The Hispanic Family

By Fr. Fernando Torres

The Hispanic community in the United States is growing rapidly and the Catholic Church has the mission to look after, promote, celebrate and care for everyone's faith. These essential responsibilities involve giving attention to Latin couples who begin their lives in the American society.

The couples are diverse: They are young; some of them started their marital life since adolescence; some are captives of a consumer society, and do not know how to educate and live with their children and see them grow up in a world permeated by viciousness and lacking the values they themselves grew up with.

Many couples have grown up in a macho society; now, they live in a society where men and women both have the same rights. Both work to help sustain the home, leaving the children without parents, the couples without a home and a home without unity.

The Latin couple continues facing difficulties with the language, the culture, the faith and also with the department of immigration. But their biggest challenge as a couple is to live their Latin love in a different culture, where the concept of love is different, is lived under different norms and even expressed in a different way.

The job of the church is to help these couples go from a passive attitude to an active attitude, promoting the dialogue between the spouses, helping them learn to identify their values and work for them, promoting their faith in life as partners in their home, their parish community and most important of all, with their children; to assist them in developing marital spirituality that will help them live their vocation as spouses, as parents, as Christians and as members of the society.

The church isn't there for the couple just on the day of their wedding. It must continue being present in their lives to help them share the gifts and grace Latin people bring from their culture, their traditions, their families and most of all, their hearts.