Pope Benedict will find a Big Apple that remains city of immigrants

Published: 2008-02-22

NEW YORK (CNS) -- On Super Bowl Sunday, most of Transfiguration Church in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn had an answer for Father Tony Hernandez when he asked them where they'd be for the kickoff. The New York Giants were playing the New England Patriots in a matter of hours, and Transfiguration's congregants, many of them from Latin America, were not missing their adopted country's big game. When Pope Benedict XVI arrives in New York in April, he will find the Big Apple unchanged from papal visits past in at least one regard: It remains a city of immigrants. The same is true for other parts of the metropolitan area. The New York Archdiocese, whose jurisdiction includes the three boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, as well as seven counties outside the city, numbers 2.5 million Catholics, an estimated 23 percent of whom are foreign-born. Certain vicariates run higher: 50 percent of Catholics in north Manhattan, for example, are immigrants. In the Brooklyn Diocese, which encompasses Brooklyn and Queens, 54 percent of the area's 1.3 million Catholics are foreign-born. Overall, 37 percent of New Yorkers were born outside the United States.

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