PAT BUCHANAN VS. CATHOLICS

U.S.A.: immigrants boost number of Roman Catholics: Catholics are leading the pack of immigrants flocking the United States, with a large chunk of newcomers originating from the Philippines and Latin America, a recently released study showed. (Cristina DC Pastor, 7/08/03, Philippine News)

The study by Guillermina Jasso of New York University, Douglas Massey and Mark Rosenzweig of the University of Pennsylvania, and James Smith of the Rand Corporation showed the percentage of immigrants who are Catholic is nearly twice the percentage of Catholics in the United States.

The finding is striking since Hispanics are now the largest minority in the U.S., having recently surpassed African-Americans, while Filipinos are just a shade under the Chinese as the largest Asian community in the country.

The Catholic faith is represented in the study by 92 percent of immigrants from Poland, the homeland of Pope John Paul II; 86 percent from the Dominican Republic, and 82 percent from the Philippines.

Catholics from Mexico account for 78 percent, El Salvador with 63 percent, Vietnam with 53 percent, and Canada with 43 percent, the study said.

Overall, the immigrant population is broken down into the following: 42 percent Catholic, 19 percent Protestant, and 4 percent Eastern Orthodox. Immigrants professing to be Christians make up 65 percent of all immigrants--nearly two in three people who come to the U.S., according to a study of almost 1,000 adult immigrants in 1996.

Apropos yesterday.

MORE:
Latino worship in bomber plant (Steve Sailer, 7/14/2003, UPI)

About 23 percent of all American Hispanics are Protestants, according to a nationwide survey of 2,300 Latinos carried out as part of the recent Hispanic

Churches in American Public Life (HCAPL) study sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trust. Among those Hispanic Protestants, 85 percent belong to Evangelical churches like the Faith Community in West Covina.

Third generation American Latinos are significantly more likely to be Protestants (29 percent) than are first generation immigrants (15 percent). Yet, the percentage of Hispanics who are Protestant doesn't appear to have increased since the late 1980s, according to the HCAPL report, due to heavy immigration from highly Catholic Mexico. In recent decades, evangelical Protestantism is thriving in much of Latin America, especially among the poor, but it has yet to gain a large foothold in Mexico.

The encounter between Hispanics and conservative Protestant churches that laud this-worldly business enterprise has reopened a century-old debate inaugurated by the great German scholar Max Weber about the link between Calvinist Protestantism and the specifically American form of capitalism.

Extending Weber's theory, some observers believe that conversion to Protestantism will hasten the assimilation of Hispanic immigrants into the American middle class. [...]

Some Republican strategists anticipate that Hispanic conversions to Protestantism will help them gain a larger share of the Hispanic vote. They had long hoped that the traditionalist moral teachings of the Roman Catholic Church on abortion and the like would impel Hispanic Americans toward the GOP, but that doesn't seem to have yet happened in any large measure, perhaps in part due to the Catholic emphasis on social justice and help for the poor.

While evangelical Protestant churches offer similar moral messages, they tend to be more free market-oriented in their economic and political views.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 12, 2003 8:11 AM