An Unlikely Marriage

In 2002, the office of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis approached the leadership at Incarnation about receiving a Spanish-speaking church as a tenant in their building. Father Kevin McDonough was the Chief of Staff to the Archdiocese at the time and led the talks that forged the connection between Incarnation and Sagrado Corazón; he became pastor of the two in 2009.

I knew that the Spanish-speaking community . . . was growing explosively and was in a much smaller church building shared with a congregation that was doing well . . . I [also] knew that Incarnation, which is built to seat about 900 people, had a very small congregation . . . about 400 households or a thousand people . . . So in my role as Vicar General or Chief of Staff, I brokered a marriage . . . to push Incarnation and its leadership to accept Sagrado Corazón as a tenant and eventually a partner.
—Father Kevin McDonough1

  1. Father Kevin McDonough, interview by Carinna Nikkel, May 17, 2016.↩

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Incarnation/Sagrado Corazón hosts several Spanish Masses every week and distributes a bilingual weekly program including a schedule, important news and events, and scripture readings.

After Incarnation agreed to the partnership, Sagrado Corazón’s first Spanish Mass in its new home was held on November 10, 2002. In the next few years, Sagrado Corazón transferred all its operations to Incarnation; during this period, the churches worked alongside each other, but the communities largely remained separate.

Membership at Sagrado Corazón grew rapidly. Even though Incarnation's massive cathedral had twice the seating as Sagrado's previous building, more Spanish services had to be added to serve the community. By 2009, the church accommodated 3000 people each week through four different services.2 Later, the number of regular churchgoers was estimated at 5000.3 By 2016, there were at least six Spanish Masses and one bilingual Mass held each week.

In 2009, seven years after the first Spanish Mass at Incarnation/Sagrado Corazón, the senior pastor, Father Monaghan, retired. At the request of the Archbishop, Father Kevin McDonough, who had brokered the Incarnation/Sagrado Corazón partnership, transitioned into leadership, making him the first senior pastor of both churches. "At that time, I could tell, like a lot of shotgun marriages, it wasn’t a very happy connection initially," he said. However, he was committed to making the partnership work.

  1. Father Kevin McDonough, interview by Carinna Nikkel, May 17, 2016.↩

  2. Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, "About Us," Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, https://www.sagradompls.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=1834458&type=d&pREC_ID=1989020.↩

Since that time, Father McDonough has worked to further integrate the two communities. He admitted that this can be a challenging task and said they try to invite cooperation across the language barrier in each congregation's activites. "And then we’re also trying to create new initiatives which are deliberately multicultural and bilingual."4

But the language divide has proved to be a major obstacle. McDonough said, "The reality is that there is a lot of the life of the parish that is only carried on in English . . . and there is a lot of the life of the parish that is only carried on in Spanish . . . It's a challenge and it's kind of one block at a time. There's not a template to just sort of make everyone fit into."5

Although there are some parishioners who object to the increased Hispanic presence at Incarnation, others appreciate the richness and diversity that Sagrado Corazón has brought to the church. Mary Knudsen, a parishioner and secretary at Incarnation, said, "It makes [the church] feel more vibrant . . . because it really was an old and kind of dying parish."6

Even with efforts to integrate the two churches, Incarnation and Sagrado Corazón still function as mostly separate communities residing in the same space, with separate liturgical practices and membership. Sagrado Corazón is now a partner, rather than a tenant, of Incarnation, and parishioners of each community claim the arrangement is greater than the sum of its parts.

  1. Mary Knudsen, interview by Carinna Nikkel, May 17, 2016.↩

  2. Father Kevin McDonough, interview by Carinna Nikkel, May 17, 2016.↩

  3. Matthew J. Rieger, "History of Incarnation Church," Church of the Incarnation, 2009, https://www.incarnationmpls.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=1813644&type=d&pREC_ID=1976799.↩