The New York Times magazine lead article today was a very long look at the resurgence of Catholicism in California, and how that relates to Mexican immigration, problems of poverty, and problems of social justice and violence.
It has been said that clinical health looks at the best way to repair gunshot wounds in the Emergency Room, and public health goes outside to see what all the shooting is about, and how to stop it. In that sense, the Catholic Church appears to be filling a gap and serving a major public health role in California.
If nothing else, it shows that the Catholic Church is a trusted, credible communication channel that reaches into these communities.
With my fascination with "self-organizing structures" and "feedback systems" I've also pulled out a few quotes from that great reference article that highlight how these activities interact to produce a rapidly resurgent church and community that deals with violence without making it worse in the process.
As with the Positive Psychology movement in management, it also shows that emotional and spiritual factors can be pivotal in holding a group of people together so they can accomplish tasks in hostile environments.
Excerpts from
The New York Times online (nytimes.com)
December 24, 2006
by David Rieff
... 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.”
This news comes as something of a surprise, given the fact that the last four decades have been such a catastrophe for American Catholicism.
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, ... Parish business is routinely done bilingually,...or another language of recent Catholic immigrants, like Tagalog or Vietnamese) as well as in English.
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.
The vast increase, both proportionally and in absolute numbers, is mostly because of the surge in immigration from Latin America, above all from Mexico,
Nowhere is this clearer today than in Los Angeles.
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.
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 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.”
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...
But the social message embedded in the scriptural passages, above all the call for justice and a validation of the dignity of the poor — that is to say of the parishioners themselves — evoked the strongest reactions.
He added: “Our effort is part of what it means for us to build the kingdom of God. Our engagement in civic life helps that happen. We don’t see this as separate from our religious vocation but essential to it.”as Monsignor O’Connell put it, “for many immigrants, the church is the mediating institution they trust the most, in which they feel they already have a foothold and are treated with respect.” O’Connell himself spends a great deal of his time trying to serve as a go-between linking the immigrant community, including those who are in the United States illegally, with the local authorities. Many people in his parish, he told me, “exist in an underground economy, a cash economy. They also live in a culture in which there is a lot of gang violence. What we often do is go into a neighborhood, say Mass and then talk with people about the issues that most concern them. Often, that means crime. So we will try to bring them to meet with the local police captain. The effort is meant to give them a stronger voice in the local community.”
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).
... the Catholic Church ...has such a long-developed social gospel and such an elaborate language for advocating for it,
On the grass-roots level, that activism has taken, and continues to take, many forms, ranging from the month of prayer and fasting that the Dolores Mission initiated when an anti-immigration bill sponsored by Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin, passed in the House of Representatives to lobbying for labor rights and immigrants’ rights in Washington to participating in the mass rallies for immigrants’ rights that took place in Los Angeles last spring.
(St. John’s is in Ventura County, in the heart of avocado-growing country, and the vast agricultural work force is almost entirely Latino).
Mahony divides the history of his own engagement into two periods: the time before 1965, when, as he puts it, “I was mostly aware of the immigrants’ pastoral needs,” and the years since, when, he says, “the church became more and more involved in social-justice issues for immigrants.” ...1962, during the period when Cesar Chavez began his campaign for farm workers’ rights in earnest. Mahony was close to Chavez, ... in 1975 — Gov. Jerry Brown named him to head up the newly formed California Agricultural Labor Relations Board. In effect, he became the lead negotiator in a series of labor disputes that culminated in the edgy peace between growers and farm workers that persists to this day.
s a result, the church has shifted its emphasis from labor rights for legal residents of the United States to the rights of immigrants. Mahony views this mission as one that is biblically ordained. In a recent speech at St. John’s, he said, “If you look today to see who are the most vulnerable, these are the same ones who are singled out by the prophets: people in poverty, single mothers, children and immigrants.” In other words, he said, “the challenge of the prophets is for us here and now.”
For Mahony, there is nothing new about this. “The church,” he told me, “has been doing direct service for centuries and doing advocacy as well.” But there is little doubt that the Sensenbrenner bill and the rise of virulent nativist feeling in America, above all on conservative talk radio, played a role in galvanizing the Los Angeles archdiocese and Mahony personally. The church had already been campaigning hard, but, the cardinal told me, the immigration restrictionists in Congress “teed up for us a home run by passing a bill so unlike the spirit of America.”
As a practical matter, the church’s commitment to the immigrant cause now far transcends any individual’s commitment, even the cardinal’s.
The story of the Virgin of Guadalupe .... By extension, the “Guadalupist” perspective embodies the church’s concern for the poor.
What is taking place in Los Angeles is an erasing of the border between Catholicism in the United States and Catholicism in the rest of the Americas.
The Rev. Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit who ran the Dolores Mission when things were at their roughest in East L.A. and who now heads up Homeboy Industries, a group that helps gang members (their slogan is “Nothing Stops a Bullet Like a Job”), summed it up when he said, “As a priest, you’re always connecting the Gospel to people’s lives.”
The Times article is filled with details and examples and I recommend taking the holiday season to read the whole thing.
technorati tags:LA, losangeles, catholic, catholocism, immigration, California, church, socialactivism, activism, poverty, gangs, gangwarfare, community, organizing, Chavez, farmworkers, Spanish, Latino, language
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