Hispanic population changes face of Mormon faith in state

MESA—Luis Cruz grew up in the Catholic tradition that his parents taught him in Chiapas, Mexico. But when he came to Phoenix more than three years ago, he developed a spiritual void that the Catholic Church was unable to fill.

“During the course of a whole year, I could not find a single church here,” the 33-year-old landscaper said in Spanish. “I didn’t know where there were Masses. I couldn’t find a Spanish church that was nearby.”

That changed when a woman he knew in Mesa invited him to come and meet with two missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The meeting was the catalyst for his eventual move to Mesa and his conversion from lifelong Catholicism to Mormonism.

“What really impressed me about (the missionaries) was that they didn’t speak badly about other churches,” he said. “They speak to you about Jesus ... They speak to you about the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. It’s the same thing they do in the Catholic Church. The only difference is that in the Catholic religion, there are saints.”

Mesa, which was incorporated by Mormon pioneers in the late 1870s, is often thought of as a conservative, white, LDS-dominated community.

But as the Hispanic population continues to grow, some newly arrived Mexican immigrants are abandoning their traditional Catholic roots for the Mormon faith.

At the beginning of 2002, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints only had five congregations within 10 miles of downtown Mesa that offered services in Spanish, said Elder Wilford Andersen, a church official who oversees LDS affairs in the Southwest.

Today, that number has more than doubled to 13 Spanish-speaking congregations throughout Mesa.

“I think that the church is growing among all populations, but the Hispanic population has grown fairly dramatically in Mesa and in Arizona and throughout the Southwest,” said Andersen, a Mesa resident. “It reflects the general Hispanic growth in our area.”

The growth in Spanish-speaking membership is also reflected globally. According to a church spokeswoman in Utah, the largest growth in membership from 1995 to 2006 occurred in South America. Membership there has soared to more than 3 million, making the continent’s membership the second highest in the world after the United States.

The number of Spanish-speaking congregations in the U.S. has also seen the biggest increase compared with any other foreign language. Between 2000 and 2006, the number of Spanish-speaking congregations grew from 389 to 639.

The church, like most others, does not ask about immigration status when it invites people to join. But those in Spanish-speaking congregations say it’s likely there are many illegal immigrant members.

Pablo Felix, bishop of the Liahona Second Ward in Mesa, said he suspects between 60 percent to 70 percent of the members could be here illegally.

“As a whole, the Hispanic culture is a culture of us, the family, and not of individuals,” Felix said. “You do things for the family. Generally speaking, in the United States, it’s a culture about you, me, the individual.”