Priest Tends to a Growing Flock of Immigrant Parishioners

Up since 6 this Monday morning, the Rev. Robert F. Wojtek heads to the intimate, 40-seat chapel

of St. Michael’s Church, where the Catholic priest joins with four other clergymen for private prayers. At 8, he will lead morning Mass.

The arrival of the morning worshipers heralds the start of a busy day for Father Wojtek — one that would have seemed unlikely only a few years ago, when the more-than-150-years-old urban church he leads struggled to survive, as members of its aging congregation of longtime local residents died or moved away.

Today, he will spend much of his time serving the needs of his newly expanded flock, most of whom have come to the United States only in the past decade.

The elegant St. Michael’s, which in addition to the chapel includes a 1,000-seat church (as does its nearby sister church, St. Patrick’s), is a popular tourist lure to the waterfront Baltimore enclave of Fells Point. Father Wojtek serves as pastor of both St. Michael’s and nearby St. Patrick’s.

The church is located in a section of the city that for generations had been home mainly to blue-collar, Polish- and German-American workers, many of them descendents of the European immigrants who streamed through Baltimore’s harbor in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Later, those inner-city residents dispersed to the suburbs. Urban Catholic churches, in Baltimore and other older American cities, have seen their congregations decimated by old age and middle-class flight, forcing the closing of parishes around the country.

The decline of the neighborhood’s Polish and German population brought St. Michael’s and St. Patrick’s very close to shutting their doors, says Father Wojtek.

“Ten years ago, there would be about 30 people who would show up for Mass on Sunday,” he says.

Relying on ‘Father Bob’

But since then, a new chapter has unfolded in Fells Point: Increasing numbers of immigrants from Mexico and Central America have moved into the neighborhood’s row houses. The new residents have revitalized the local churches, says Father Wojtek. St. Patrick’s, he notes, now sees about 300 people on Sunday; St. Michael’s, a minimum of 600.

It is not just a Mass in Spanish that Father Wojtek and his Redemptorist Community — a missionary order founded by St. Alphonsus in 1732, whose members are dedicated to working with poor people — are providing to their Hispanic parishioners. As these new arrivals help the churches by filling their pews, they also bring with them a host of needs.

Many of the new parishioners are undocumented workers, have not mastered English, and are often separated from their families. Father Wojtek, who speaks Spanish and English and is known to many as “Father Bob,” counsels people who face marital difficulties, who want to go to confession outside of the designated hours because of work schedules or spiritual impulses, or need him to act as an interpreter in court.

Unlike the parish’s largely female older congregations, about 75 percent of the new worshipers are male, says Father Wojtek, a fact that has resulted in some new programs geared to their needs.

“We work closely together, as Father Bob is seen as a pillar of the community,” says Elizabeth Alex, manager of the Baltimore office of CASA of Maryland, a social-justice nonprofit group that serves Hispanic residents. “People see him as their first source of information and as a strong advocate if they need help. This community knows he is someone they can trust and who will stand up for them when there are problems.”

A Native Son

Father Wojtek, the 51-year-old son of a Baltimore policeman and a nurse, and the great-grandson of Czech, Irish, and Polish immigrants, knew from an early age that he wanted a profession that would allow him to make people’s lives better.

After becoming a priest, he spent almost 20 years doing parish and mission work in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Spain, and Venezuela.

“You learn more about your own culture when you learn about another. That’s something that we as Americans miss out on because we are so isolated that we tend to see things only one way,” says Father Wojtek. “For example, when you are in a country with no welfare system and no security nets, it helps you to understand certain realities that perhaps you would never have questioned before.”

In developing countries, he points out, people die of illnesses that could easily be treated in industrialized nations.

After his time abroad, he returned to Brooklyn, N.Y., to serve the largest Redemptorist-staffed, Spanish-speaking parish in the country. After four years there, he came to St. Michael’s in 2005.

As Father Wojtek celebrates this morning’s Mass, he is joined by a handful of people from the neighborhood. After breakfast, he begins returning phone calls, mixing parish and personal business, like scheduling a tune-up for his car.

One of his calls is from Maria Johnson, director of the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s Office of Hispanic Ministry. Father Wojtek serves as the archdiocese’s liaison to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Justice for Immigrants campaign, a post he took, according to Ms. Johnson, at the behest of William H. Keeler, who was then archbishop of Baltimore.

With Father Wojtek’s help, says Ms. Johnson, the Office of Hispanic Ministry put together a conference on social justice last year, which included a march on Capitol Hill to emphasize the need for changes in the way the country deals with immigrants.

Father Wojtek, she says, “is very active and involved in pursuing justice for immigrants, especially in trying to get legislation passed.” She adds, “We’re trying to be more active in letting Catholics at large know the position of the bishops on immigrants and immigration and what they can do to help their Hispanic brothers and sisters.”

‘Our System Is Broken’

For Father Wojtek, his work on the campaign is in line with his spiritual teachings.

“Much of what we do is to educate people about immigration and about the church’s position on immigration reform, which is to follow the life and teachings of Jesus,” he says. “We are guided by the gospel of St. Matthew, who said, ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me,’ to our work with these men and women.”

In the past few months, there have been two significant police roundups in the neighborhood of undocumented workers.

“Some of our parishioners were taken into custody, including women who had small children,” says Father Wojtek. “We then called a press conference with a coalition of other organizations, including the Hispanic Apostolate and CASA of Maryland, to call attention to the plight of these people and the need for a fair reform of the immigration laws. Our system is broken, and these people are its victims.

“In addition,” he says, “we have put together a pamphlet for our parishioners that tells them what questions that the police may ask that they do, or do not, have to answer; how to find which facility someone who has been arrested has been taken to; which immigration attorneys are willing to help; and the importance of having an emergency plan in place.”

Father Wojtek counsels all his parishioners to make note of their roots in the United States by maintaining records of which schools their children attend. He advises them to formally join a parish, learn English, and stay out of trouble with the law.

“The reason we do this is in the hope that when a path to legalization does come along, they can provide enough proof of the time they have been here as well as have a record of their contributions to this society,” he says.

On this particular morning, Father Wojtek returns a call to an undocumented worker who has received mail from a military organization and believes he is being drafted. The priest helps straighten things out.

Offering Services

For all Father Wojtek’s work with individual parishioners, the church offers a number of other resources for the flock.

For instance, Adelante Familia, a program that is administered by the St. Vincent de Paul Society, is a social-service charity that operates in St. Michael’s former school. Adelante offers a food pantry, and offers help with financial, health, and housing problems, says Father Wojtek.

The church also runs aid programs for domestic-violence victims and treatment programs for their abusers.

“We do have problems with domestic violence, and often if something happens, women won’t report the abuse — if they are discovered to be undocumented, they run the risk of being sent to their home country,” says Father Wojtek. “Or they may be reluctant to report the abuse as their husbands, who might be the primary breadwinner, could be forced to leave the country.”

Other programs offered include English courses, computer classes, general equivalency diploma classes, and an early-learning center. St. Patrick’s also plays host to Spanish-language Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

At 11:15 a.m., Father Wojtek meets with Olga Diaz, his director of religious education. The following Sunday, 23 children are making their first communion, and the two have to assemble the bilingual Mass and decide which readings and what music will be part of the ceremony. They also map out roles for each of the 23 children.

At 12:30 p.m., the priest is back on the phone — greeting callers with, “Good afternoon, buenas tardes.”

He arranges to meet with couples who wish to be married and chats with the church’s maintenance man about how things are going in the parish’s war on its rat population: The church buildings are relatively rodent free, but the neighborhood is not.

Tight Finances

Keeping body and soul together financially is clearly another of the priest’s concerns. St. Michael’s and St. Patrick’s share an annual operating budget of $550,000. In addition to the collection plate and financial contributions from the Redemptorists, the church throws a pair of three-day fund-raising carnivals in the summer, a fair every September, a lottery, and a weekly bingo night.

But these efforts don’t always add up to enough. Father Wojtek recently had to let one staff person go because the parish could not afford to pay her salary.

“What I’d like to do is to move some of the programs from the school to the parish hall and fix the school up so that it could become a source of income,” he says, though he has not quite figured out all the details.

At 2 p.m., an engaged couple meets with the priest; a second couple is slated to meet with him at 3:30.

“Many do not understand what is involved” in marrying in the Catholic Church, says Father Wojtek. “So I let them know that the Catholic Church requires a baptismal certificate and confirmation certificate, and oftentimes those documents are in another country or have been misplaced.”

The Archdiocese of Baltimore also requires that engaged couples meet five times over six months with another married couple in the parish. Father Wojtek must match the engaged and married couples and make introductions.

At 5 p.m., the priest and others share evening prayer in the rectory’s chapel.

Dinner Talk

With most of the day’s work done, Father Wojtek and other clergy members sit down to a pot-roast dinner prepared by Maritza Morales, the church’s administrative assistant.

“During dinner we usually talk about things that are not parish issues, and so we speak about the heritage of our religious community and the things that bring us together,” says the priest. “We always remember our deceased Redemptorists — those who we knew individually or those who everyone knew.”

Before a meeting to plan the next fund-raising carnival begins at 6:30 p.m., Father Wojtek and his colleagues clear the dinner table. At the meeting, Father Wojtek and six of his parishioners go over details: how sales of raffle tickets are going, the status of the concession stands, and what the games of chance will be.

The parish’s carnival, the priest notes, is a chance for the neighborhood’s current and former residents to mingle: “We see a lot of former parishioners who have moved coming back for this event to sit around and chew the fat about the old days.” (This year’s event netted just under $13,000 for the church.)

After the meeting, Father Wojtek catches the evening news before calling it a day.

“By 11 p.m., I’m completely done in,” he says. “I’ve had a wonderful life, and I have no regrets. If I could do this all over again, I’d jump at the chance. I have a tremendous sense of satisfaction that this is what God wanted me to do, and He has been with me every step of the way.”