3/18/2010
All communities are united under one common faith at Hillsboro parish
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| All communities are united under one common faith at Hillsboro parish |
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Clarice Keating
HILLSBORO — A 2003 survey taken by the city of Hillsboro uncovered an uncomfortable statistic: Five percent of those polled listed Hispanics and illegal immigrants as the No. 1 problem affecting the city’s livability.
“There were a lot of people who kept saying, ‘What are you going to do about that?’” said then-Mayor Tom Hughes. “But you can’t pass a city ordinance that says people can’t feel that way. It’s a deeper problem, one that needs to be solved by the whole community.”
Hughes’ sense was that it was an issue that needed to be worked on in the long term, and the city’s faith communities needed to be enlisted as allies. So he invited the priests from St. Matthew Church to help city leaders brainstorm ideas on breaking down what he called the “historic disconnectedness.”
“I don’t know of any institution in town yet that does a better job of sorting through potential differences between the Anglo and Hispanic community than St. Matthew’s does,” Hughes said.
St. Matthew’s, the only Catholic church to serve Hillsboro’s 90,000 residents, not only serves English and Spanish-speaking populations, but a diversity of nationalities and ethnicities of people who come to work at Intel, one of the biggest employers in the area. The parish also represents a rural culture from the farming people that have been in the parish for decades, but also an urban culture, of those who move to Hillsboro for its high tech industry and trendy new development. This was a challenge the parish council faced early in the millennium, how to cater to all these different groups.
“St. Matthew Parish had great intuition and did not want to create two communities in one parish,” Father Juan José González said. “We don’t deny the difference or the language barrier because this is where the parish’s identity is rooted, so we put our effort in making sure we remain one, even with the differences.”
That unity represents the universality of the Catholic Church, Father González said.
“We want to continue to be different, but in certain areas we need to be one,” he said.
Bridging that gap might be easier for the three priests and one brother who have been entrusted with the pastoral care of the congregation here; the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit there are all bilingual. The four men, Father González, associate pastors Fathers Peter Arteaga and Pablo Sanchez, and Brother Santos Mendoza, live together as a family in the church’s rectory.
Like their church leaders, parishioners have united the church’s many efforts. There is one bulletin, translated in English and Spanish. In another form of unity, the parish’s central business office was reorganized so that parish school and office would share resources and find a consistency to their practices. There are liaisons who go between the pastoral and administrative councils and the school advisory council, so each group knows what the others are working on, to decrease duplication of efforts. Additionally, all fundraising was tied together — so any money generated during the upcoming fundraising auction, on Friday and Saturday, April 16-17, is divided evenly between school and parish, to allay tension created by competition for resources.
“We know we are in this together,” Father González said. “When the school does well, the parish does well. And when the parish does well, the school does well. It’s impossible to support one without inadvertently supporting the other.”
The parish, first dedicated in 1902, has long honored a multi-lingual congregation. Back then, most parishioners were of Swiss and German descent, so Mass was celebrated in German and English. Today, there are more than 2,600 people who attend Sunday services at St. Matthew’s.
Future endeavors for the parish, as identified through a survey of parish stakeholders, are a modernization of the school and the creation of additional meeting spaces for the parish’s many faith formation groups.
The parish’s St. Vincent de Paul conference, the biggest outlet for the Washington County office of Oregon Food Bank, serves 8,000 families a year.
John Krautscheid and his wife Jean volunteer every Friday at the food distribution center. In his early retirement years, he spent practically every day at the parish helping out, except for one day a week spent golfing.
Their family is very tied to the parish. John’s parents were married at St. Matthew’s in 1933, and John and Jean had nine children go through the school. Every year all their kids and grandkids come home for the annual German dinner at the parish. Last year there were 37 people, taking up two full tables. John and Jean also celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in the parish hall.
In fact the parish hall and the school are brimming with constant activity.
“This building is always full,” said Principal Jeannie Timoney. “It seems there is always something going on in this parish.”
The school building is used for CYO sorts, religious education classes on Sundays, and English as a second language courses through Portland Community College, among other things.
Like the diverse parish, the kindergarten through eighth-grade school educates students who are fourth- or fifth-generation locals, as well as those from families that are new to the area.
Father Arteaga comes every Tuesday and visits the students.
“It’s common for the kids to see the priests in the building,” Timoney said. “That’s unusual because priests are often spread so thin. We feel like more of an extension of the parish family.”
Fanny Linzier has three children who attend the school, and one who will be old enough to enroll next year. She started going to Mass at St. Matthew’s in 2000, and even though the family has since moved to Forest Grove, she still drives her children the 15 minutes to Hillsboro for school and Mass.
What really contributes to the parish’s friendly atmosphere are the missionary priests and the continuity of priests who come from the mission, she said.
“We are blessed with great priests,” she said. “They are very approachable, even to have them out for dinner or just have a fun hike, or for spiritual direction.”
Molly Teeter, coordinator of religious education for the preschool through eighth-graders and sacramental preparation for second- through eighth-graders, has been working at the parish since 1988.
“We have so many different programs and activities that parishioners can get involved with to help [the parish] be vibrant and grow,” Teeter said.
But behind it all is that idea that they are one community, she said.
“We want to be a welcoming community united, one body.”
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