IN HIS eighth-floor office overlooking a snow-covered city, Father José Hoyos has just finished writing a book about faith and healing, his fourth on the topic. This one contains stories from cancer patients about the miraculous shrinking of tumours that had once seemed unstoppable. Father Hoyos (pictured) was born in Colombia but has been in Arlington, Virginia, for 25 years. On most Sundays he can be found in one of the diocese’s churches, healing by prayer or livening up services by getting worshippers to act out Bible stories.Often, though, people who want to hear him must travel further. In January he was preaching in Guatemala; later in the year he will preach in Colombia, Honduras, Panama, Mexico and Ecuador. “When I went to Bolivia, 10,000 people came to hear me,” he says. “Many of them said they knew me already because they had relatives in DC.”Is the pope Hispanic?As Father Hoyos’s wanderings suggest, American Catholicism is becoming knitted into a broader Latin American faith. This matters, even for those who care little for religion. Catholic institutions are estimated to employ more than 1m people. (...
from The Economist: United States http://ift.tt/1jz5dvg
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