The Face of Catholicism in the United States Has Changed. Heres How.

A lively Mass with mariachi music in San Antonio.A monthly potluck for Filipino Catholics in New York City.

Parishes in Las Vegas so crowded that some attendees must stand.These are some of the faces of the Catholic Church in the United States this Easter weekend.For decades, the share of American Catholics declined in the face of broader trends in secularization.

But those numbers have stabilized in recent years, according to the latest survey data from the Pew Research Center, buoyed by growing immigrant communities across the West and the South and by broader societal changes that are transforming Catholic identity.Most Asian Catholics are immigrants.QueensAbout 78 percent of Asian Catholics in the United States were born outside the country, and another 14 percent are the children of immigrants — the highest proportion of any ethnic group for which Pew has sufficient data.While Asian Catholics now make up only about 4 percent of the U.S.

Catholic population, that number has ticked up since the 2000s.At St.Mary Gate of Heaven, a parish in Queens in New York City, Filipino parishioners pack in on the first Sunday of each month for a Mass offered in Tagalog.

(Most Filipino Americans are Catholic, according to Pew.) The service is followed by a potluck in the church basement where people bring Filipino dishes such as lumpia, adobo and cassava cake.The parish began offering the Mass over a decade ago when a Filipino priest joined and championed its creation, according to Fe Tesoro, who coordinates the Mass.She said the service draws both recent immigrants and older generations of the Filipino community.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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