Church's New Wave of Change

By ANNE-MARIE O’CONNOR

March 25, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Father Juan Romero still remembers how, as a young priest 30 years ago, he was forbidden to give a Spanish homily to his Latino immigrant parishioners in East Los Angeles--even if they spoke nothing else.

“The idea was let them learn English,” recalled Romero, now the priest at St. Clement Parish church in Santa Monica. “For some pastors, it was more important to teach English than to preach the gospel. We’ve come a long way, baby, since then.”

Today, 80% of Romero’s Westside parishioners are immigrants or their children. Most of his Masses are in Spanish, and life at his church has a decidedly immigrant heartbeat. And nowadays, Spanish proficiency is a requirement for graduation from Catholic seminaries in Los Angeles, Orange and several other California counties.

A similar demographic transformation is taking place in other U.S. immigrant hubs. Like the Irish, Poles, Italians and Germans before them, Latin Americans are reshaping the 61-million-member U.S. Catholic Church. At least 70% of the about 30 million Latinos in the United States are Roman Catholic, said Ron Cruz, executive director of the Secretariat for Hispanic Affairs in Washington. A fifth of America’s 20,000 U.S. parishes offer Spanish services, he said.

“This migration will transform the church by the next century into a predominantly Hispanic American institution, just as today it is predominantly Irish American,” said Father Allan Figueroa Deck, a Loyola Marymount professor who wrote an authoritative history of U.S. Latino Catholicism, “The Second Wave.”

In Los Angeles, dramatic change has already occurred, though estimates of the Latino church presence vary widely.

Louis Velasquez, director of the Los Angeles archdiocese Office of Hispanic Ministry, estimates that about 70% of the more than 4 million Catholics in the three-county Los Angeles archdiocese--America’s largest--are Latinos. He says that makes it one of the largest Hispanic Catholic archdioceses in the hemisphere.

More conservative estimates range between 50% and 60%, said archdiocese spokesman Father Gregory Coiro. The presence of so many illegal immigrants in the region may contribute to an undercount of as many as 1 million Latino parishioners, he said.

Coiro said the shift, fueled by the growth of the Latino community, is a microcosm of the immigration trends that are redrawing the face of Southern California. Other emerging Catholic groups are Pacific Islanders, particularly Filipinos, and Asians, especially Koreans, Coiro said.

“The word Catholic means universal and we are one of the most--if not the most--diverse archdioceses in the world,” Coiro said.

Enrollment Up at Parochial Schools

About 60% of Los Angeles’ Latino Catholics speak Spanish as their primary language, Velasquez said. Spanish-language Masses are held at 187 of the archdiocese’s 287 parishes, and at most of those churches they make up 80% of the services, he said. At least 15 city churches hold only one English mass a week, on Sunday, he said.

Latino immigrants also are boosting parochial school enrollment wherever they settle. The number of Latino students has risen more than 60% in the Los Angeles archdiocese since 1970, and nearly half of the city’s Catholic schoolchildren now are Latino, according to church figures. Velasquez said Latino enrollment would be even higher if tuition--$100 to $130 monthly--was not too expensive for many immigrants.

Absorbing the immigrants has meant assuming assimilation and social service duties--regardless of recipients’ immigration status--at a time that Californians have voted to restrict immigrant access to government services.

“Once they’re here, how they got here is irrelevant to us,” Coiro said. “These are human beings with dignity and needs. The church has to stand with the immigrants regardless of the reasons they came or the ways they found themselves here.”

Front-line parishes provide programs such as day care, food distribution, employment counseling, legal advocacy, help with immigration paperwork and health care. Youth programs try to steer immigrant teenagers away from the urban siren call of gangs and drugs and the risk of teen pregnancy.

“We’re always working on helping the people assimilate,” said Father Dennis O’Neil, the parish priest of St. Thomas the Apostle in Pico-Union, where immigrants take classes in English, parenting, adult literacy and citizenship.

Some churches run shelters for new immigrants. At one downtown church, after the final Mass, 60 immigrant men lay down on pews and mats. They may stay for as long as four months while they find jobs and apartments.

“If it weren’t for the church, my struggle here would be much more difficult,” said Rogelio Castro Ramos, 32, a Mexican who slipped into Arizona illegally a few weeks ago and sleeps at the church while working as a day laborer.

At a time when Catholicism must compete with proselytizing Protestant sects for Latino believers, church leaders are increasingly accommodating of the Mexicans and Central Americans who bring their own variants of the faith to Southern California. But in parishes where newcomers eclipse U.S.-born whites or Latinos, there are often tensions, in some cases even defections, priests say.

In most parishes shared by Latino immigrants and whites, “there are basically two churches that share the same building but are not a community,” said John Coleman, a religious sociologist at Loyola Marymount.

But some parishioners applaud the arrival of Latino immigrants who, like the Irish and Polish before them, are more regular churchgoers than assimilated American Catholics.

“When I’m at a Spanish Mass, I find it very moving,” said Regina Bolan, 45, a white parishioner at St. Clement who attended its now defunct parochial school at a time when the church’s small congregation was predominantly white. Now, the original white English-speakers have been overtaken by a lively majority of Spanish-speaking newcomers.

“Religion is very important to them,” she said. “Their fervor extends itself over and above the Mass. The world is always changing, and you have to go with it, or it leaves you behind.”

Sometimes it is the priests who find it hard to navigate the changing map. Church contributions always drop, at least temporarily, when poor immigrants arrive en masse, Velasquez said. Some priests resist taking steps, like adding a Hispanic Ministry office, to accommodate the newcomers, he said.

“It’s huge numbers, and it’s happened very swiftly. That’s the difficulty,” he said.

Traditions Are Changing

The immigrant shift has meant incorporating a more emotional, charismatic style of worship, and integrating Latin America’s “popular church”--a rich melange of regional grass-roots religious practices--into the established U.S. church traditions.

When Mexico’s elaborate Day of the Dead was revived at one East Los Angeles church, some U.S.-born Latino parishioners worried that it was “Satanism.” A shocked white seminarian told a Latino theologian that the Day of the Dead--a baroque fusion of pre-Colombian and Catholic rituals celebrated Nov.2--seemed like “voodoo.” One priest who watched immigrants caress and speak to religious statues worried it was idolatry, and placed the figures behind glass. Others won’t let immigrants fill the church with miraglos--tiny metal charms representing broken hearts, ailing arms, legs and eyes--in hopes of obtaining divine cures.

Their concerns echo 19th century Catholics’ complaints about “superstitious” Irish peasants filling church pews. Yet a century later, Irish American and Catholicism were synonymous and, as late as the 1970s, Irish Americans comprised a third of the clergy and half the church hierarchy.

Unlike the Irish and other Europeans, however, Latinos lack a strong tradition of clerical vocations. Only 2,200 of America’s 50,000 priests are Latin Americans or Spaniards, said Father Jose Gomez, president of the National Assn. of Hispanic Priests. There are only about 300 U.S.-born Latino priests, though Latino enrollment in Catholic seminaries is on the rise, Gomez said.

Instead, theologians say, Latino immigrants are reinventing parishes in Los Angeles from the bottom up.

The first parishioners of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in East Los Angeles came as Mexican refugees in the 1920s, bringing a militant, persecuted church. Mexico’s revolutionary leaders, viewing the clergy as allies of exploitative landowners, exiled many, and bloodshed erupted in the so-called Cristero War.

But years passed, and younger generations lost their Spanish and moved to more upscale enclaves, like Montebello. They attended other churches, or like many U.S. Catholics, stopped going to church regularly, said Father Robert Juarez, Our Lady of Guadalupe’s pastor.

Then came the Mexican immigrant boom. The newcomers packed pews, youth groups and catechism classes. They introduced vivid new rituals and invested old ones with pageantry and emotion.

The December feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe became a two-day passion play with Aztec dancers and a dramatization of the day the 16th century Mexican peasant Coahtlatoatzin--Christianized as “Juan Diego”--sighted the Virgin at a hilltop shrine for an Aztec fertility goddess. Like the goddess, the Virgin is called Tonantzin--”our mother”--and is cited as the crucial bridge between Mexico’s pre-Colombian and Catholic worlds.

Christmas at the parish has become a fervent reenactment of the posadas--Mary and Joseph’s search for shelter--with parishioners taking turns hosting statues of the Nativity for eight nights of festive open houses. At Lent, they recreate the stations of the Cross and Christ’s agony in the streets outside the church.

Other differences are more subtle but still widely felt.

The American-born Latinos donate more money to the church, but the Virgin of Guadalupe’s newcomers need more help. A nurse examines immigrants who fear a trip to the emergency room will mean deportation. The neediest parish families receive food distributions weekly.

Immigrants listen intently in meetings on their children’s religious development. American parents often “just watch the clock,” said Giovanni Perez, the religious education director. “It’s like, let’s get it over with.”

And while Spanish services thrived, English-language services became so empty “you could shoot a cannonball through the pews and not hit anyone,” Father Juarez said.

Today, 60% of his flock--mostly Mexicans--speak Spanish only, and Sunday is the only day that English Mass is offered. “We know this has caused hard feelings, but how can you keep preaching to thin air?” Juarez said.

“There’s a lot of resentment of the new immigrants by the more Americanized Mexican Americans,” he said. “The English-language people say, you’re turning your back on us. They see the immigrants as bringing the community down. They don’t see the richness.”

Church matron Bertha Sandoval, 70, the U.S.-born daughter of Mexican immigrants, is one of the parishioners who is, in the words of one priest, “in mourning” for Our Lady of Guadalupe--the way it used to be.

“They’re giving priority to Spanish, and we think it’s unfair,” Sandoval said. “I figure you’re here in the United States, you shouldn’t speak Spanish. I think the people should learn English.”

Behind the changes at the church, experts say, is a broader process of assimilation that is emptying the pews of old families and leaving behind empty spaces that are being filled by immigrants. When Sandoval’s three daughters married, they moved to affluent suburbs, and they take Sandoval’s nine grandchildren to church there. Sandoval thinks they don’t come back to their childhood church because, unlike her, they don’t speak Spanish.

“My kids don’t like to go to any of the services and things, because they don’t understand it,” she said. “Some of the ladies, like me, don’t like to say the Rosary in Spanish.”

Ron Cruz, of the Hispanic secretariat in Washington, said such feelings are typical.

“U.S.-born Latinos have not responded all that well to the Hispanic Ministry,” he said. “There’s cultural tension. It’s really more popular with the immigrants.”

Clergymen try to draw immigrants into the existing U.S. Catholic culture. Some try to “redirect the focus” of immigrants whose overwhelming devotion to the Virgin seems to ignore the importance of Jesus.

But at St. Thomas the Apostle, parishioners speak to God through six different Latin American virgins, and “we just sort of go with it,” said Father Dennis O’Neil.

“We do try to steer them away from the statue as a powerful image, and teach them it’s a symbol,” he said. “But in a gentle way.”

O’Neil smiles as he describes how his parishioners swear that they do not worship the folk saints--some with pre-Colombian roots, none recognized by the church--whose feast days draw crowds outside parish gates. But the biggest local botanica, where their images and candles are sold, is around the corner from the church.

Church Is Focus of Communities

At St. Thomas, Zapotec Indian parishioners from the Mexican state of Oaxaca not only brought their church, but also entire villages. And in the prevailing multicultural spirit, their transplanted village councils were incorporated into church life.

The Zapotec councils have helped make the parish contributions the highest of 40 Los Angeles parishes, O’Neil said. One council donated a whopping $3,000. The councils also mediate between the Zapotecs and the pitfalls of American culture. Gang graffiti and hand-painted Latin American virgins dominate the urban hieroglyphics on the streets outside, and thieves and exploiters prey on immigrants.

The Zapotecs outmaneuver slumlords by buying apartment buildings--which the church dutifully blesses--listing multiple names on the titles and paying for them jointly. Their councils come up with parochial school tuition and send their kids to college at a rate that defies the poverty and illiteracy of their parents. The small percentage of Zapotec youths in gangs are often exiled to a year in Oaxaca, and O’Neil personally escorts some to the plane.

As in their native villages, the church is the focal point of community life, and the packed pews at St. Thomas illustrate one of the bounties of the immigrant wave.

“The Catholic Church continues to grow in this country when most mainstream churches are declining, and the immigrants are the reason, “ Father Deck, the theologian, said. “If you want a growing church, work with the immigrants.”

“The Spanish-speaking Masses are full, full full, and the Anglo ones are dying,” echoed Father Michael Kennedy, the Jesuit pastor of Mission Dolores in Boyle Heights. “If a priest is not bilingual, his access to the job market is limited.”

Commitment to Immigrants

Few churches work harder to aid immigrants than Mission Dolores. Here, church workers say, the congregation is “100% immigrant” and the church commitment to them is explicit.

“In the last six years, people from Mexico have had to cross the border because their families are in need,” explains an outline of its pastoral project. “The services . . . help them with orientations that will make easier their coping.”

The importance of programs that provide food, child care and foster youth development increase with the growth of official unwillingness to help immigrants, said Claudia Martinon, 28, a Mexican-born parishioner and part-time church lay worker.

The program also has an activist dimension.

Church lay workers act as mediators when merchants refuse to let immigrants stand on downtown street corners where employers cruise by, looking for gardeners and construction workers. They go after employers who stiff immigrant laborers on payday, telling them that they will turn them in to immigration authorities if they complain. Lay workers even participate in protests.

At Dolores, the church is collecting money to build a shrine for victims of the December massacre of Indian villagers in Chiapas, and members wrote a letter to Mexico’s president protesting the violence.

Such advocacy seems natural to newcomers who lived through an era of army persecution of priests and nuns in Central America. And Latino lay workers, some veterans of Cesar Chavez’s farm worker movement or church “asylum” programs that sheltered immigrants from war-torn areas in the 1980s, see no reason to discourage it.

“Certainly there will be people who think this is very political,” said Humberto Ramos, the pastoral coordinator of the Hispanic Ministry in San Gabriel, who organized this week’s commemoration for a Salvadoran archbishop, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who was assassinated as he celebrated Mass at a chapel March 24, 1980, at the outset of the nation’s recent civil war.

“Jesus, when he preached, challenged the established order, and that’s one of the reasons he died the violent death he suffered,” Ramos said. “Today, Jesus would have taken stands.”

Times researcher Julia Franco contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Latino Catholics

Although the percentage has been steadily decreasing, an overwhelming majority of Latinos in the United States are Catholic.

Protestant

Catholic

Other or no religion

Latino students make up the largest ethnic group attending the parochial schools of the Los Angeles Archdiocese as of October 1997.

Latino: 44%

White: 31%

Filipino: 11%

Black: 9%