Along the Border, Catholics Complain of 'Sheep Stealing'

LAS CRUCES, N.M. (RNS)-- When Bishop Ricardo Ramirez enters a church, he carries a crosier, or shepherd's staff, as the chief shepherd of southern New Mexico's Catholics. Lately, he's been worried about a few lost sheep.

"There is a lot of this sheep-stealing going on," Ramirez says over dinner in the picturesque Old Mesilla district.

The culprit: fast-growing evangelical and Pentecostal churches who lure Mexican immigrants away from their native Catholic faith.

Further north, in Santa Fe, Archbishop Michael Sheehan is also looking for a few lost sheep. Sheehan, slightly annoyed, blames the "intense proselytism" of some Protestant churches.

"They have their own agenda, and they feel they have the truth, so they're going to go ahead and try to steal the sheep," he says.

Here along America's desert frontier, a friendly -- and sometimes not-so-friendly -- competition has been raging between Catholics and conservative Protestants to attract the constant flow of migrants coming across the border.

The attraction for both churches is obvious. Hispanics are now the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, and experts agree the future of church growth for any denomination lies in its ability to attract and retain Hispanic members.

It's not solely a border issue. In Chicago, Cardinal Francis George said agressive proselytism by Protestants has "complicated ecumenical relationships." A Lutheran church on the city's South Side came under fire last year for advertising "Missa en espanol" -- Mass in Spanish.

Some Hispanics had baptized their children in the La Sagrada Familia church, not realizing it was not Catholic. With holy water dispensers and statues of the Virgin Mary, the confusion was not surprising.

Chicago's Lutheran bishop was shocked. "If that is true, that's the thing I want to get to the bottom of. If there is deception involved, I don't want to be part of it," Bishop Paul Landahl told the Sun-Times last August.

Last November, it drew the attention of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. In a new blueprint for Hispanic ministry, the bishops listed Protestant proselytism as a "challenge." Evangelical churches, they admitted, often are better at fostering "a notion of church as extended family that provides Hispanics with a sense of belonging to God's family."

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