Kreyol Sunday at St. Jerome Church in Brooklyn, New York

Father Guy Sansaricq is seeing the last of his 11 o'clock congregation as they come to receive his personal blessings before bundling up and spilling out into the street, hemmed in by graying mounds of snow. A pat on the cheek here, a tender squeeze of the hand there, and his heartwarming smile seem to do more to make the parishioners stick around and try to engage him with chat and laughter than leave. But he can't be saying goodbye for too long because St. Jerome Church is preparing for another Mass, and his job is to help empty the building for the next wave of believers.

They have already started filling the pews where their brethren sat just minutes ago. To the unknowing eye, it looks as if two identical groups of churchgoers are simply taking turns, forced perhaps to do so by the limited capacity of the church. What's apparent, and what unites the two congregations in addition to their Roman Catholic faith, is their homeland, Haiti. What's invisible, and what divides them, is the languages of the old country and of the one they call home now.

"I speak both, but I prefer English," says Yasmine Jeudi, a 23-year-old Haitian-American on her way out of the church.

"No, no English," an elderly Haitian woman says with an apologetic smile on her way in, as she is approached by an English-speaking reporter. "Kreyol."

Then she joins her compatriots, a sea of expectant black and brown faces which Sansaricq says represent 65 percent of St. Jerome's 1,800 parishioners.

Many of them speak little English, some none at all. That's why Sunday in this church is a trilingual affair, an alternation of Creole, English, and Spanish Masses for all the people of the island of Hispaniola.

Located at Newkirk Avenue and 29th Street in Brooklyn, St. Jerome Church is in the heart of Flatbush, the New York neighborhood known as Little Haiti. According to the 2000 census, Brooklyn itself is home to 61,267, or 64 percent, of New York's 95,580 Haitian immigrants. But that estimate does not reflect the growth in numbers over the last five years, or the influx of illegal immigrants along with the legal ones.