what they consider to be the murky faith of liberal Catholic figures like former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. During last year's election campaign, Jugis and at least two other Southern bishops publicly argued that Catholic politicians who favor abortion rights should be denied Holy Communion, a move endorsed by many Southern Catholics as the tone they believe the church should set.
Given how overwhelmingly Protestant the South was in the 20th century, it is easy to forget that the Catholic Church--which, to its shame, condoned slavery--was a player there before the Civil War. (Think Scarlett O'Hara chanting the rosary in Gone With the Wind.) But the church virtually disappeared after the war. It aided the civil rights movement, but its numbers didn't rebound until the 1980s, as Yankees flocked to the Sunbelt's technology and service industries, and as Mexicans and Central American migrants moved northward for poultry-processing and other low-wage jobs. From 1980 to 2000, the region's Catholic population had doubled, to more than 12 million.
North Carolina, in fact, suddenly had the highest Hispanic growth rate in the U.S. One arrival was Carlos Medina, 55, who arrived 10 years ago from Nicaragua via Miami. "In 1983 U.S. bishops prophesied in a pastoral letter that Hispanic people would revive, maybe even save, the church in this country," says Medina, who owns a painting company in Charlotte and is a deacon at Our Lady of the Assumption, where he assists the priest with the popular Spanish-language Masses. "I think it came true."
If Hispanic Catholics find affirmation in the South, Northerners often experience a transformation. Dianne Rider, 45, was a doctrinal moderate when she lived in Yonkers, N.Y. As a parishioner at St. Mark, she is a strict adherent to Vatican instruction. One reason: in a region where the first question you're asked when you meet someone is often "What church do you attend?," Rider is in constant contact with Evangelicals and other Protestants who are still mystified by Catholics and frequently "call us onto the carpet to explain what we believe. It has helped take me back to the basics of my faith." Says the Rev. Jay Scott Newman, pastor of St. Mary's Catholic Church, less than two hours south in Greenville, S.C.: "Here you're not Catholic because your parents came from Italy or Slovakia. It's because you believe what the church teaches you is absolutely true."
Such evangelical Catholicism, as Newman calls it, also lends itself to Southern-fried flavors like more exuberant hymn singing, intense Bible study, spirited preaching and what Evangelicals call witnessing--personal and public professions of faith usually foreign to the more philosophical, communal and inward Catholic style. Some church observers say this trend, while ecumenical, could undermine the "intellectual heritage" of the faith, says the Rev. Kevin Wildes, president of Loyola University New Orleans, which in 2002 opened the Center for the Study of Catholics in the South. "The question is whether Catholicism in the South simply becomes another form of evangelical Fundamentalism with incense."
Yet for a church that has suffered so many setbacks in recent years, it's hard to argue with such success. Southern dioceses like Charlotte not only boast some of the highest numbers of priestly ordinations in the U.S.; they're also a magnet for new clergy from the North. The current generation of U.S. Catholic seminarians, weaned on the strict dogma of Pope John Paul II, is more conservative than its predecessors who came of age in the 1960s and '70s in the wake of Vatican II. Many, like the new parochial vicar at St. Mark, the Rev. Timothy Reid, 34, an Indiana native, are drawn to the more orthodox spirit they see in Southern pews. Says Reid: "Here it's more vibrant because we're creating a Catholic culture almost from scratch."
It is a culture that is also attracting religious outsiders. Southern Catholics say their real strength is not in the influx of co-believers coming into the region but in the rising number of native converts. In an area where many consider Catholics idolaters, the adult catechumen class at St. Mary's in Greenville, site of conservative Protestant Bob Jones University, has leapt to more than 60 members from a minuscule number a few years ago, according to Newman, who converted from Protestantism in 1982. Beth Burgess, 42, a lifelong Presbyterian, is converting despite the open disapproval of her parents. She feels she needs a deeper "historical perspective of faith," a sense of what the Catholic Church's "1st century fathers believed." She may end up playing a larger role than she imagined in how 21st century Catholics believe. --With reporting by Maggie Sieger/Houston and Constance E. Richards/ Greenville
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1025176,00.html
Eight years ago, a handful of Roman Catholic families in Huntersville, a suburb of Charlotte, N.C., started a new parish. The home of their church, St. Mark, was a bowling alley. Our Lady of the Lanes, as they jokingly called it, was an apt symbol of the scarcity--and supple ingenuity--of Catholics in a region known as the buckle of the Protestant Bible Belt. Soon St. Mark was gaining a family a day. Now its almost 2,800 families hear Mass in a cavernous gymnasium as they await completion of a new church. Among the newcomers is Ben Liuzzo, 54, a financial-services manager who a few years ago moved his family from New York to North Carolina. He had thought Catholics in the area might be as outnumbered as Jews or Muslims--and that the meager church life that did exist wouldn't engage his 14-year-old son. Instead, the Liuzzos are attending standing-room-only services like St. Mark's teen Mass, complete with a pop-music ensemble that could be mistaken for one of the area's rollicking Christian rock bands. "This I was not prepared for," says Liuzzo, who flashes a smile at a recent service as an altar girl marches a crucifix past 1,000 parishioners.
Yankee transplants like the Liuzzos aren't the only ones helping fill the pews in the Charlotte diocese. Mexican immigrants are the fastest-growing group, and Hispanics as a whole make up half the diocese's 300,000 Catholics. Thousands of Vietnamese and Filipino Catholics are settling in too. "I've wondered often how bishops in the Northeast handled the waves of immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries," says Bishop Peter Jugis, 47, who took over the diocese in 2003. "It's exciting." It also transcends demographics: the newcomers are practicing a more conservative Catholicism than their brethren in many other parts of the country.
That more orthodox approach is proving as popular as a revival meeting. Priests and lay people in traditional Catholic strongholds in the Northeast and Midwest are distressed by a plunge in regular Mass attendance to just 30% of the registered congregation in many parishes, by a chronic shortage of priests and by the financial burden of paying off settlements for sexual-abuse cases. But Catholics in places like Charlotte say the church is being born again in the cradle of born-again Christianity--the South. The Catholic population in Charlotte is growing almost 10% a year, and the ratio of newly ordained priests to parishioners there is 1 to 7,000, more than seven times as high as Chicago's. Bishop Jugis last year blessed five new churches in the diocese.
Charlotte's conversion is hardly unique. The number of Catholics in Houston and Atlanta has tripled in the past decade; the nation's first new Catholic university in 40 years, Ave Maria, is under construction in Naples, Fla. Pizza billionaire and Michigan native Tom Monaghan, a conservative Catholic, is bankrolling the $200 million campus, along with a scholarship program for the children of Florida migrant laborers, and many regard the project as a potent symbol of Southern Catholicism's growing theological and political clout. All told, Catholics still make up only about 12% of the South's population, vs. 22% of the total U.S. population, according to the Glenmary Research Center in Nashville, Tenn. But Southern Catholics saw growth of almost 30% in the 1990s, compared with less than 10% for Baptists, who make up the area's largest denomination.
The success of the church in the South could be influential beyond the Mason-Dixon Line. Southern Catholicism "is changing the nature of the church in America," says Patrick McHenry, 29, a Republican who last month became Charlotte's first Catholic Congressman. "We adhere to a truer and purer view of Catholicism." Roman Catholics, still the largest religious denomination in the U.S., at 65 million strong, will debate what "truer and purer" means. But one thing seems certain: Southern Catholics, influenced in no small degree by their morally hard-line Protestant neighbors, as well as the strong piety of Latin America, are decidedly more orthodox in their faith. Their explosive growth could eventually reverse national polls in which a majority of Catholics say they can disagree with church teachings, even on abortion, and remain good Catholics. Indeed, many Sunbelt Catholics say their mission is to rescue the church from what they consider to be the murky faith of liberal Catholic figures like former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. During last year's election campaign, Jugis and at least two other Southern bishops publicly argued that Catholic politicians who favor abortion rights should be denied Holy Communion, a move endorsed by many Southern Catholics as the tone they believe the church should set.
Given how overwhelmingly Protestant the South was in the 20th century, it is easy to forget that the Catholic Church--which, to its shame, condoned slavery--was a player there before the Civil War. (Think Scarlett O'Hara chanting the rosary in Gone With the Wind.) But the church virtually disappeared after the war. It aided the civil rights movement, but its numbers didn't rebound until the 1980s, as Yankees flocked to the Sunbelt's technology and service industries, and as Mexicans and Central American migrants moved northward for poultry-processing and other low-wage jobs. From 1980 to 2000, the region's Catholic population had doubled, to more than 12 million.
North Carolina, in fact, suddenly had the highest Hispanic growth rate in the U.S. One arrival was Carlos Medina, 55, who arrived 10 years ago from Nicaragua via Miami. "In 1983 U.S. bishops prophesied in a pastoral letter that Hispanic people would revive, maybe even save, the church in this country," says Medina, who owns a painting company in Charlotte and is a deacon at Our Lady of the Assumption, where he assists the priest with the popular Spanish-language Masses. "I think it came true."
If Hispanic Catholics find affirmation in the South, Northerners often experience a transformation. Dianne Rider, 45, was a doctrinal moderate when she lived in Yonkers, N.Y. As a parishioner at St. Mark, she is a strict adherent to Vatican instruction. One reason: in a region where the first question you're asked when you meet someone is often "What church do you attend?," Rider is in constant contact with Evangelicals and other Protestants who are still mystified by Catholics and frequently "call us onto the carpet to explain what we believe. It has helped take me back to the basics of my faith." Says the Rev. Jay Scott Newman, pastor of St. Mary's Catholic Church, less than two hours south in Greenville, S.C.: "Here you're not Catholic because your parents came from Italy or Slovakia. It's because you believe what the church teaches you is absolutely true."
Such evangelical Catholicism, as Newman calls it, also lends itself to Southern-fried flavors like more exuberant hymn singing, intense Bible study, spirited preaching and what Evangelicals call witnessing--personal and public professions of faith usually foreign to the more philosophical, communal and inward Catholic style. Some church observers say this trend, while ecumenical, could undermine the "intellectual heritage" of the faith, says the Rev. Kevin Wildes, president of Loyola University New Orleans, which in 2002 opened the Center for the Study of Catholics in the South. "The question is whether Catholicism in the South simply becomes another form of evangelical Fundamentalism with incense."
Yet for a church that has suffered so many setbacks in recent years, it's hard to argue with such success. Southern dioceses like Charlotte not only boast some of the highest numbers of priestly ordinations in the U.S.; they're also a magnet for new clergy from the North. The current generation of U.S. Catholic seminarians, weaned on the strict dogma of Pope John Paul II, is more conservative than its predecessors who came of age in the 1960s and '70s in the wake of Vatican II. Many, like the new parochial vicar at St. Mark, the Rev. Timothy Reid, 34, an Indiana native, are drawn to the more orthodox spirit they see in Southern pews. Says Reid: "Here it's more vibrant because we're creating a Catholic culture almost from scratch."
It is a culture that is also attracting religious outsiders. Southern Catholics say their real strength is not in the influx of co-believers coming into the region but in the rising number of native converts. In an area where many consider Catholics idolaters, the adult catechumen class at St. Mary's in Greenville, site of conservative Protestant Bob Jones University, has leapt to more than 60 members from a minuscule number a few years ago, according to Newman, who converted from Protestantism in 1982. Beth Burgess, 42, a lifelong Presbyterian, is converting despite the open disapproval of her parents. She feels she needs a deeper "historical perspective of faith," a sense of what the Catholic Church's "1st century fathers believed." She may end up playing a larger role than she imagined in how 21st century Catholics believe. --With reporting by Maggie Sieger/Houston and Constance E. Richards/ Greenville
