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Pope will find US church struggling to hold onto Latinos
Catholic boom and struggle in Atlanta
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Alejandro Castillo, of Gainesville originally from Guerrero, Mexico, passes a plate of food to a motorist following Mass outside the St. John Paul II Pastoral Center in Gainesville, on Sunday. Latinos and whites each make up about 44 percent of the 1 million members of the Atlanta archdiocese, and Latinos are on track to eventually become the majority. - photo by David Goldman
The St. John Paul II Pastoral Center, a Roman Catholic mission, sits at the rough end of a former strip mall in the shadow of an Arby’s in Gainesville. The space, church leaders say, was once used as a nightclub and movie theater, a history now hidden by multiple coats of paint, pews brought in from other congregations, and a stone-and-wood shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of the Americas especially revered by Mexicans. This mission, in the Archdiocese of Atlanta, was built in a hurry, to serve the many Latinos who labor at the poultry processing plants that form the economic backbone of Gainesville.