Latino Catholicism

Transformation in America's Largest Church

Timothy Matovina

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781400839735
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Denominaciones cristianas

How Latino Catholics and America are transforming each other Most histories of Catholicism in the United States focus on the experience of Euro-American Catholics, whose views on social issues have dominated public debates. Latino Catholicism provides a comprehensive overview of the Latino Catholic experience in America from the sixteenth century to today, and offers the most in-depth examination to date of the important ways the U.S. Catholic Church, its evolving Latino majority, and American culture are mutually transforming one another.In Latino Catholicism, Timothy Matovina highlights the vital contributions of Latinos to American religious and social life, demonstrating in particular how their engagement with the U.S. cultural milieu is the most significant factor behind their ecclesial and societal impact.

1

CHAPTER

Remapping American Catholicism

Father José Antonio Díaz de León, the last Franciscan priest serving in Texas when it was still part of Mexico, died mysteriously in 1834 near the east Texas town of Nacogdoches. A judge exonerated an Anglo-American accused of murdering Díaz de León amid rumors that the priest’s death of a gunshot wound was a suicide. Mexican Catholics decried this decision as a sham. How could their pastor, who had served faithfully on the Texas frontier for nearly all his years as a priest, have committed such a desperate act?¹

Seven years later Vincentian priests John Timon and Jean Marie Odin made a pastoral visit to Nacogdoches. They deplored the conditions of Mexican Catholics, whom, they said, Anglo-Americans had indiscriminately killed, driven away, and robbed of their lands. Father Odin also reported that Anglo-Americans had burned the local Catholic church building to the ground. Yet these and other visitors observed that Mexican Catholic laity continued to gather in private homes for feast days and weekly worship services and celebrated various rituals, such as funerals. Catholicism in Nacogdoches remained almost entirely a lay-led effort until 1847 when (by then) Bishop Odin was finally able to appoint two priests to replace Father Díaz de León. Parishioners’ eager reception of the sacraments from their new pastors testified to their enduring faith amid a tumultuous period of social upheaval.

These largely forgotten events occurred simultaneously with more widely known episodes in U.S. Catholic history. General histories and survey courses of U.S. Catholicism inevitably examine the atrocities of the anti-Catholic mob that burned the Ursuline convent to the ground at Charlestown, Massachusetts (across the river from Boston), in 1834, the same year of Father Díaz de León’s assassination and concurrent with the burning of the Nacogdoches parish church. Historical overviews also explore the saga of European Catholic immigrants, such as the Irish and the Germans, whose migration flows increased significantly during the very same decades that Mexican Catholics at Nacogdoches struggled in faith for their very survival as a community. Irish-born John Hughes became bishop (later archbishop) of New York in 1842, the same year that Odin, the first bishop of Texas (and later archbishop of New Orleans), was ordained to the episcopacy. But Odin’s two decades of endeavor to advance the Catholic Church and faith in Texas are far less recognized than Hughes’s simultaneous labors in New York.

U.S. Catholic historians’ strong focus on the eastern seaboard and European settlers and immigrants mirror long-standing emphases in the broader scholarship of North American religious history. Studies in recent decades have addressed lacunae in this historiography such as the role of regionalism, the frontier, women, African Americans, and Asian Americans, to name but a few.² Collectively these studies reveal that while documenting “forgotten” peoples, histories, and regions is an essential intellectual endeavor, it is only a first step toward the longer-range goal of investigating how to remap general narratives of the past in a manner that more adequately encompasses the various peoples, places, and events that formed it. Building on the groundbreaking work of colleagues like Moises Sandoval, the leading figure in the 1975 founding and subsequent development of the U.S. chapter of the Comisión para el Estudio de la Historia de la Iglesia en Latinoamerica (CEHILA, the Commission for the Study of the History of the Church in Latin America), this chapter is part of the larger effort to rethink the narratives of U.S. religious history, and U.S. Catholicism in particular—in this case, through the lens of Latino Catholic experience.³

Interpreting the past is never a neutral endeavor, of course. A basic truism of historical studies is that those who control the present construct the past in order to shape the future. With this challenge in mind, how can we understand the past in a way that sheds light on the tragedies of Father Díaz de León and the Ursulines at Charlestown; Catholicism in Nacogdoches and in New York; the contributions of bishops Odin and Hughes; and the experiences of Mexican, Irish, German, and other Catholics? More broadly, what are the basic themes of U.S. Catholic history? What gradual trends or dramatic turning points mark it into distinct time periods? How do Latinos fit into and shape the overall narrative? Obviously the answers to these questions are matters of interpretation, and no single response is unilaterally comprehensive. But how one responds is decisive for a number of the issues and topics that are fundamental to understanding the Hispanic presence and the future of Catholics in the United States. So we begin with an assessment of the historiography of U.S. Catholicism.

It is no surprise that for Latinos the most contentious renderings of the U.S. Catholic past are those that obscure their contributions, sometimes to the point of near invisibility. While the strongest expressions of this critique are usually directed at more dated scholarly works, as recently as 2008 James O’Toole’s The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America encompasses only two brief references to Hispanics from the origins of U.S. Catholicism to the dawn of the twenty-first century. The final chapter of O’Toole’s examination of U.S. Catholic history from the perspective of the lay faithful depicts Latinos as an important component of Catholicism’s ongoing evolution in the United States in the new century, but unfortunately this leaves the impression that only now are Hispanics becoming a noteworthy element of the U.S. Catholic story.⁴

To varying degrees other recent general histories of U.S. Catholicism address the Hispanic presence and contribution more adequately. A number of historians begin their rendering of the U.S. Catholic story with the Spanish colonial era rather than the establishment of the later and overwhelmingly Protestant British colonies. Woven into the narrative of general works such as those of James Hennesey, Jay Dolan, Charles Morris, and James Fisher are discussions of immigration patterns, demographic shifts, and Latino Catholic leaders, organizations, movements, religious traditions, political involvement, and social activism. But these historical treatments often subsume Hispanics into an Americanization paradigm that is presumed to hold true for all Catholics in the United States. Morris concluded his acclaimed 1997 work with the assertion that there is a “standoff between the tradition of Rome and the tradition of America [the United States].” His claim is based on an understanding of U.S. Catholicism as, in the words of Dolan, a fledgling “republican” church after U.S. independence that expanded into an “immigrant church” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and after World War II had “come of age” as “American,” a process often depicted as culminating in John F. Kennedy’s election as president, which signaled for numerous Catholics the authentication of their full acceptance in U.S. society. Explicitly or implicitly, scholars contend that these developments expanded Catholics’ benefits and contributions as U.S. citizens.⁵

Even those who protest Americanization as a detriment to Catholicism divide the U.S. Catholic past into a similar series of historical eras. Distancing himself from previous authors he deemed “one-sided in a progressivist direction,” Joseph Varacalli presented his 2006 work The Catholic Experience in America as “one of many more balanced and orthodox pieces of scholarship that . . . should be viewed, partly at least, as a result of the intellectual legacy of Pope John Paul II.” Yet Varacalli follows the same basic pattern of historical periods as the predecessors he critiques, albeit with his own interpretive slant. He depicts Catholicism in the United States as evolving from modest beginnings as a “minority church” in the first decades of the new republic to a period of nearly a century and a half in which mass immigration and effective episcopal leadership enabled Catholics to forge a subculture that “successfully propagated” the faith. In his view the zenith of Catholic subculture and its defense against “a then Protestant and a mostly unsympathetic civilization” was the period following World War II. But upward mobility, progressive interpretations of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), and secularization in society at large significantly diminished the countercultural edge of the subculture and the vitality of Catholic faith. While Varacalli diverges from previous authors in his addition of a fourth historical era he calls the Catholic “restorationist” movement under the pontificates of popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, he does not depart from the dominant schema. Instead he critiques the process of Americanization that others depict in a more positive light.⁶

Some scholars question whether the immigrant-to-Americanization paradigm is the best lens through which to examine the U.S. Catholic experience, even for the experience of European Catholic immigrants and their descendants. Others critique the language of “coming of age,” noting that whatever their level of formal education and status, European immigrants did not sojourn in a perpetual state of childhood immaturity, nor did adopting the English language and U.S. social norms indicate that their descendants had advanced to the age of adulthood.⁷ Nonetheless, the contention that U.S. Catholics have become “Americanized” to a significant degree remains an important interpretive lens through which most scholars, pastoral leaders, and other observers examine Catholicism in the United States.

The core question about the Americanization paradigm is this: in the long view, will the undeniably profound assimilation that transpired in the period from roughly 1920 to 1980 end up appearing more as an anomaly in U.S. Catholic history, or as the norm? Are there interpretive lenses that illuminate important alternative understandings of the historical trajectories of U.S. Catholicism? From the perspective of many ecclesial leaders, for example, a more pressing concern is the loosening of attachment to the institutional church in recent decades as reflected in data such as the relatively fewer vocations to the priesthood and religious life and the lower rates of Catholic school enrollment and Sunday Mass attendance, trends that are evident to varying but significant degrees among both immigrant and U.S.-born “Americanized” Catholics. How will future historians assess trends such as these, their interrelation with the Americanization paradigm, and the relative explanatory significance of each for understanding Catholicism in the United States? Are there other interpretive lenses no one has yet articulated that will rise to the fore in analyses of the U.S. Catholic past? At this juncture the most tenable conclusion about the Americanization paradigm is that it offers considerable insight into the experience of European immigrants’ descendants from the interwar period until the two decades following the Second Vatican Council, as well as into the subsequent contentious debates about the stance Catholics should take vis-à-vis the wider U.S. society. To presume that the Americanization paradigm is the best or even the sole organizational schema for U.S. Catholic history, and in particular for examining the place of groups such as African Americans and Latinos within that history, remains unsubstantiated.

Thus a decisive challenge is to construct a history of U.S. Catholicism that incorporates Latinos, and other non-European groups, but is not modeled exclusively on European Catholic immigrants and their descendants’ societal ascent and assimilation during the middle six decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, in broad strokes the history of Latino Catholics inverts the standard depiction of their counterparts from nations such as Ireland, Germany, Poland, and Italy. While Catholics were a small minority in the British colonies, in lands from Florida to California they comprised a more substantial population under Catholic Spain. The first mass group of Catholics to settle in the United States was nineteenth-century European immigrants, but the first large group of Hispanic Catholics became part of the nation during that same era without ever leaving home, as they were incorporated into its boundaries during U.S. territorial expansion into Florida and then westward. Just as European immigration diminished to relatively minuscule numbers as a result of 1920s restrictive immigration legislation, Hispanic immigration began in earnest with the Mexican Revolution. The counter trajectory of Latino Catholic history in the United States in relation to that of their European-descent coreligionists necessitates a reanalysis of each epoch delineated in the standard historiography, particularly the period since World War II, as waves of Hispanic immigrants have comprised an increasingly significant portion of what was purportedly an established, Americanized, post-immigrant church.

A Latino perspective on U.S. Catholic history also necessitates sharper attention to its international dimensions, especially the intersections of U.S. and Latin American history. Following the Spanish colonial presence in lands that are now part of the United States, U.S. political and economic expansionism led to the conquest of nearly half of Mexico’s national territory at the midpoint of the nineteenth century, consolidated U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico five decades later, fueled economic shifts that led to the origins of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigration from Mexico, resulted in a U.S. presence throughout the Caribbean and Central America that helped induce migrations from those regions, and has driven the globalization process that in recent decades fed an immigration explosion from throughout Latin America. This latter process blurred the border between Latin and North America, accelerating the development of previous links between Catholicism in the United States and Catholicism in the rest of the Americas. It also produced an unprecedented degree of diversification of national origin groups among Latinos in U.S. Catholicism. Examining the U.S. Catholic past through the lens of this diverse Hispanic experience—as well as through the experience of Europeans and other groups—expands on a unilateral Americanization paradigm with a hemispheric perspective that is essential for understanding the current demographic Hispanicization of Catholicism in the United States.

Colonial Origins

Jay Dolan’s introduction to the U.S. history survey course exemplifies a fundamental revision that a number of contemporary scholars have adopted for U.S. Catholic historiography. Dolan’s custom on the first day of class was to ask his students the significance of three years in North American history: 1607, 1608, and 1610. At least one student was always able to recognize 1607 as the date for the founding of the first British colony, Jamestown. But rarely could anyone identify 1608 as the founding date for Québec, and 1610 for Santa Fe. Dolan attests that “the reasoning behind my pedagogical cunning is to impress upon the students the French and Spanish dimension of American history as well as the more familiar English aspect.” Colonial U.S. historians like Alan Taylor have expanded on Dolan’s treatment, noting even less-acknowledged developments within territories that later became part of the United States, such as the Dutch colonies, Russian settlement in Alaska, and British incursions into Hawaii.⁸ Implicitly, this approach answers an essential question for any overview of U.S. history: does the subject matter encompass solely the British colonists and other peoples and territories only when they become part of the U.S. nation, or does it encompass the inhabitants of regions that are now part of the United States both before and after their incorporation? Rather than a story of thirteen original colonies and their westward expansion, the latter perspective accentuates the encounter and conflict of peoples, primarily the southward-moving French, the northward-moving Spanish, the westward-moving British, the natives who already lived on the land, and the slaves and immigrants who settled among them. Given that both the French and Spanish colonists were from Catholic countries, any comprehensive analysis of U.S. Catholic history must examine their foundational presence and the extent of their influence on subsequent developments.

Spanish-speaking Catholics have lived in what is now the United States for twice as long as the nation has existed. The first diocese in the New World was established in 1511 at San Juan, Puerto Rico, now a commonwealth associated with the United States. Subjects of the Spanish Crown founded the first permanent European settlement within the current borders of the fifty states at St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, four decades before the establishment of Jamestown, and around 1620 established at that settlement the first Marian shrine in what is now the continental United States, Nuestra Señora de la Leche y Buen Parto (Our Nursing Mother of Happy Delivery). Before the end of the sixteenth century, Spanish Jesuits and Franciscans initiated missionary activities in present-day Georgia and even as far north as Virginia. In 1598 Spanish subjects traversed present-day El Paso, Texas, and proceeded north to establish the permanent foundation of Catholicism in what is now the Southwest.

Catholics in the thirteen British colonies were a repressed minority in a Protestant land, eventually even losing the elective franchise in Maryland, the only British colony that Catholics founded. They comprised scarcely 1 percent of the population at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Meanwhile, in Hispanic settlements from Florida to California, Catholicism was the established religion under Spain and, in the Southwest, under Mexico after it won independence in 1821. This prescription led newcomers to the region—such as escaped slaves from Georgia who were granted freedom in Spanish Florida, famed Alamo defender James Bowie in Texas, and renowned scout Kit Carson in New Mexico—to accept Catholic baptism and at least nominal practice of the faith. From the standpoints of original settlement, societal influence, and institutional presence, the origins of Catholicism in what is now the United States were decidedly Hispanic.

Contemporary Latinos acclaim the foundational role of their ancestors in various ways. El Paso residents maintain that members of the Juan de Oñate expedition celebrated the “first Thanksgiving” in the United States on April 30, 1598, in gratitude for surviving their trek across the Chihuahuan Desert. The Oñate expedition festivities included a Catholic Mass and a meal for which the Spaniards provided game and natives from the region supplied fish. Since 1989 the El Paso Mission Trail Association has commemorated the event annually with a community picnic and festivities and Mass in historic sites like the San Elizario Presidio Chapel. Costumed participants and members of the local Tigua Indians reenact the Oñate expedition’s day of thanks. In 1991 a delegation from El Paso visited Plymouth Rock dressed as Spanish conquistadores and, according to an El Paso Mission Trail Association press release, was amicably “arrested and charged with blasphemy and spreading malicious rumors for stating that the real First Thanksgiving took place in Texas.” Though this staged confrontation was aimed at drawing publicity to both parties...