by Paul Harvey
After the Christmas Eve event at St. Basil’s Church in Los Angeles, Latino church activists learned what could happen when they stood their ground and articulated their demands. Their very presence drew out liberals in the Church and sympathetic priests and nuns who realized they had to stand either with the Church or with CPLR. After the event, Cardinal McIntyre was compelled to retire. His replacement proved more open to hearing Latino voices in the Church. Not long afterward, Patricio Flores became the first Mexican American bishop. Nonetheless, leaders of CPLR saw continued challenges. Euro-American priests continued to preach the same sermons dwelling on outdated themes of individual behavior, ignoring the cries of people for social justice. Priests insisted on faithful attendance of Mass and close study of the catechisms, “instead of urging that people become action-oriented in the selfless service of their own people and others less fortunate.”
Latino activists also pressed for culturally appropriate worship and theology in the Church. For Latinos, as one priest expressed it, this meant the “human intersection of two histories, two nations, two cultures, two languages converging, colliding, blending, embracing, depending on one’s location within the human geography evolved by one and a half centuries of relentless interaction.” Another Latino Catholic priest pointed to the history of national parishes in the American Catholic system. Historically, the system afforded opportunities for the faithful to “practice Catholicism in their own cultures and not make acculturation blackmail to receive the redemptive act of Christ.” Injustices committed against Latino believers had to be acknowledged, and the Church had to rectify the injustices. “Why do many want to de-Hispanicize and to Americanize us?” asked one Latino layperson in 1974. “What crime is there in being Hispano?”
Latino Catholic priests and leaders in the 1970s and 1980s pursued power within the church walls through the organization of PADRES, short for Padres Asociados para los Derechos Religiosos, Educativos, y Sociales (Priests Associated for Religious, Educational, and Social Rights). For women, Las Hermanas (“The Sisters”) served a parallel function. Following the example of Chicano/a student activism in groups such as MEChA, as well as ad hoc protest groups such as CPLR, which had formed around specific issues of Latino inclusion and exclusion in major Latino Catholic areas, PADRES came from the efforts of Ralph Ruiz and other priests who gathered originally in San Antonio to share their experiences in the church and discuss ways to meet the needs of Chicano Catholics. At a press conference following the first meeting in 1970, they vowed to transmit the “cry of our people to the decision-makers of the Catholic Church in America.” Writing to the archbishop of San Antonio, Ralph Ruiz explained that they could serve as spokesmen for a disaffected Latino church membership, because they had come from the people themselves. The Latino priests pointed out the neglect of their people by the institutional Church. Juan Romero of Los Angeles recalled that in his first parish, in Los Angeles, he could not celebrate the Mass in Spanish even though almost everyone who came to confession spoke Spanish. Some newly trained priests during those years withdrew as they concluded that the promise of the Church was a “total lie and a doublecross.” PADRES could provide them with an alternative.
At the first national PADRES meeting in Tuscon in 1970, controversies over whether there would be lay membership in the group generated splits. Those who sought to limit full membership to Mexican American priests insisted that the Church itself would listen to a group of priests far more readily than an organization diluted with clerical and lay and Chicano and white members. PADRES focused especially on the issue of Latino bishops and other Latinos in positions of church authority, but some argued it should be less worried about placing Latino bishops than pushing a political program to help the poor. PADRES saw an early success with the appointment of Patricio Flores as the first Mexican American bishop in 1970. Meanwhile, in 1972, PADRES helped to form the Mexican American Cultural Center in San Antonio. It proved to be a fertile ground for theologians such as Virgilio Elizondo and others who began to articulate what they referred to as a mestizaje theology. They emphasized the mixing of cultures and ideas in forming Latino/a identity.
Juan Romero, one of the founding members, noted that groups such as PADRES were deliberately temporary creations to make visible the Latino presence and to “provide a support system for Mexican-American priests who often felt isolated and tended toward burn-out during the hard days of the movimiento.” Ironically, it was in part the success of groups such as PADRES that ultimately led to their decline, as Latino priests increasingly found themselves appointed to positions within the church hierarchy.
Like black women, who wrote of the double bind of race and sex, Chicanas (a term for Mexican American women that came to be preferred among politically active Latinos in the 1960s) came to realize that they struggled with the same dilemmas of race and gender. In the Catholic Church, home for the large majority of Mexican American Christians, women were viewed as submissive. Mexican American women who entered religious orders could not simply leave behind their cultural heritage. The politically and culturally aware Mexican American nun, Sister Teresito Basso argued, would be compelled to recognize the urgency of La Raza even to the point of building her life in the Church around it. Basso’s struggles within the church may be compared to those of Daniel Berrigan, who addressed the question of how to engage in civil disobedience against the Vietnam War even while remaining true to the Church and Order (the Jesuits) that he loved.
Basso was one of the founding members of Las Hermanas an organization of Spanish-speaking religious women serving in the Church in the United States. Las Hermanas provided a means to pursue the larger good of the Latina community even while serving the Church as an institution. Mexican American sisters, she said, had to
choose whether to identify with her people as “Chicana” or remain an acculturated Mexican-American. If she chooses to be known as “Chicana” it is because she is consciously aware of herself, her power of self-determination, as well as proud of her cultural heritage and experiences. Within her religious commitment, the people of La Raza will take priority while she seeks basic institutional changes because she senses the urgency and immediacy of bringing about this change.
She would see the shortcomings of the Church in providing the spiritual and material sustenance the people needed or in addressing the demands for social justice. As the Mexican American community pursued its aims of improving neighborhoods, job opportunities, and educational institutions, Latina sisters could no longer wait for an indifferent church or inequitable governmental structures to recognize the plight of the people.
Las Hermanas had a longer life than PADRES, in large part because they could hold out no such hope for advancement within the church (meaning also that the church authorities could do little to discipline or stifle the sisters). They too faced controversies on limited versus open membership and whether non-Spanish speakers would be given full membership. Las Hermanas took on a structure like that of PADRES, in which Spanish-speaking priests and lay religious were full members and associate membership was open to others, including Anglos, who worked in Latino communities or expressed sympathy with the organization. In the early 1970s, Hermanas leaders pointed to statistics that the Catholic population was more than one-quarter Latino, while the Catholic episcopacy had less than one percent Hispanic representation. By contrast, Irish Americans made up seventeen percent of American Catholics but controlled over half of the bishop positions.
In one of its earliest statements from the founding conference in Houston in 1971, the fifty nuns from eight states who gathered to form Hermanas said that Latina sisters had seen a gap between what they hoped to achieve for their people and what they actually had done within the Church. An early document by two founders of Las Hermanas lamented that sisters had not served the people as they wished, while some who had tried found themselves in trouble with members of their own congregations or with leaders of the Church. “We, as Spanish-speaki
ng Sisters, are greatly concerned with the plight of La Raza especially and are determined to better our efforts to meet their needs.” While PADRES and Las Hermanas issued statements about social struggles (such as farm workers’ strikes), their most concentrated activism was within the Church itself. Las Hermanas, for example, blasted the Church for using cheap Mexican labor in Church institutions. “Is it necessary to profess vows to be a waitress or a house maid?” two members of Las Hermanas rhetorically asked of the low pay extended to domestic workers in the Church.
Much like PADRES, founding members of Hermanas debated the degree to which they should focus on reforming the Church from within versus investing energies in social struggles around them. One founding member who had grown up in South Texas, Sister Yolanda Tarango, remembered it this way. Her reflections capture the movement of many Latino/a activists toward engagement with social justice issues:
I think that we changed from initially like being concerned about the ministry with the folks, and then as you get involved with the ministry of the folks you get involved with the justice issues. And so like one of the first justice issues was, for example, the farm workers. When we had the third national assembly in California, there was a real challenge of ‘Do we sit here and meet, or do we get out on the streets and march with the farm workers?’ And so it was like a big tension. And the result was saying, ‘We need to be out there; we need to be out in the trenches.’ And so a few people stayed and kind of did the business of the work, and others you know packed their bag and went and joined the farm workers. The farm workers who were and continue to be for, well for Hermanas and for the Church, a wonderful, what do I say, educational call to the Church to be who we say we are and to be with the people. And so anyway, so we started with the farm workers and more Hermanas getting involved in demonstrations and joining the farm workers and just really making that our issue in addition to the ministry area.
And then our issue became feminism, and looking at how do you [or] how do we deal with feminism among Latinas.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Catholic Church attempted to respond in some tentative way to the growing predominance of Latinos in the American church. “This Hispanic presence challenges us all to be more catholic, more open to the diversity of religious expression,” one bishop wrote. Recognizing that the Church historically was an immigrant church, the bishops saw the “pastoral needs” of Hispanic Catholics as great, with a strong tradition of faith in communities being challenged by pressures of assimilation into American society. The bishops endorsed the turn in Catholic teaching toward being specific about defining social justice and looking into issues of nutrition, health crises, poor housing, unemployment, and substandard education. They also encouraged attention to issues close to the lives of Latino constituents, including voting, immigration rights, and access to bilingual citizenship materials. “The Church embraces the quest for justice as an eminently religious task,” they concluded.
In stark contrast to the response of the church to Chavez’s crusades in the mid-1960s, the bishops devoted a special section to the needs of farm workers, including a sociological paragraph detailing the streams of migrant workers in various parts of the country. They decried the poor treatment of migrant workers and urged support of the right of migrant laborers to engage in collective bargaining through unions. They perceived the lingering problems of racism, despite the strides made in targeting prejudice and discrimination. The bishops also noted that the practice of ordinary Latino Catholics “imbues them with a spirit of sacrifice. It can lead to an acute awareness of God’s attributes, such as his fatherhood, his providence, and his loving and constant presence.”
Since the 1970s, a combination of immigration patterns from Mexico and Central America together with declining and aging Euro-American populations in Catholic parishes in cities soon made it evident that the future of the American Catholic Church lay with its growing Latino population. With a current Catholic constituency in North America of just over forty percent Latino, a figure soon to be well over fifty percent based on current demographic patterns and birth rates, American Catholicism will undergo another of its transformations that has in American history periodically reshaped it. The struggles of Latino activists from this period began to compel Euro-American authorities within the Church to acknowledge this rapid transformation.
NATIVE AMERICANS AND DILEMMAS OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
Deliberately modeling his work on James Cone’s pronouncement that “God is black,” Vine Deloria, a friend of Cone’s and a scholar of Native American history and religions, published his now-classic God is Red in 1973. The work arrived just on the heels of a standoff between Indian activists in the American Indian Movement (AIM) and federal authorities at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. AIM had occupied the town, in part, as a symbolic redemption of the 1890 massacre there that had killed some two hundred ghost dancers of the plains.
Spiritually reared in Indian and Episcopalian ways and educated in a Lutheran seminary, Deloria developed a wide familiarity with varieties of religious thought. In the 1960s and 1970s, he rejected the Western biblical tradition as beholden to a linear religious and historical narrative that was time oriented. This, he suggested, devalued native modes of placing space and geography at the center of religious understanding. Western Christians claimed that God works in history, Deloria suggested, but tribal religions “bound as they are to some specific places and particular ceremonies, do not need to rely upon the compiled arguments of history. It is only necessary that people experience the reality of the sacred. . . . A Sweat Lodge, a Vision Quest, or a Sing performed in a sacred place with the proper medicine man provides so much more to its practitioners than a well-performed Mass, a well-turned sermon argument, or a well-organized retreat.” Christianity taught that Jesus “made the one supreme sacrifice,” Deloria wrote, but “the rest of creation is involved in the Crucifixion only by logical extension and does not participate in the same way that Indian ceremonies involve it. . . . Traditional Indians do not see that sacrifice necessarily involves a sinful nature; rather, it is the only way that humans can match the contribution of other forms of life.” Deloria endeavored to shift the sacred from the person of Jesus and his actions in the past to the places of existence and experience connected to Indian geographies and sacred lands.
By critiquing the entire Western religious tradition, Deloria found a way to understand and contextualize his training in it and move beyond it. But the nexus of race, religion, and freedom always has been a troubled one for Native Americans. Native traditions historically have valued and sacralized land—space and geography—rather than sacred texts. Native religions have been more about practices and stories than “beliefs” in the Protestant American sense. Partly as a result, attempts to apply First Amendment law to Native American cases often have met with frustration. As a result, religious practices have met racial barriers created through the lens of ostensibly neutral court decisions.
The court’s reliance on Western theological definitions of God—such as the concept of “ultimate concern” as outlined by theologian Paul Tillich and cited in Supreme Court cases—also has hindered protection of Native American practices. Plaintiffs in these cases must meet standards of sincerity and centrality; in other words, they must show that their religious beliefs and practices are sincerely held and that the practices themselves are central and fundamental to the expression of the religion. If and when they can meet those tests, then the state is required to meet a compelling interest test when those religious interests may be abrogated or violated in some way. These tests have often not been applied, or have been applied in ethnocentric ways, in cases where Native American sacred land usages have interfered with development projects or with administrative needs. Congress has responded with symbolic gestures such as the American Indian Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1994, but the ways that “religion” is defined for the purposes of legal proceedings make it difficult to defend Native practices
within the context of a “compelling interest” test.
The stage was set for contemporary Native American religious freedom jurisprudence in the 1971 case, Lemon v. Kurtzman. In the Lemon case, the court enunciated its three tests of constitutionality for church- state laws. Laws that might impinge on religious practice should have a secular legislative purpose, neither advancing nor inhibiting religion, and there should be an avoidance of an “excessive government entanglement with religion.” The court also recognized, however, that “judicial caveats against entanglement must recognize that the line of separation, far from being a ‘wall,’ is a blurred, indistinct, and variable barrier depending on all the circumstances of a particular relationship.”
The principle of neutrality, and the Lemon principle of avoiding excessive entanglement of religion, would appear to work in favor of the Native American religious freedom, but the net effect has been the opposite. The test was whether government action violated a person’s religious beliefs or practices, which could be proven to be deep, compelling, and fundamentally religious. If those tests could be met, then only a compelling state interest could override them.
In the most important case of the last quarter century, however, Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith (here abbreviated as Smith v. Oregon), the court moved in the direction of expanding the sphere of what constituted “state interest.” The court ruled that generally applicable legislation was permissible even in the case where it might incidentally affect the religious practice of one group, provided it was not aimed at that practice. In this case, Galen Black and Alfred Smith, one an Indian and one white, lost their jobs in a drug rehabilitation program because of their use of peyote. They could not collect unemployment compensation because they had been fired for “misconduct.” After a complicated history in the Oregon courts, the case made its way to the Supreme Court. In the majority opinion, which held for the State of Oregon’s dismissal of the two employees, Justice Antonin Scalia insisted that the court had “never held that an individual’s religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the state is free to regulate.”