<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/magazine/24catholics.t.html> December 24, 2006 Nuevo Catholics By DAVID RIEFF
Like the three services celebrated earlier in the morning and the four that will follow into the afternoon, the 10:45 a.m. Sunday Mass at St. Thomas the Apostle Church in the Pico-Union district of downtown Los Angeles is crammed to the rafters, even though the church holds nearly 1,000 parishioners. When I spoke on a recent Sunday to Msgr. Jarlath Cunnane, or Father Jay, as he is known by his congregation, he said: "If we had the space, I think another thousand people might well come to each Sunday Mass. We're full, bursting at the seams, and so are most churches in the archdiocese."
In many ways, this is the best of times to be a Catholic in Los Angeles. "In the 1980s, we were conscious of dioceses closing churches all over the Eastern United States," Cunnane told me. We were sitting in his office in a low-slung new building across the street from the church, where the administrative work of the parish is done. "Our problem is the reverse: were it not for the shortage of priests, we would be expanding our ministry."
This news comes as something of a surprise, given the fact that the last four decades have been such a catastrophe for American Catholicism. The statistics speak for themselves: In 1965, there were 49,000 seminarians; in 2002, there were 4,700. In 1965, there were 1,556 Catholic high schools; in 2002, there were 786. Mass attendance dropped from 74 percent of self-identified Catholics in 1958 to 25 percent in 2000. The number of priests has not fallen quite as drastically — 58,000 in 1965; 45,000 in 2002 — but the median age for priests today is 56, and 16 percent of them are from foreign countries.
And yet, to hear Cunnane tell it, things are different in Los Angeles. Indeed, what he was describing sounded like a throwback to the glory years of American Catholic devotion — the baby-boom era, when the native-born children and grandchildren of Irish, Polish and Italian immigrants filled an ever-expanding number of Catholic churches, often in places where there had been no Catholic diocese before, and they clamored for more priests to say Mass, hear confession, preside over baptisms and petition for more parochial schools.
In those days, young American Catholic males answered this call in steadily increasing numbers. To be a priest was to play a central role in the life of much of both urban and suburban America, spiritually and also in the everyday concerns of parishioners. The priestly hierarchy was overwhelmingly Irish then, and it remains so today. But that is where all similarity to the church of the 1960s ends. For if the priests are cut from much the same ethnic cloth as they were a generation ago, their parishioners are not: out of the eight Masses celebrated at St. Thomas every Sunday, seven are in Spanish, as are all three of the Masses on Saturday and two out of the three daily Masses. Parish business is routinely done bilingually, and priests like Cunnane probably spend more of their working lives speaking Spanish than they do English. New seminarians in the archdiocese of Los Angeles are required to be able to say Mass in Spanish (or another language of recent Catholic immigrants, like Tagalog or Vietnamese) as well as in English.
St. Thomas is in inner-city Los Angeles, but there is nothing anomalous about what takes place there. Throughout Southern California, from the San Gabriel Valley to downtown Los Angeles and from Orange County to East L.A., almost every parish church is in the same position, or at least inclining that way. As Fernando Guerra, a professor at Loyola Marymount University, has said, churches in Los Angeles now fall into two categories: they "are either Latino or in the process of becoming Latino." Although the trend is not as extreme in other parts of the country, it is being reproduced almost everywhere in Catholic America to one degree or another. Take, for example, another St. Thomas the Apostle Church — the one in Smyrna, Ga. There, Masses in English still predominate during the week, but on Sundays there are four English services and three Spanish ones, despite the fact that large-scale Hispanic immigration to the state is a very recent phenomenon.
Nationally, Hispanics account for 39 percent of the Catholic population, or something over 25 million of the nation's 65 million Roman Catholics; since 1960, they have accounted for 71 percent of new Catholics in the United States. The vast increase, both proportionally and in absolute numbers, is mostly because of the surge in immigration from Latin America, above all from Mexico, that has taken place over the course of the past three decades. Today, more than 40 percent of the Hispanics residing in the United States, legally and illegally, are foreign-born, and the fate of the American Catholic Church has become inextricably intertwined with the fate of these immigrants and their descendants.
Nowhere is this clearer today than in Los Angeles. One key to the history of the city (mostly forgotten by non-Latinos) is the fact that the great migration of Mexican nationals northward in the past 30 years has a precedent in the 1920s, when waves of migrants flowed into California after the failure of the Cristero rebellion — an uprising against the abolition of many of the church's privileges by Mexico's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. The regime of President Plutarco Elías Calles suppressed the Cristeros ruthlessly. ("The Power and the Glory," Graham Greene's novel that follows the hunting down of a "whisky priest" by government forces, is set during the Cristero rebellion.)
On one level, this is all ancient history, yet for many new immigrants from Mexico, the echoes linger on. One battle cry of Cristerismo, as it was known, was "Long Live the Virgin of Guadalupe," a reference to the apparition of Mary that Mexican Catholics believe appeared to a native Mexican in the 16th century. In a caustic moment, the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz suggested that Mexicans believe only in two things: the national lottery and the Virgin of Guadalupe. The fascination continues: ask any Border Patrol agent, and he will tell you that many of the illegal immigrants whom the service intercepts today wear tattoos of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
In the aftermath of their defeat, many of the Cristeros — by some estimates as much as 5 percent of Mexico's population — fled to America. Many of them made their way to Los Angeles, where they found a protector in John Joseph Cantwell, the bishop of what was then the Los Angeles-San Diego diocese. Though he was born in Limerick, Ireland, Cantwell was determined to serve his Hispanic congregants. During the course of his tenure, Cantwell created dozens of new Hispanic parishes and missions — this at a time when race relations in L.A. were at a nadir, and the bishop's mostly Irish congregants wanted little or nothing to do with their Mexican co-religionists.
The Cristeros arrived in the tens of thousands, but the current wave of immigrants dwarfs their numbers. Roger Mahony, the current cardinal archbishop of Los Angeles, likes to point out that the United States is reaching "the greatest levels of immigration in our nation's history," and to him and others in the church hierarchy, the new arrivals herald a rebirth of American Catholicism. Many within the church also say that these new arrivals could reverse the trend toward more tolerant attitudes on issues like contraception and abortion — what orthodox believers dismissively call cafeteria Catholicism. If Los Angeles is the epicenter for the astonishing Hispanicization of the American Catholic Church, it is also the site of a return to orthodoxy.
The question, though, is whether these changes represent something lasting. Is this a real turning point in the history of the American church that will lead to its enduring revival or, instead, only another cycle in that history? A cynic might observe that while the Catholic Church in Los Angeles has a great new market to serve, it has had great markets before. After all, the faith of the Irish and Italians in the 1950s seemed unbending, and yet it eroded in the aftermath of Vatican II and assimilation. Then, as now, priests routinely described their immigrant parishioners as possessed of traditional family values, a deep historical as well as spiritual connection to Catholicism and a belief that the church would look after their best interests. As Mahony himself told a group of seminarians in a recent speech, the pastoral task today among Latinos "is not much different than at other times in the church's life in this country, such as when Catholic immigrants from Europe — mostly Irish, Italian, Polish and German immigrants — came in search of better lives and looked to the Catholic Church for assistance in their spiritual, material and legal needs."
At times, there seems to be a certain wishful thinking in the church hierarchy's insistence on the unshakable faith of Hispanic Catholics. At the very least, it seems to underestimate the effect assimilation has had throughout American history on religious orthodoxy. With the children and grandchildren of European immigrants, the church fought what turned out to be a losing battle against the secular mind-set. As Latino immigrants become more settled, will they not, in their turn, choose to adopt views reflective of the American norm — a norm in which religious ideals of community have tended to give way to individualism and the quest for prosperity? Monsignor Cunnane has certainly thought about the problem. Cunnane, who comes from County Sligo, acknowledges ruefully the decline of faith in his native Ireland and says of his new flock, "We'll not let these people slip away."
You do not have to spend much time with the Catholic hierarchy in Los Angeles to realize how deep the church's commitment is to its Latino parishioners. The priests I spoke with praised the moral seriousness of their new parishioners and displayed a palpable exhilaration about the depth of their faith, an almost romantic, idealizing rendering of their spiritual commitment. As Cunnane put it, "The renewal we've experienced has not just been in numbers but in terms of vibrancy of faith and in the sense of community."
This extraordinary flow of feeling seems to go both ways. At Spanish Masses all over Los Angeles, there is the pervasive feeling of ardent devotion among the congregants. Clichéd though it may seem, what seems evident at the end of a Mass in an immigrant church is the sheer power of the experience. Parish priests talk a great deal about the need to make their new parishioners feel at home. To do so, these priests have tried to accommodate their habits of worship. At St. Thomas, for example, a mariachi band with the musicians in full ranchers' regalia stands behind the altar and intermittently steps forward to play. As well, fewer and fewer churches in greater Los Angeles make use of communion rails, and while this a tendency that is increasingly visible around the country, there is a particular informality and, more important, a particular intimacy to Masses in Latino churches. People bring their children, and the intermingled sounds of laughter, babies' tears and parents' admonitions and reassurances echo through the church as a counterpoint to service, sermon and song.
At St. Thomas, as the priest moves among his parishioners delivering the homily in Spanish, microphone in hand, he can seem to an outsider more like an evangelical pastor than a traditional Catholic priest. As he steps forward to ready communion, the priest is aided by a number of female members of the congregation. Most are elderly; all are dark-skinned — this in a congregation where people of every color come to worship. The communion itself is given with those who wish to receive it standing around the priest. From a distance, it can seem as if they are almost purposelessly milling about him, although, of course, the reverse is true.
To be sure, it is still possible in Los Angeles to hear a more formal Mass said in English, in a more hierarchical manner, notably in the new cathedral downtown. But many local parish priests have done everything they can to break down the barriers between themselves and their congregations. As Msgr. David O'Connell, who has worked as a priest in the inner city for the past 18 years and now is the pastor of St. Michael's Church in South-Central Los Angeles, explained it to me: "The church must always be willing to 'reread' our own tradition in terms of those we're serving. It's what we've always done."
Of course, the archdiocese has not severed its ties with the powerful in order to stand exclusively with the meek and the poor. The church is an institution that wields enormous political power in Los Angeles, just as it has always done. The city has a Catholic establishment, which, while not as old as that in Boston or New York, dates back at least to the 1920s, when the Doheny family held sway. Edward L. Doheny, who made his fortune when he struck oil in Los Angeles and later added to it with oil holdings in Mexico, left in his estate millions of dollars for the building of Loyola Marymount University. His wife's rare-book collection formed the nucleus for the library at St. John's, the diocesan seminary. The Doheny family has since largely faded from the scene, but decade in and decade out the archdiocese has maintained its influence. Emblematic of this is the fact that the list of donors who underwrote the building of the new cathedral reads like a who's who of L.A.'s power brokers and includes many non-Catholics, most notably Eli Broad, the businessman and philanthropist, who is Jewish.
There are tensions between the church as an establishment institution and the church as the champion of poor Latinos, but they rarely surface. To the extent they are referred to at all, they are spoken of obliquely. Members of the hierarchy will tell you that there was some resistance to Spanish Masses when they started becoming the norm in the archdiocese and that there is some lingering resentment at how ubiquitous they have become. Some Latino officials, both clerical and lay, intimate that the church still has a way to go before the hierarchy properly reflects the composition of Catholic Los Angeles. And it is telling that it was far easier for Cardinal Mahony to raise money for the new cathedral than it is for him to raise money for outreach in immigrant neighborhoods or to support the social activities of parish churches.
After the pontificate of John Paul II, there is little left within the official church of the spirit of liberation theology that cut such a swath in Latin America and to some extent in the United States in the '60s. And yet, on the grass-roots level, that spirit is not extinguished. A number of the homilies I heard could have been uttered by the leftist priests of the immediate post-Vatican II period, like Gustavo Gutíerrez, the Dominican theologian, or Ivan Illich, the radical educational theorist whom the present pope, Benedict XVI, threatened to excommunicate when, as Bishop Ratzinger, he was the head of the Vatican's Holy Office. The organizing tool that many priests in Los Angeles use, which is to form groups of neighbors into communidades de base, or base communities, was itself one of the fundamental innovations of liberation theology. Within certain orders active in Los Angeles, above all the Jesuits, campaigns for social justice continue to loom large, and it sometimes can seem as if the social commitments of the church of an earlier era are alive and flourishing in L.A., no matter what the current Vatican line may be.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Over the past 25 years, enormous numbers of people all over Latin America have become Protestant. In the smallest market towns of Tabasco or northeastern Brazil, you see storefront evangelical churches competing with Catholics for adherents. In Guatemala, the most extreme example of the phenomenon, 60 percent of the population is Pentecostal or charismatic. And this trend has repeated itself among Hispanics in the United States, where Pentecostalism has become an extraordinary phenomenon. Curiously, modern Pentecostalism was born in Los Angeles in 1906, when William J. Seymour, the son of former slaves, began to preach in a dilapidated building on Azusa Street in what is now the Little Tokyo neighborhood of the city. In Pentecostal literature, this is referred to as the Azusa Street revival, and from the start it involved Latinos.
Today, about 20 percent of American Hispanics are Pentecostal, and their churches, whether conventional religious buildings or simple storefronts, are found in every neighborhood in Hispanic Southern California. Pentecostal leaders insist that their numbers are growing steadily, and the church is visible in many parts of Los Angeles. For example, around MacArthur Park, which is only a short drive from St. Thomas the Apostle, Pentecostal preachers, male and female, sermonize in Spanish through tinny loudspeakers, Bibles in hand.
Some Pentecostal ministers in L.A. say that the Catholic Church is still too hierarchical. When I spoke to the Rev. Sammy Fernández of La Puerta Abierta, the Open Door Church, in East Los Angeles, he said, "People love touching God themselves." In Catholic churches, and even in mainline Protestant churches, he added: "God is out there somewhere. He's probably too busy to touch us little peons. But our faith" — the Pentecostal faith — "is based on the ability to express yourself freely and in the presence of the Lord."
Fernández's language was the language of faith, but in contrast to the Catholics I met in Los Angeles, it was also the language of capitalism. The Catholics' vision emphasized social justice, and while it encouraged people to organize themselves, it also at least implicitly made demands on them (and had high expectations of the state). In contrast, it seemed to me that Fernández's focus was closer to Margaret Thatcher's or Ronald Reagan's, and there is little question that part of the appeal of Pentecostalism generally among immigrants is its emphasis on prosperity, in contrast to the traditional Catholic emphasis on solidarity. "Whosoever will, do it yourself," Fernández told me he liked to say to his parishioners. "Don't bother the pastor. Do it yourself."
Neither Protestants nor Catholics were eager to speak about the tensions between them, but those tensions are palpable in Los Angeles. "The Roman Catholic Church views us as little storefronts," Fernández remarked. "They assume that no matter what they do, Latinos are always going to be Catholic. But we've showed they're wrong. That's just a fact."
Fernández did not deny that he was proselytizing, though he declined to single out Catholics specifically. "We teach that we will be rewarded in heaven by the souls that we bring to the feet of the Lord," he said. After St. Thomas was damaged in a fire in 1999, a group of Pentecostals came to preach in front of it, exhorting the church's parishioners to join them. Proselytizing goes on all the time, on the streets, in door-to-door ministries, even in the workplace. Cunnane at St. Thomas told me that he had been in a restaurant and heard a Pentecostal and a Catholic arguing in Spanish about a biblical passage. The Pentecostal, it seemed, had brought his own Bible to work.
No Catholic I spoke with believed that the church's history rendered it any less capable of being close to the people (a standard Pentecostal charge). They simply emphasized the goal of social justice alongside that of catechizing. Historically, this is almost certainly easier for the Catholic Church than for any other religious group, because the church has such a long-developed social gospel and such an elaborate language for advocating for it, both when it raises its own voice in the debate and when it seeks to help make the voices of its congregants heard. And contrary to what Rev. Fernández said, I saw no evidence of the church's indifference, either in terms of its teachings — some of which, as in the case of birth control and priestly celibacy, of course makes liberal Catholics squirm — or in terms of its activism.
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>