Primero, Time, la decana del negocio, la dedica su portada a nueva virgen María, la María Protestante, que muestra una mano alzada como símbolo de protesta ante la doctrina romana. Antes relegada, hoy los protestantes han incorporado a María como su arma principal para robarle a la iglesia católica las almas de los latinos.
Newsweek a su vez nuestra como las iglesias protestantes están usando inteligentes estrategias de marketing para atraer a los latinos católicos de Chicago. Un fragmento.
Five years ago, Esperanza Hincapie had sunk into a pit of despondency. With a daughter in prison for murder, she contemplated swallowing a mouthful of pills to blot out her heartache. Then four Hispanic ladies from Rebano Companerismo Cristiano—a Pentecostal church in the Humboldt Park area of Chicago—came to visit her. They encircled Hincapie—a lifelong Roman Catholic from Colombia—laid hands on her and prayed. "I felt a tremendous chill," she recalls. "I began to cry and cry, and released everything." The following Sunday, one of the women drove her to Rebano, where Hincapie, 52, converted and permanently joined the flock. At her Catholic church, she says, "I always left feeling empty." At her new one, "I felt something beautiful—the presence of the Lord."
It was another successful conversion for Rebano, one of dozens of churches—including Lutheran, Jehovah's Witness and Seventh-day Adventist—that crowd the gritty streets of Hispanic-rich Humboldt Park and vie for Latino souls. Their ground battle offers a granular view of a broader struggle taking place nationwide. Forty million strong and deeply religious, Hispanics are traditionally Catholic. But, research shows, the longer they are in the United States, the more open they are to other faiths. While 72 percent of first-generation Hispanics are Catholic, according to one study, that figure drops to 52 percent by the third generation—a trend that has long troubled the Catholic hierarchy. Latinos remain the Catholic church's fastest-growing ethnic bloc, but they are also one of the fastest-growing segments among Mormons, Methodists and most other denominations. The result: all faiths are courting Hispanics with a marketing savvy more often associated with corporate America. These churches "have plans to grow, and they're aggressive," says Edwin Hernandez of the University of Notre Dame. "The competition is rampant."
Si yo fuera Roma, estaría muy nervioso, ya que perder a los latinos es perder el futuro.
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