THE SUSPENSION OF THE CROATIAN SLOVENIAN PARISH IN SAN FRANCISCO AND THE CHALLENGES OF ETHNIC CATHOLICISM IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Abstract

In recent decades, the United States has witnessed a marked crisis in the number of parishes providing pastoral care to European ethnic communities, because many of them have been forced to close or merge, usually due to a shortage of priests, declining attendance at services and financial reasons. This issue within American Catholicism is the focus of this article, which looks at the specific case of the parishioners of the Croatian-Slovenian Nativity of Our Lord Parish who resisted the closure of their church in 1994 and managed to reopen it two years later. This was a period of empowerment for American Catholics of Slovenian and Croatian descent in the San Francisco Bay Area, and an important achievement for the so-called traditional immigrant organisations, which were slowly losing the role of centres that they had once played among the much larger first-generation immigrant population.