Immigration as the Lifeblood of Franciscan Friar Communities in the Western US after Vatican II

"Immigration as the Life-Blood of Franciscan Friar Communities in the Western US after Vatican II"

In the fifty years after the end of Vatican II in 1965, the Franciscan Friars of Saint Barbara Province and St. John the Baptist Province – later Our Lady of Guadalupe Province - of the Order of Friars Minor saw an incredible shift in the demographics of their members. In the mid-1960s, the vast majority of members of both provinces were the grandsons or great-grandsons of nineteenth-century Western European Catholic immigrants to the United States. But that source of vocations to their communities all but disappeared in the 1970s. Increasingly, the men who came to these now very Americanized friars were immigrants themselves, either from Latin America or Southeast Asia. That shift in demographics had a profound impact on how the Franciscan friars saw themselves and how they attempted to live out their vocations. With an 800-year history of going among non-Christians and non-Europeans in order to proclaim the Gospel and accompany those on the margins, what would it mean to have the immigrants and marginalized come to them? Working with immigrants is in Franciscan DNA, but how they would do so in these changed circumstances would prove a challenge which has brought new life to the communities, even as they struggle to incorporate their new members.