Here’s a surprising, and heartening, bit of journalism from, of all places, the Chicago Tribune, about a demographic shift in the diaconate:

When Sergio Lopez’s wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and told she had only three months to live, he looked to the sky and asked God to allow her to see their young children grow old.

After she defied her doctors’ predictions and fought off the cancer to live for 15 more years, Lopez felt a call to deeper service within his faith and began the long journey to become a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church.

“I think God called me and said, ‘I gave you what you asked me, and now you’re mine,'” said Lopez, 60, of Maywood.

Sunday afternoon, Lopez’s 5 1/2 years of training culminated in a ceremony in St. Nicholas of Tolentine Parish on Chicago’s South Side, where he was ordained along with six other Hispanic men as deacons of the Catholic Church.

The seven, who were ordained by Cardinal Francis George, are part of the changing ethnic makeup of both the Chicago and national Catholic communities.

The Archdiocese of Chicago has more than 600 deacons, one of the largest such communities in the world, said Jaime Bascunan, director of information for the archdiocese’s Hispanic pastoral formation programs. Of that group, about 150 Chicago deacons are Hispanic, Bascunan said.

As the Hispanic population grows, so does the proportion of the church that claims Hispanic heritage. A 2007 study by the Pew Hispanic Center found that Hispanics make up roughly a third of America’s Catholics and account for more than 40 percent of Catholics in Chicago.

“The number of [Hispanic Catholic] leaders doesn’t match that percentage, so we need to find more Hispanic people for positions of leadership,” Bascunan said.