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Charlotte's conversion is hardly unique. The number of Catholics in Houston and Atlanta has tripled in the past decade; the nation's first new Catholic university in 40 years, Ave Maria, is under construction in Naples, Fla. Pizza billionaire and Michigan native Tom Monaghan, a conservative Catholic, is bankrolling the $200 million campus, along with a scholarship program for the children of Florida migrant laborers, and many regard the project as a potent symbol of Southern Catholicism's growing theological and political clout. All told, Catholics still make up only about 12% of the South's population, vs. 22% of the total U.S. population, according to the Glenmary Research Center in Nashville, Tenn. But Southern Catholics saw growth of almost 30% in the 1990s, compared with less than 10% for Baptists, who make up the area's largest denomination.
The success of the church in the South could be influential beyond the Mason-Dixon Line. Southern Catholicism "is changing the nature of the church in America," says Patrick McHenry, 29, a Republican who last month became Charlotte's first Catholic Congressman. "We adhere to a truer and purer view of Catholicism." Roman Catholics, still the largest religious denomination in the U.S., at 65 million strong, will debate what "truer and purer" means. But one thing seems certain: Southern Catholics, influenced in no small degree by their morally hard-line Protestant neighbors, as well as the strong piety of Latin America, are decidedly more orthodox in their faith. Their explosive growth could eventually reverse national polls in which a majority of Catholics say they can disagree with church teachings, even on abortion, and remain good Catholics. Indeed, many Sunbelt Catholics say their mission is to rescue the church from what they consider to be the murky faith of liberal Catholic figures like former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. During last year's election campaign, Jugis and at least two other Southern bishops publicly argued that Catholic politicians who favor abortion rights should be denied Holy Communion, a move endorsed by many Southern Catholics as the tone they believe the church should set.
Given how overwhelmingly Protestant the South was in the 20th century, it is easy to forget that the Catholic Church--which, to its shame, condoned slavery--was a player there before the Civil War. (Think Scarlett O'Hara chanting the rosary in Gone With the Wind.) But the church virtually disappeared after the war. It aided the civil rights movement, but its numbers didn't rebound until the 1980s, as Yankees flocked to the Sunbelt's technology and service industries, and as Mexicans and Central American migrants moved northward for poultry-processing and other low-wage jobs. From 1980 to 2000, the region's Catholic population had doubled, to more than 12 million.
North Carolina, in fact, suddenly had the highest Hispanic growth rate in the U.S. One arrival was Carlos Medina, 55, who arrived 10 years ago from Nicaragua via Miami. "In 1983 U.S. bishops prophesied in a pastoral letter that Hispanic people would revive, maybe even save, the church in this country," says Medina, who owns a painting company in Charlotte and is a deacon at Our Lady of the Assumption, where he assists the priest with the popular Spanish-language Masses. "I think it came true."