But there’s one place in town where the Anglo and the Hispanic people are working side-by-side to live together as one community: St. Julie Billiart Church.
“It’s a work in progress,” said Norma Quinteros, a member of the parish council. “But I think we are making great strides.”
At the center of it is the Rev. Michael Pucke, a Cincinnati native with missionary experience in Chile, who speaks Spanish fluently and sees the conciliation of the two groups as all part of a day’s work.
“I’m a parish priest,” he said. “It just turns out that this parish is one-third people with a Hispanic background.
“Working with the Hispanic parishioners is only a small part of what I do,” he said, “maybe only 10 percent, and that is working toward the integration of the two communities. While much of Hamilton has resisted integration with the influx of Hispanic people over the last decade, that’s not the case at St. Julie’s. There is a genuine desire on the part of both communities to come together for their mutual benefit. That’s not so easy to do when you have two different cultures and two different languages.”
The parish priest’s job is simple, he said: Hatch, match and dispatch. That is, to take care of the parishioners’ spiritual well-being and preside over the rites that mark the milestones in their lives. That he’s doing a job that is a rarity in this region — the only other mixed parish in the Cincinnati Diocese is St. Mary’s Church in Dayton — is only incidental.
He does admit that it’s sort of like being a peacemaker, but it’s the kind of work a parish priest would do in, say, a country parish where there was a congregation mixed with family farmers and people who work on big industrial commercial farms.
In a parish like that, “part of my job would be to try to bring to the parish the teachings of the church on the issues that affect their lives. The Catholic church historically has been a big supporter of family farms.
“So my job is not only to help the two groups get to know each other, but to bring to both groups 2,000 years of Catholic wisdom with the goal of becoming one community in Christ and experience the uniqueness of being a Roman Catholic.”
Quinteros said, “Part of our discussions have been what we can do as a community to move forward and unite so that we won’t be two groups.
“By getting to know each other, we are going to dispel the preconceived ideas.”
The emergence of the Hispanic influx predates Pucke’s entrance by several years, but “he has been a burst of energy,” Quinteros said.
Seeking a different type of parish
Being a native of Cincinnati’s West Side and a graduate of “finishing school for young gentlemen,” a joke he likes to make when referring to the parochial Elder High School, Pucke said he was somewhat familiar with Hamilton before he came here, which he did on the advice of his predecessor, the Rev. Jeff Silver. Silver, who is now in Oxford, thought St. Julie’s would be a good match because of Pucke’s experience in Chile.
Pucke came here from St. Michael’s Church in Sharonville, which was quite a different parish and a different experience.
“St. Michael’s is a suburban parish, meaning it’s fairly well-off and the people who attend there live close by,” he said. “I was attracted by the opportunity to be more involved with the Hispanic community here. Af- ter 38 years as a priest, you can try to stay in the same groove or you can stretch yourself. I’ve done a little bit of everything.”
Pucke grew up in the Kennedy era and was inspired by the president’s call to service.
“When I was growing up, the idea of ‘Don’t ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’ inspired many of us, not just in the United States, but in the world,” he said. “That kind of idealism is characteristic of my generation.”
Being from a “solid Catholic” family, the priesthood was always one of his career options, and he also drew inspiration from the priests he knew.
“I didn’t know anyone in my neighborhood who had a college degree,” he said. “Except for the priests I met, none of them had traveled outside the U.S., none of them spoke another language.
“I believe what we call grace builds our nature and that God works through normal, everyday means. You can wait forever for God to give you a vision, but the fact that I grew up in the ’60s with the ethos of building a better world is what called me to the ministry.”
Until he actually became a priest, it wasn’t a done deal, however. Pucke said he had a reasonable expectation of getting a scholarship to the University of Cincinnati to study electrical engineering, but after going through a religious retreat in his senior year at Elder, he thought he might try a year at the college seminary that the Archdiocese operated at the time.
“If you think it might be right for you, take a swing at it,” he said, using a baseball metaphor.
“I went to seminary thinking that maybe God didn’t want me, but I’d give it a try. I remember telling the girl I was dating at prom night on her front porch that I’d probably be back out of the seminary very soon.”
But he came out a priest.
Missionary work
When he was 38, in the spirit of what drew him to the priesthood in the first place (“trying new stuff”), he applied for a stint with the Catholic missionary organization Maryknoll, and was given a five-year contract. He spent the first year stateside learning the Spanish language, before going to Chile for the next four years.
Although it was during the tail end of the Pinochet dictatorship, he felt relatively safe as he worked a street ministry in the shanty towns in the outskirts of Santiago because the dictator didn’t want any American blood on his hands, Pucke said.
In Latin America, he explained, the poor people don’t live in the inner cities, but on the edges of town as if they had come in from the countryside, which many of them did, but couldn’t make it any further.
“I lived in a little concrete block house that was luxurious by the standards of the area,” he said. “There was very little money available for the poor. What was there was funneled in from nongovernmental organizations and churches. There was a sort of Head Start program, for instance, that was funded by German churches.
“I’d get on my bike each day and make rounds. Maybe there were some people I wanted to see, stop by someone’s house to make arrangements for a meeting because you couldn’t just call someone up. Of course, then, it had to be a visit.
“That was my life. A street ministry.
“The only time I was in physical danger was sometimes in the evening, I’d go walking up and down the street, and kids would be huffing (inhaling chemicals), and occasionally one of them would pull a knife on me until someone would tell him, ‘That’s the Padre.’
“The thing about a street ministry is that people know you. Kids would joke and pull on my hair telling me, in Spanish of course, that it was my security pass.”
But there’s really no similarity between his work in Chile and his work here.
“Almost two totally different worlds,” he said. “Their experience is not parallel in the United States, and certainly not parallel with life in this church.”
Culture is culture
Although Hamilton is not Chile, “The fact that he’s been there, he’s able to identify with the Hispanic community,” said Bill Groth, chairman of the Parish Council, “and that he speaks Spanish gives him credibility.
“Social justice is a big tenet of the Catholic church, and it’s something he’s trying to put into practice.
“He really tries to look at all of us as the mission of Jesus Christ and the Catholic church,” Groth said.
“When I asked what I should know about Hamilton, I was told that it was a city divided by a river,” Pucke said. “So we shouldn’t be surprised that people of good will who want to get together would find culture to be a barrier. The desire to overcome that is the attraction for me.”
There is some integration already under way. Although the church offers a Mass in Spanish and English, there is movement toward more bilingual masses.
“Not everyone agrees with that,” Quinteros said, “but it takes time.”
“The religious education of the children is all one,” Pucke said. “The Hispanic children prefer English to begin with. We have Sunday school teachers from both cultures and bilingual teachers. We have a committee that does parish dinners and have really made efforts to have family dinners with a sensitivity to menus by the group that prepares the meals.
“It’s not easy. It’s not quick, but when you rely on good will, it’s going to happen,” he said.
Of course one of the hallmarks of church life is the parish dinners, and there have been some — and one scheduled for Sept. 17 — organized with the intent of bringing both communities together with a menu sensitive to all.
“We recently put a new ceiling in the biggest hall in the Fenmont Center,” the church’s community hall, he said. “The ceiling that needed to come down was a glued ceiling. While the new installation we had professionally done, we put out a call for parishioners to come and take it down to save some money. So that was a good example of both cultures coming together in service of the whole community.
“There is natural tension, but there is good will for the two groups to become one community. It’s like a marriage in that sense, like Venus and Mars.”
One of the things he said he tries to do is to promote a sense of welcome here so that even if the Hispanic people don’t feel welcome in other places, they will be welcome there.
“The Hispanic culture places a high value on their home life, their work, their school and their church,” he said. “I can’t change their economic situation, but I can give tools to their families to make their life better.”
Contact this reporter at (513) 820-2188.
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