Unfettered by the past, young church is blooming in the vast Arizona desert

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 9, 1998 by Tom Roberts

PHOENIX - By the time you get to Phoenix, you've flown over endless square miles of barrenness, austere and smokey brown with rare daubs of dull green foliage or streaks of magenta swirled into the earth. And then the plane banks to the right and there, like a wide-angle shot out of an old Look magazine, is the breathtaking sprawl of this city.

"We're growing." One hears it all the time, of the city and of the church here. It's as if, at this point in creation, the dust of the ancient desert has no more time for slow evolution. The city project's 52,000 new residents annually for the next 15 years -- a total of 780,000. Things just spring up.

The Catholic church here seems to mimic its surroundings. Tethered to ancient traditions, it nevertheless is not weighted with the crust of habit. This is no East Coast, heavy muscle, granite-facade church. It hasn't had time to get that way.

This is a church -- the Phoenix diocese was founded just 28 years ago -- that in many ways, itself, is just springing up. It is building new churches not because, as in other dioceses, people keep moving out of the cities but because people keep moving in. Here they build new churches without having to close many older ones. "We have started three new parishes in the last three years," said Marge Injasoulian, director of communications for the diocese. "Two are in Scottsdale and one is in Glendale, both high-growth areas."

It would be difficult to find a slow-growth area in the Valley of the Sun. And the growth generates innovation. In Sun City West, for instance, a fourth new church has gone up in the past year, but it is part of an existing parish. Since both churches -- Prince of Peace and Our Lady of Lourdes -- are located in a retirement area, they have the benefit of retired priests to provide additional clergy at both sites. But those who attend the churches are members of the same parish -- same administration and programs and resources. "We've taken a new approach to fulfilling the needs of a growing Catholic community," said Injasoulian.

"Things are fresh here, they're pretty new," said Chris Gunty, associate publisher of the diocesan newspaper, The Catholic Sun, and a transplant 13 years ago from Chicago. "We're just getting to the point," he said, "where we're having to fight saying, `Let's do it this way because we've always done it this way.'"

The freshness of things was evident one week in November when, in separate events, the diocese first celebrated a unique piece of its brief history -- the Kino Institute -- and then, with original music and lyrics and the humor of the young, performed "Jubilee 2000," a witty statement of its mission in light of the coming millennium.

"People who come into the desert often do so when making threshold said Carmelite Fr. Don C. Benjanmin, recently appointed executive director of the Kino Institute, an innovative adult education center that opened 25 years ago.

If that analysis sounds quaintly out of a biblical studies course, the insight apparently holds for the desert today, even when it is being covered with office towers, gated communities and shockingly green golf courses.

So people at the Kino Institute talk about migrants from the coasts weary of exhausting commutes and crushing population densities. They speak of retirees from the North, as well as young families chasing the burgeoning high tech job market. Others tell of refugees from the Los Angeles area escaping earthquakes and mud slides. "Every time there's a natural disaster in L.A.," said Gunty, "it seems that about three months later there's a real estate boom here."

Some are simply chasing the relentless sun. "Look outside," laughed Gunty on a brilliant 80-degree afternoon. "This is November! The day I was hired here, it was so cold in Chicago my car wouldn't start."

Whatever the reasons, the flow of people from other states into this metropolitan area of 2.5 minion (it was just 350,000 in 1960) has been steady. If old ratios hold up, more than 13 percent of the newcomers will be Catholics.

It would be an easy leap for the outsider to view the Kino Institute primarily in light of the priest shortage. After all, the number of registered Catholics in the area has more than doubled in 20 years, from 165,975 in 1977 to 386,821 last year. At the same time, while the Phoenix diocese has benefited from unusual al attention by orders of religious priests (16 of 85 parishes are run by orders), the number of diocesan priests has hardly kept pace with the growth. In 1977, there were 94 active diocesan priests; today there are 95. During the same period, the number of order priests in the diocese jumped from 12 to 110.

Regardless of how one spins the figures or the myriad interpretations that can be brought to them, the reasonable expectation is that the Phoenix diocese would be hard-pressed, in terms of clergy, to keep up with its own growth. In fact, Vision 2000, a diocesan effort to determine what the church should look like in the next millennium, concluded that by the year 2000, each of the diocese's 11 vicariates, or areas, would be short at least one priest by current standards.