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Cover
story
Parish of La Placita is ‘a Pentecost’
community
In a sense, the Claretian story in the United States begins at La
Placita. For many years, until 1890, La Placita’s pastor was Fr. Peter
Verdaguer, a priest of the Brownsville, Texas, vicariate who had known the
order’s founder, St. Anthony Claret, in Catalonia, Spain.
By 1902 Verdaguer was bishop of Brownsville and eager to have
Claret’s men preach missions in remote corners of his diocese. The Spanish
Claretians responded, and from those beginnings, Claretians spread out.
“They were circuit riders,” said Claretian Fr. Ron
Alves, today doing community organizing in Long Beach, Calif. Alves, who
studied dairy science at college before joining the order, said, “Those
early missioners rode for 12 hours to say Masses. They fasted all
day.”
Soon the Claretians were operating Mission San Gabriel in the Los
Angeles area and by 1910, La Placita. (Until 1978, they also staffed the
historic San Fernando Mission in San Antonio.) The first private landowners in
California, the Dominguez family, gave the congregation their historic home as
a seminary, and by 1920 the U.S. Claretians had international missions in
Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama and the Canal Zone.
Today Claretian Fr. Dennis Gallo is pastor at La Placita. He, Fr.
Steve Niskanen and Arnold Abelardo, a transitional deacon in the congregation,
talked to NCR about parish life, Claretian life and Claret.
Abelardo, raised in the Philippines and about to be ordained for
the U.S. Western Province, worked in Manila’s slums as a lay Claretian.
“My encounter with the Claretians was seeing them engaged with the poor
and the squatters. The spirit and charism of Claret is his identification with
ordinary people.”
Another distinction he said, was that with diocesan priests,
“it was ‘Whatever Father said.’ The Claretians said, ‘What
do you think? What do you want us to do?’ That inspired me.”
Until last July, Gallo was pastor at St. Gabriel Mission in San
Gabriel, Calif. The essential multicultural parish, it serves Latinos,
Vietnamese, Filipinos and a variety of European cultures.
“How to meld our multicultural com-munities reflects the real
challenge of the church today,” Gallo said. “Truly a gift but also a
challenge.” In addition to training lay evangelizers and developing small
group communities, the parish comes together at liturgies, he said, through
song and responses in the various languages. “It’s really a
Pentecost,” Gallo said.
Explained Abelardo, “English is not the standard language,
and that’s not a problem. [In the small groups] there will be a Vietnamese
who is bilingual in Spanish, a Filipino bilingual, Latinos who speak Spanglish.
So you can have trilingual liturgies, you do it through songs, through,
‘Let us pray to the Lord, oremus.’ You listen to the people in
each language.”
At La Placita, Niskanen and Gallo agree that one of the biggest
challenges is to respond to the needs of those seeking refuge and a place of
welcome. And to build up the parish presence in nearby public housing, where
they’ve already established an outreach and a Tuesday Mass.
For Latino immigrants coming into the United States, La Placita is
the mecca. Once they’ve connected, many never leave -- even if they move
away. On Sundays they come in by train. Said Gallo, “They come from all
over; their culture is respected and valued. This is their parish, their
home.”
Back in Long Beach, Alves is circuit riding that city, getting
churches to organize, and people to speak out about their needs.
What catches people’s attention? Replied Alves, with a
knowing smile, “letting Long Beach people know the streetlights have 100
watt bulbs… everywhere except in the poor people’s neighborhoods. If
the poor people’s streetlights work, they only have 75 watt
bulbs.”
-- Arthur Jones
National Catholic Reporter, February 28,
2003
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