Chicagoland

Parishes help people pray in ‘mother tongues’

By Michelle Martin | Staff writer
Sunday, May 12, 2013

Father Ted Koo blesses the gifts during a celebration of the Chinese lunar new year at St. Therese Chinese Catholic Mission in this 2008 file photo. At St. Therese, Mass is available in English, Cantonese, Mandarin and Indonesian. (Karen Callaway / Catholic New World)

Want to go to a Mass celebrated in Lithuanian? You can do that in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Korean? You can do that too.

There are plenty of Masses available in Polish, of course, and even more in Spanish, but also in languages that came to Chicago with the immigration waves of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Italian, German, Hungarian.

There’s even a monthly Mass offered in French — although it’s really more often in French Creole, for Haitian immigrants, said Deacon Rameaw Buissereth. If the Haitian Catholic Mission can’t find a priest to celebrate its Mass on the first Sunday of the month at Our Lady of Peace Church, 2010 E. 79th St, in French Creole, it will invite a French-speaking priest from Africa, since most of its congregation can understand French.

Most of those Haitian immigrants have been in the United States for years, and nearly all of them speak English, but it’s important to them to be able to worship in the language they grew up with.

“They go there for the culture,” Buissereth said. “To feel like home.”

Indeed, said Father Marco Mercado, if you want to know what someone’s “mother tongue” is, find out which language they use to pray and to do math.

Mercado, the cardinal’s delegate for Hispanic ministry and rector of the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe at Maryville Academy in Des Plaines, said that even though he speaks English every day, he still has to translate numbers into Spanish to do math. In the same way, when he prays, it is in Spanish.

More than 40 percent of the Catholics in the archdiocese are Hispanic, so it makes sense that 132 of the archdiocese’s 357 parishes offer Mass in Spanish every week, and 146 have Mass in Spanish at least once a month, he said. That number is still growing, he said, because many Latino families prefer to worship in Spanish, even when their members are comfortable speaking English.

“When we do confirmations, for example,” he said, “in some parishes all the classes are in English, but for the liturgies, they prefer it in Spanish. It’s about how you connect with the Spirit.”

Todd Williamson, the director of the Office of Divine Worship for the archdiocese, said he sometimes consults with pastors who are considering starting a Mass in another language in their parish. But while he can offer advice, he can’t approve or disapprove. It’s not something the archdiocese has any say in, he said.

“If there is a pastoral need, and if they can find the resources to do it, then they can do it on a parish-by-parish basis for the good of the parish community,” Williamson said. “But in reality, pastors generally don’t start a Mass until they’ve consulted with their episcopal vicar (the auxiliary bishop responsible for their area) and the other parishes in their deanery.”

That’s because there might be enough people who speak a given language to support one Mass in an area, but not enough for a Mass at each of two or three neighboring parishes.

In most cases, there is only one parish — or two or three — that offers Mass in languages that are not widespread in the archdiocese. For Mass in Cantonese, for example, the only option listed is St. Therese Chinese Catholic Church, 218 W. Alexander St., which has Mass in Cantonese at 9:30 a.m. the first Sunday of every month. Its Masses in Mandarin (11 a.m. the fourth Sunday of every month) and Indonesian (11 a.m. the second Sunday of every month) also are the only ones of their language in the archdiocese.

Teresita Nuval, director of the archdiocese’s Office for Asian Catholics, said that allowing parishioners to have Mass in their own languages fits with the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, which emphasized that the people at Mass are to actively participate, not simply serve as an audience.

“The liturgy is the summit of the church’s life,” Nuval said. “There is to be full, conscious participation. How can you have full, conscious participation if you are not comfortable with the language?”

But Nuval emphasized that the key is that the needs of the congregation must drive the decision to celebrate a Mass in a language other than English; it should not be done simply as a cultural display.

“If you have no Africans in your liturgy, you cannot have an African liturgical dance, because that would just be a show,” she said. Rather, the language and liturgical customs must reflect the culture of the congregation itself. Visitors are welcome to join in the prayer, she said, as long the original expression of the prayer is genuine.

“God created man with language, with culture,” she said. “These are what we use in the ritual. The danger could be a distortion of the culture, or a lack of understanding of inculturation.”

On the Archdiocese of Chicago's website www.archchicago.org you can find listings for Masses in the following languages. It is possible, and likely, that Masses are said in other languages as well on any given Sunday:

  • American Sign-Language
  • Cantonese
  • Croatian
  • Czech
  • English
  • French
  • Ge'ez
  • German
  • Hungarian
  • Indonesian
  • Italian
  • Korean
  • Latin
  • Lithuanian
  • Mandarin
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Slovak
  • Slovenian
  • Spanish
  • Tagalog
  • Vietnamese

Advertising