Catholic
Education To mend rift U.S. church needs to embrace gifts of
Latinos
By CÉSAR DIAZ
Anaheim, Calif.
Hispanic theologian and El Paso,
Texas, pastor Msgr. Arturo J. Banuelas asked one question and provoked another.
He asked, Are we Latinos to be seen as a blessing or as a pastoral
problem to solve?
His 500-plus Latino listeners, jammed into a standing-room-only
session at the 2002 Los Angeles Religious Education Congress here, knew what he
was really asking: With more than a third of U.S. Catholics now Latino, how
will this church effectively minister to an American Catholic people
increasingly Latin American in heritage and in religious experience?
To Banuelas, a cofounder of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic
Theologians in the United States, the answer is simple. We need to look
at the church as a diverse body of Christ. We must, then, affirm the
religiosity of Latinos and their daily life.
There were more than 21,000 participants at the Feb. 15-17
congress. Five thousand-plus of those attended the Spanish-only sessions, and
that figure climbs dramatically with each succeeding congress.
NCR sought reactions to Banuelas implied challenge to
the church among those Latino participants.
Daniel Robles, a teacher and a pastoral minister at Our Lady of
Lourdes in East Los Angeles, said, The church doesnt know its
audience. Theres a big rift. Some parishes are doing it right, but when
you go to others, you notice it. The it Robles referred to is
the affirmation or denial of Latino religious expressions by mainstream
Euro-American parishes.
Veronica Farjado, a parishioner in East Los Angeles, said there
are two sides to the issue. While some mainstream Euro-American churches
neglect the need for Latino expression in the liturgy and parish life, those
parishes dont bear all the blame, she said.
A lot of time we Latinos never really stick up for who we
are. We need a lot of guts to do so, said Farjado.
Many parishes have responded to the influx of Latinos in their
community by offering bilingual and/or Spanish-only Masses. Yet, such efforts
only scratch the surface of what Latinos say are much deeper issues between
them and the traditional Euro-American Catholic church.
Many Latinos at the Congress spoke about their experiences of
Catholicism in traditional Euro-American parishes as worship from the
neck up. Parish worship is seen as too rigid, and many
Latinos feel they cannot express themselves fully in such settings.
This is one reason why Pentecostal and evangelical denominations
have been able to make inroads among the once solidly Catholic Latino community
in the United States. These denominations have a greater willingness to accept
the affective dimensions of Latino religious expressions, noted
Congress speaker Roberto Goizueta, Boston College theology professor.
Armando Robles, brother of Daniel, said Latinos also face a
language difficulty in building support for their cultural expression of
religion.
Nearly one in 10 Latinos in the United States doesnt speak
Spanish, and when they attend Spanish-only religious services, said Robles,
they cant relate spiritually. But, they also know they dont
want to lose this part of their culture.
Robles said that pastoral ministers working in such parishes need
to be aware of the many language and cultural differences that exist within the
U.S. Latino culture. The success of such communities with Spanish and
non-Spanish speaking Latino populations, he said, lies in a commitment to build
a community that integrates many aspects of Latino religious and cultural
expressions.
With or without a priest
Parishes that want thriving Latino communities, said Goizueta,
must reach out to Latino community leaders. He noted that Latinos have a long
history of religious worship and expression in small communities, with or
without the presence of a priest.
As a result, religious leadership in a community may be invested
in a Latinos abuelita (grandmother) or perhaps a compadre
(godparent), rather than in a parish priest. Its a reality that many
Euro-Americans have difficulty with, said Goizueta.
Several of the participants that NCR spoke to said they
knew of parishes that had effectively reached community leaders. These parishes
collaborated with Latino community leaders in planning feast days and invited
them to develop ways to make worship more meaningful.
Yet, in almost the same breath, these same participants knew of
other parishes that merely see Latino community leaders as nothing more than
Spanish translators for the traditional weekly worship sheet. It is this issue
that crystallizes for many Latinos their identity as being a second-class
citizen in the larger Euro-American Catholic church.
Were being asked to be volunteers, not to be
involved, said Daniel Robles.
The overarching problem, as Banuelas, Goizueta and other Latino
speakers at this years congress alluded to, is whether or not
popular Catholicism as defined by the U.S. Latino culture will be
seen as an authentic religious expression by the larger Euro-American
church.
Popular Catholicism, as many Latino theologians note, is more than
rituals and practices, but is a central way of perceiving human reality. It is
a mixture of both the sacred and the profane, said Goizueta, and for many
Latinos, they define themselves as a people with an extremely sacramental
notion of reality.
As such, religious devotions to Our Lady of Guadalupe or her feast
on Dec. 12 are seen as real and direct expressions of God interacting with
humanity for many Latinos throughout the United States.
A representative figure of what Goizueta and other Latino
theologians call the cultural and religious mestizaje
[mixture] of Latinos in the United States, Guadalupe is indicative of how
popular Catholicism is misunderstood and underappreciated in the United
States.
I suspect that a lot of Euro-American Catholics who had to
leave behind their devotions are now looking at Latinos and saying I
dont want to be associated with this brand of Catholicism,
noted Goizueta.
One indicator of this feeling is that many Latino devotions and
feasts are described in liturgical manuals as para-liturgical celebrations. To
Goizueta and other Latino theologians, what this says to the Latino community
is were telling people who experience God most closely in such
celebrations that its an inferior experience.
However, in some ways, said Goizueta, the feast
of Our Lady of Guadalupe is really an Easter experience for Latinos.
The challenge, as he and many of the congress participants noted,
is how to integrate the U.S. Latino community without forcing its members to
lose their highly regarded religious expressions.
We should be seen as a gift that needs to be embraced,
said Banuelas. And the churchs pastoral emphases should be geared
toward evangelization, not assimilation.
César A. Diaz is a graduate student at the Jesuit School
of Theology at Berkeley, Calif.
National Catholic Reporter, March 22,
2002
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