Changing Demographics
St. Finbar serves a community that has been a microcosm of the greater Los Angeles area. Located a mile down Olive Avenue from The Walt Disney Company's corporate headquarters and NBC Studios, St. Finbar served an overwhelmingly Anglo community for many years. Known for years principally as the butt of Johnny Carson's jokes about "Beautiful downtown Burbank," the parish changed beginning in the 1970s and accelerating during the 1980s into an increasingly multiethnic community with many of the problems of a large urban area. By 2000, Burbank's population had reached 100,316 people.
As Vietnamese refugees began moving into the Burbank and Santa Ana areas in 1975, St. Finbar and a parish in Orange County drew media attention when they jointly brought in a Vietnamese redemptionist priest, Rev. Tran Ngoc Bich, to provide services for Vietnamese immigrants. Father Bich heard confessions in Vietnamese preceding Masses in that language at the St. Finbar Parish Hall and at St. Barbara's in Santa Ana.
By 1990, St. Finbar was described by the Los Angeles Times as a "thriving" parish and a local "landmark" -- the largest parish in Burbank with 3,600 registered member families. Believing there may be thousands of unregistered Catholics in the parish, and concerned that some may be elderly or infirm, St. Finbar's pastor, Father Robert Howard declared 1990 a "year of evangelization" and sent 200 volunteers door-to-door conducting a Catholic "census" across the parish's 17-square-mile (44 km2) territory. The census-takers carried questionnaires across the community during Holy Week, asking residents a series of questions about their religion, including whether they had been baptized and confirmed.
Read more about this topic: St. Finbar Catholic Church And School (Burbank, California)
Famous quotes containing the word changing:
“The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)