Crossing the Water and Keeping the Faith

Haitian Religion in Miami

Terry Rey, Alex Stepick

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780814777091
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479820771
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
significant numbers of Haitian immigrants began to arrive and settle in Miami.
Overcoming some of the most foreboding obstacles ever to face immigrants in
America, they, their children, and now their grandchildren, as well as more
recently arriving immigrants from Haiti, have diversified socioeconomically.
Together, they have made South Florida home to the largest population of
native-born Haitians and diasporic Haitians outside of the Caribbean and one of
the most significant Caribbean immigrant communities in the world. Religion has
played a central role in making all of this happen.



Crossing the Water and Keeping the Faith is a historical and
ethnographic study of Haitian religion in immigrant communities, based on
fieldwork in both Miami and Haiti, as well as extensive archival research.
Where many studies of Haitian religion limit themselves to one faith, Rey and
Stepick explore Catholicism, Protestantism, and Vodou in conversation with one
another, suggesting that despite the differences between these practices, the
three faiths ultimately create a sense of unity, fulfillment, and self-worth in
Haitian communities. This meticulously researched and vibrantly written book
contributes to the growing body of literature on religion among new immigrants,
as well as providing a rich exploration of Haitian faith communities.

1

The Haitian Catholic Church in Miami

When the Saints Go Sailing In

A colorful mural adorns the northern interior wall of Miami’s Notre Dame d’Haiti Catholic Church (see fig. 1.1). It depicts bright skies over the shimmering blue waters and the high green mountains of the Caribbean nation of Haiti. Soaring through the skies is an Air d’Haïti passenger jet, while plying the waters is an overcrowded wooden sailboat. They are both departing and they are both watched over maternally by Our Lady of Perpetual Help. For those aboard the plane with intentions to emigrate, voyagers who could afford an airline ticket and possessed the required valid passport and visa to board, the immigration and settlement experience in Miami differs vastly from those with no other choice than to squeeze onto a sailboat in a desperate and dangerous attempt to make it to lot bo dlo, to the other side of the water, as the Haitian diaspora is called in Haitian Creole. For those on the boat who actually make it to Miami, chances are that they eventually would find themselves in the pews of Notre Dame and in the hallways and erstwhile classrooms of its adjacent Pierre Toussaint Haitian Catholic Center, accessing any number of the social services offered there. An able leadership greets them with the generous support of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Miami. Together, the church leadership and the Haitian immigrant congregants have made this the epicenter of Little Haiti, an impoverished inner-city neighborhood that has been called both the “Ellis Island” and the “living room” for Haitians in Miami.

Notre Dame d’Haiti is very much the heart and soul of Little Haiti, the densest concentration of Haitian immigrants in Miami, if not the entire world, and one of the poorest neighborhoods in one of the poorest cities in America. And, although the jet airliner is depicted in the mural, this church began as a congregation of those who came on the boat, of thousands of Haitian refugees, of botpipel, who first began arriving in the late 1970s, followed by a large wave of some ten thousand coming in 1980 alone. They and their boat are also depicted in a stained-glass window behind the altar, right next to another stained-glass window of the Venerable Pierre Toussaint.¹ There is no memorial window of the plane, though, and so it is clear that this is a church of the botpipel and of the poor, however many wealthier Haitians may have gravitated here over the years. Haitian class distinctions, as everything else in Haitian culture and society, extend transnationally into Miami. The Polish American monsignor Thomas Wenski, one of the founders of Notre Dame and the spiritual father of Haitian Miami, understood this from the very beginning of his ministry: “I figured out pretty quickly that the doctors and lawyers didn’t need me—their Haitianess was a sort of social tea kind of thing, like at Christ the King,” a reference to an upper middle-class parish elsewhere in the Archdiocese of Miami that has a weekly French/Creole language Mass. And, one of the ways in which Wenski expressed his solidarity with the Haitian poor and endeared himself to his inner city flock was “by not learning French.”²

For those touching down on the Air d’Haïti flight at Miami International Airport (some of them the French-speaking doctors and lawyers who didn’t need Wenski), chances are that they already owned fine houses somewhere else in Miami-Dade County than Little Haiti, or that they were welcomed into the living rooms of relatives to embark upon settlement experiences that did not require any assistance from the Toussaint Center on the grounds of Notre Dame d’Haiti. Many from this flight and thousands of others like them have never even stepped foot in Little Haiti. Most of them are devout Catholics who, like the Catholic botpipel, bring their faith with them when crossing the water. But, the ones from the plane find themselves worshipping, usually as minorities, in Catholic churches other than Notre Dame, in other Miami neighborhoods, where masses are celebrated regularly in French or Haitian Creole. They are members of an increasingly upwardly mobile and economically, culturally, and generationally diversifying Miami’s Haitian community that today counts roughly a quarter of a million people. And, just as they have diversified economically, culturally, and generationally, so too have Haitian and Haitian American Catholics in Miami diversified religiously

Figure 1.1. Mural inside of Notre Dame d’Haiti Catholic Church in Little Haiti, Miami, depicting Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Haiti’s patron saint, watching over departing boat people and air passengers leaving Haiti for Miami. Photo by Jerry Berndt.

This chapter is a historical and ethnographic portrayal of Notre Dame d’Haiti Catholic Church, the leading cultural and religious institution in Haitian Miami and one of the most significant “ethnic parishes” in American Catholic history. Time and time again, Haitian immigrants have flocked to Notre Dame for solidarity and prayer, whether in the midst of tumult in Haiti or in the struggle to survive in a “host” society that never wanted them. More regularly, Notre Dame has also effectively served as the spiritual home for tens of thousands of Haitian Catholic immigrants over the years, and the Toussaint Center has served thousands more Haitians and Haitian Americans of whatever religious or secular persuasion with its myriad of social assistance programs.

Prayers and Tears in the Living Room

“When I learned about the earthquake,” explains Fr. Reginald Jean-Mary, “I opened the church so that people could come and pray” (WLRN 2010). What else was there to do in the immediate aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010? For thirty years Haitian immigrants had come to “the living room,” as Fr. Jean-Mary likes to call his church, to pray: regularly for Mass but also whenever news of some major event in Haiti reaches Miami: of coups-d’état; of violence at the polls; of AIDS and cholera epidemics; or of migrants lost at sea. On October 27, 1983, for instance, when Msgr. Wenski led 140 Haitian immigrants in mournful procession beneath the towering oak trees in the churchyard behind Notre Dame. The processors and their priest prayerfully joined hands in a circle and planted a large wooden cross in the ground to commemorate the thirty-three seafaring Haitian migrants who drowned when their sailboat, La Nativité, capsized within sight of the lights of the South Florida coast at night two years earlier, their bodies washing up on Hillsboro Beach by the following morning. “This wasn’t only for those who died aboard La Nativité,” noted Wenski. “It’s for the hundreds whose bodies were never found [in other unsuccessful attempts to reach the United States]” (in Vaughan 1983b).

Just over twenty years later, in 2004, Haiti celebrated its bicentennial, marking the republic’s independence from French colonial rule, a feat achieved through world history’s only successful national slave revolt. Lampposts throughout Little Haiti were adorned with banners of red and blue, the colors of the Haitian flag. Thousands of Haitians walked beneath them on New Year’s Day to Notre Dame d’Haiti for an effusive and worshipful outdoor Mass and jubilee, which, even by Notre Dame’s standards, was an extraordinary occasion, perhaps the most celebratory in the church’s history. January 1 is also the feast day of the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, which certainly added spiritual meaning to the gathering, as most Haitian Catholics attribute the independence and the care of their homeland nation to the Blessed Mother, but especially to Our Lady of Perpetual Help (Rey 1999; 2002). To Haitian Catholics, Notre Dame d’Haiti, Our Lady of Haiti, is Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The sociologist Margarita Mooney (2009: 4) was in attendance among the estimated four thousand people at Notre Dame that festive sunny day, and she helpfully reflects some of the celebration’s broader import:

The celebration at Notre Dame on January 1, 2004, marked not only two hundred years of Haitian independence but also a significant amount of progress in the Haitian community in Miami. In the 1970s, Catholic leaders in Miami celebrated Mass for thousands of Haitian asylum seekers being detained in Krome Detention Center and opened their doors to thousands of boat people who showed up at the church doorstep seeking help. Today, some twenty-five years later, Haitians in Miami have overcome tremendous prejudice in their journey from being … “the refugees nobody wanted” to becoming proud Haitian Americans with their own community organizations, elected political leaders, religious institutions, and distinct cultural identity.

That New Years Day gathering at Notre Dame d’Haiti was a celebration not only of Haitian independence and the Virgin Mary but of the rich stores of worthiness, justice, and dignity that Haitians in Miami have gained over the years from and through this church, through the material and spiritual support of Notre Dame d’Haiti and the Toussaint Center.

The joy of January 1, 2004, would last only two months: on February 29—this was a leap year and the first day of Lent—Haitians in Miami awoke to learn that a rebellion in their beloved homeland had driven the democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power, and that he was being whisked off to exile, for the second time in recent history. Once again, upon receiving news of upheaval or disaster in Haiti, hundreds of Miami Haitians dropped whatever they were doing that morning and flocked to Notre Dame. They came, as they always have, to pray for Haiti and to try to gain some sense of meaning amid yet another tragedy back home. In a moving expression of solidarity with Haitian Catholics, a group of Cubans and Cuban Americans made pilgrimage from the Shrine of the Virgin of Charity of El Cobre to Notre Dame, led by the spiritual father of the Cuban exile community, Bishop Augustín Roman. Journalists also came, knowing that if Haiti is anywhere in Miami, it is here. Conspiracy theories were quick to hit the city’s Creole airwaves and circulate via teledjòl (word-of-mouth). The one with the greatest currency had it that Presidents George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac had initiated a Franco-American coup d’état in Port-au-Prince to please the Haitian economic elite and foreign investors, Aristide’s most vociferous opponents. By 8:00 a.m., the pews of Notre Dame were filled with sobbing people overcome with an all-too-familiar sense of disbelief in the seemingly inevitable. During Fr. Jean-Mary’s stirring impromptu sermon, a woman in a rear pew cried out “Aba George Bush! Aba George Bush!” (Down with George Bush! Down with George Bush!). Jean-Mary seized the opportunity to place emphasis on the dire need for Haitian unity, which is one of the most common exhortations that we have heard preached in Haitian churches over the years: “Madame! Madame! That is not it! That is not what we need right now at all! It is not the time for blame and division, but for unity, prayer, and healing!” For Haitian Catholics in Miami, there is no better place to turn for these things than Notre Dame d’Haiti, where their faith and spirituality have transformed a drab high school cafeteria into one of the most moving religious sanctuaries in the American Catholic Church.

Thus, for most Haitian Catholics in South Florida, when tragedy strikes the homeland you go to Notre Dame and you pray and you weep and you console and you come together with family and strangers alike, uniting in a repeating drama of faith and longing and for a time when Haiti has peace and food and shelter and health care and education and jobs for all. But January 12, 2010, was unlike any other tragedy-induced gathering at Notre Dame, something much worse than any coup d’état imaginable. The earthquake created devastating violence in Haiti, crushing its capital city and killing a quarter of a million people in a few terrifying minutes. Jean-Mary got word of the quake and, like so many of us, tried immediately to call Haiti for news. “I was able to talk to a priest in Haiti. The only word I heard was ‘catastrophe’ and then it cut off” (in Romero and Lacy 2010). Then he opened the church for people to pray: “They were crying, they were leaning on each other … some would throw themselves on the ground to find strength” (WLRN 2010). The living room was once again swept with tears and prayers, this time more cascadingly than ever in Notre Dame’s thirty years. But the people who had crossed the water kept the faith, as they always have, through it all and despite it all.

Founding the Haitian Catholic Church in Little Haiti

Haitian refugees began arriving in South Florida in significant numbers in the early 1970s; by the end of that decade they numbered around fifty thousand, most of them initially settling in Miami just seven hundred miles from Haiti, and most of them were Catholics. The Haitian community’s rapid growth and pressing needs prompted Archbishop Edward McCarthy to establish the Pierre Toussaint Haitian Catholic Center in 1978 at the Cathedral of St. Mary in Lemon City, a neighborhood that would soon become known as Little Haiti. That year he also appointed a recently ordained native Floridian named Thomas Wenski to serve at Corpus Christi Catholic Church, a few miles to the south, where Masses had been said in French and eventually in Creole for the migrants since 1973. As the son of Polish immigrants, Wenski was especially sensitive to the concerns of South Florida’s newly arriving Haitians: “I’ve always considered myself an ethnic. As a kid, I was always the Pollack. I wore my Polishness as a badge of honor. That sense of ethnicity always helped me when I learned Spanish to identify with the Cuban community and also when I learned Creole to identify with the Haitian community” (in Shaffer 1989).

Soon thereafter, Archbishop Coleman Carroll’s plea to the Catholic Church of Haiti to send a priest to help serve Miami’s swelling Haitian population was granted, and Fr. Gérard Darbouze, a native of Les Cayes who had been a priest of the Haitian Diocese of Jérémie, left Haiti in 1980 to join Wenski to minister to Haitian refugees in South Florida. By then, Wenski had been named director of the archdiocesan Haitian apostolate and pastor of Notre Dame d’Haiti Catholic Church, which was still without a home independent of the cathedral. In 1980 Darbouze and Wenski said Mass in Haitian Creole at the cathedral in Miami, and other Creole services less frequently at Corpus Christi and at Catholic churches in Pompano Beach, Belle Glade, and Fort Lauderdale, as well as at the Krome Detention Center.

To Wenski, 1981 was a year of “divine providential timing” for the Haitian Catholic Mission in Miami. May 1981 witnessed the last graduating class of girls from Notre Dame Academy at the corner of NE 62nd Street and NE 2nd Avenue. Then the school merged with Archbishop Curley High School because of dwindling enrollments, and the archdiocese decided to cede the premises to the Haitian Catholic Mission. The cafeteria was transformed into the church, while the two stories of classrooms housed the rectory and the multitude of social service programs offered by the Haitian Catholic Center: ESL classes, job placement counseling, health screenings, legal assistance, and the like. Almost immediately, the center drew throngs of beneficiaries. Because more than ten thousand Haitian refugees had arrived in South Florida in 1980, Wenski understandably perceived the hand of providence in the transfer of the school grounds to the Haitian apostolate. By August, masses were being said in Creole for the mission’s approximately one hundred members, even though Notre Dame’s official consecration, by Archbishop McCarthy, did not take place until November 15. By 1982, Notre Dame had absorbed Corpus Christi’s weekly Creole Mass and the Cathedral of St. Mary’s daily morning Creole Mass. They offered in the new “quasi-parish” two Creole masses per day, the first at 9:00 a.m. and the second at 5:30 p.m., with Wenski as pastor, a role that he assumed enthusiastically and thoughtfully: “Immigrants integrate into American society best from positions of strength, which is precisely what the ethnic church fosters… . Establishing an ethnic parish was key to giving Haitians a sense of identity, and a sense of belonging… . The whole idea was to make the Church visible to Haitians and to make Haitians visible to the Church.”³

Politics, Protest, and Prayer in Little Haiti

A Haitian American proverb has it that “When Haiti sneezes, Miami catches a cold.” Because it was so closely attuned to, and created by, the social and political upheaval that rocked Haiti in the 1980s and 1990s, Notre Dame d’Haiti cannot be understood without focusing on the remarkable events that brought to an end thirty years of brutal dynastic dictatorship in Haiti under the Duvaliers and the ensuing (and shorter-lived) Namphy and Cédras regimes.⁴ As it had throughout Latin America, liberation theology took root in Haiti in the 1970s, creating a new breed of Catholic priests in the country who envisioned the church as the prophetic “Bride of Christ” who should exercise a “preferential option for the poor.” For what seemed like the first time in Haitian history, Catholic leaders began to forthrightly confront and denounce the causes of poverty and injustice that had always plagued Haitian society, the very forces that drove thousands of Haitians to sea and to seek asylum in Miami. Many of the first generation of congregants at Notre Dame brought this new conception of the church—of Tilegliz (Little Church)—with them to Miami, where their expectations of a socially and politically engaged church resonated harmoniously with Wenski’s own ecclesiology, hence its actualization at Notre Dame d’Haiti.

Momentous sanction for the Tilegliz came with the visit of Pope John Paul II to Port-au-Prince on March 9, 1983. Much to the chagrin of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, John Paul’s speech before thousands of enthusiastic Haitians at Port-au-Prince’s international airport amounted to a powerful exhortation for an end to political oppression and social injustice, punctuated with the resounding insistence that “Il faut que quelque chose change ici” (Something must change here). Haitians in the diaspora closely followed the pontiff’s historic visit. In Miami, the Notre Dame community was especially overjoyed to hear their pope denounce the abuses of the Duvalier regime and acknowledge that in Haiti there was “a deep need for justice, a better distribution of goods, more equitable organization of society and more participation” (Juan Pablo II 1986: 192).

Wenski was in Haiti for the occasion. Before returning to Miami, a few days after the pope’s visit, he managed to interview Gérard Duclerville, a Catholic lay activist who had been imprisoned and tortured by agents of the Duvalier regime. His recording of the Duclerville interview was played on Haitian radio in Miami, and one hundred copies were made and sold at Notre Dame. The flip side of the cassette tape was John Paul II’s homily at the Port-au-Prince airport. Wenski later published the interview with photos in Lavwa Katolik, Florida’s only Creole newspaper, which he founded and edited. In response, the Haitian government lodged a formal complaint to the Archdiocese of Miami, recognizing that although Notre Dame d’Haiti was located abroad, it was clearly integral to the popular struggle against political repression in the Haitian homeland (McCarthy 1983a).⁵ It also served to establish a harmonious rhythm between Wenski’s charisma and his flock’s liberation ecclesiology: “That’s probably when I proved to the Haitians here that I’d paid my dues … I was saying mass in Creole every week. Whenever something happened in Haiti, we said mass for the victims. I think that gave us credibility in the community” (in Viglucci 1995).

Emboldened by their pontiff, courageous and progressive clergy of the Haitian Catholic Church, like Hugo Triest, Antoine Adrien, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Jean-Marie Vincent, Gilles Danroc, Max Dominique, and Bishop Willy Romélus (all of whom at one point in time have visited and/or said Mass at Notre Dame in Miami), took a leadership role in the events of 1985/86 that precipitated the political demise of Jean-Claude Duvalier. H...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Haitian Religion in Miami
• 1 The Haitian Catholic Church in Miami: When the Saints Go Sailing In
• 2 Immigrant Faith and Class Distinctions: Haitian Catholics beyond Little Haiti
• 3 Feting Haiti’s Patron Saint in Little Haiti: The Feast of Our Lady of Perpetual Help
• 4 Vodou in the Magic City: Serving the Spirits across the Sea
• 5 Storefront and Transnational Protestantism in Little Haiti: Harvesting the Gospel in the Haitian Church of the Open Door
• Conclusion: Beasts, Gods, and Transnational Transubstantiation
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors
• Footnote