2013 Seminar | Holy Family Catholic Community, Fond du Lac, WI

Creating Unity Through Multicultural Hospitality

by Paul Thomas, M.M. ‘13 (with contributions from Patricia Eby)

“Each a stranger, each a guest, each a host.”  Thus Congregations Project faculty member Dorothy Bass described the mutual hospitality that undergirds Christian community.  In 2000, six Catholic parishes in Fond du Lac took a step toward becoming a hospitable community when they merged to form one Holy Family Catholic Community, which includes over 15,000 parishioners spread over four church sites. Three of Holy Family’s leaders, Father Max Tzul, Hispanic choir coordinator Marisol Cortes, and choir director Patricia Eby, came to the ISM Summer Seminar to explore a pressing question: how do we create community amid, and through, cultural diversity?

At the time of the 2000 census, Fond du Lac’s population was 98% white.[1] However, that figure belied the diversity of cultures already present in the city and its Catholic community. Beginning in the 1920’s, a small Hispanic population began to grow up alongside people of French, German, and Irish descent in the city. Hispanic Catholics worshiped in Spanish at various sites, moving to St. Mary Parish after the 2000 merger. Holy Family as a whole took steps to bring Anglo and Latino parishioners together, learning a bilingual Mass setting: Bob Hurd’s “Misa del Pueblo Inmigrante.” Their project proposal seeks to go deeper and further with such initiatives, for example through community-wide celebrations of Las Posadas and the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe to foster holiday fellowship across cultures.

A few statistics underscore the timeliness of these and more initiatives. Eby reported that while minority populations only made up 9% of Fond du Lac’s population in 2010, they represented 25% in the city’s kindergarten classes.[2] “Things are going to change fast,” she said. This data is consistent with nationwide trends, especially in the Catholic Church. The Pew Research Forum reported in 2008 that 29% of Catholics in the U.S. are Hispanic, and 45% of U.S. Catholics in the millennial generation are Hispanic.[3] Holy Family is not the first church to welcome this new diversity, and it certainly will not be the last.

To begin its plenary session in the Congregations Project Summer Seminar, the Holy Family team turned the Institute of Sacred Music Great Hall into a rehearsal space. As Eby began to rehearse the group in a hymn, Cortes walked in with a guitar and traditional Mexican attire, proclaiming, “Quiero unirme el coro (I want to join the choir).” Over the next few minutes, Eby, Cortes, and Fr. Tzul, speaking in Quiche’ and dressed in garb from his native Guatemala, vividly demonstrated some challenges involved in building a multicultural music ministry. These ranged from which solfege system to use, to the very idea of having a conductor, to how music rooted in oral/aural tradition could lend new dynamics to rehearsal. Eby described a “beautiful tradition” from the Hispanic community: while an Anglo choir member, arriving late to rehearsal, would timidly find a seat and avoid a disturbance, a Hispanic choir member, no matter the time of arrival, would warmly greet each fellow singer. Cortes and Fr. Tzul enacted a common scene in choir practice: the moment when singers from different regions or language groups discovered they sang the same song differently. Uncannily, they both looked at Eby to say, “which way do you like better?”

“In Christ, the process is the product,” said participant John Tirro, discussing the theology of community through cultural diversity. Summer seminar faculty member Rita Ferrone, who chaired the conversation, introduced ideas from Rev. Mark Francis’s book, Liturgy in a Culturally Diverse Community: A Guide to Understanding. The point of multicultural liturgy , according to Ferrone and Francis, is not to celebrate cultural diversity but “to celebrate what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.”

After affirming this theology of inter-cultural hospitality, the conversation shifted to implementation. Faculty member James Abbingdon introduced a 2013 resource from G.I.A. publications, “Oramos Cantando/We Pray in Song,” which gives both Spanish and English texts for each selection. As Abbingdon led a few examples, choral conductors from several traditions voiced appreciation for the editors’ attention to lining up vowels between the two languages, that they may sound as one voice. Abbingdon advised, however, that blending might not represent culture at its most authentic. He encouraged the team to seek out older parishioners, to explore “the vast riches tucked away in people’s memories.” Regional melodic differences that can pose problems in choir rehearsal are ethnomusicological treasure troves. From a pastoral perspective, honoring these treasures would send the message that “your music is important, just like you are important.”

On the last day of the conference, Professor Bryan Spinks asked the team from Holy Family “So what are you going to do?” A brainstorming session produced the concepts of a choir festival, a guitar project for youth musicians, and even a Mexican cooking class. A report from Pat Eby a few weeks after the seminar added a few other new efforts, already tried or in the works.  Eighty choir members—including all but one of the members of the Hispanic Choir—attended the Holy Family all-parish choir retreat in September.  “Although everyone was exhausted at the end of our time together, there were rave reviews and requests to ‘do it again!’” Eby reports, adding that “the best part for me was the small group dialogue, which seemed to be honest, and everyone’s thoughts seemed to be listened to and respected.”  After the Hispanic Choir again asked to learn to read music, Eby began teaching music fundamentals for an hour each week in “Spanglish.” She is learning as well:  “I now know about pentagramme, clave de sol and clave de fa along with compas’ y barres,” she wrote in a recent e-mail.  “This is quite a stretch for me and for them but we are teaching and learning together.”  Fourteen children sing in the new Spanish Children’s Choir, for which Marisol Cortes has done an excellent job of recruiting families, and the Spanish Choir and the Anglo Choir sang a bilingual mass together for the Guadalupe celebration.  Father Max Tzul made a presentation about the team’s experience at Yale to the Church Cabinet, and he and Eby made a similar presentation to the Fond du Lac Ministerial Association.  

Whatever Holy Family decides to do in its evolving ministry, it will serve as a model for music, liturgy, and fellowship in an increasingly diverse society. As Eby said of the opportunity, “We can be the light for the rest of the community.”