Spanish-born Carmen Aquinaco notes that acculturation goes beyond learning each other's mother tongue. To think in Spanish means to think from and within Hispanic culture,'' said Aquinaco, a Catholic journalist who has lived in the United States for 20 years and is on the executive board of the National Catholic Council for Hispanic Ministry. The Florida letter was issued three days after the Massachusetts House of Representatives killed a proposal to reinstate the death penalty. The commonwealth's Catholic bishops had strongly opposed moves to permit capital punishment there. The Chimayo shrine attracts thousands of people each year by what's on the inside of the chapel, as well as what's beneath it.
People scoop the dirt out of a little hole in a side room off the main chapel.
Skeptics say chapel administrator Father Casimir Roca, a Spanish member of the Sons of the Holy Family, simply fills up the hole when people are out of the room. Every year more than 300,000 people visit the shrine 40 miles north of Santa Fe. Catholics must work to ensure that no one is excluded from their communities and that people of all races and cultures feel the church is their home, Pope John Paul II said. The Feb. 19-March 1 visit was organized by Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops' international relief and development agency. Reports of sexual abuse of nuns by priests are serious, but they do not paint a complete picture of the church in Africa and elsewhere, said senior members of religious orders, missionaries and a Vatican official.