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Mexican Catholicism in Southern California: The Importance of Popular Religiosity and Sacramental Practice in Faith Experience A Professional Project Presented to the Faculty of the School of Theology at Claremont In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Ministry by Jeffrey S. Thies May 1991 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This professional project, completed by Jeffrey S. Thies ■ ' ■ ■ ■■■■■-------- -y has been presented to and accepted by the Faculty of the School of Theology at Claremont in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF MINISTRY Faculty Committee /?f/ V Date Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission ABSTRACT Mexican Catholicism in Southern California: The Importance of Popular Religiosity and Sacramental Practice in Faith Experience Jeffrey S. Thies Through the experience of Mexican immigration to Southern California, the Catholic Church of that area is increasingly becoming a Mexican Catholic community. This professional project is an examination of the faith experience of Mexican Catholics in Southern California, specifically emphasizing the role of popular religiosity and sacramental practice in that faith experience. After a brief examination of some pertinent demographics regarding the scope of Mexican immigration to Southern California, Chapter 2 presents the results of interviews conducted with Mexican Catholics in Santa Ana, California. These interviews demonstrate the centrality of popular religiosity and sacramental practice in Mexican Catholic faith experience. Chapter 3 explores the historical antecedents of this faith experience in both pre-Columbian Nahuatl religion and the Catholicism of sixteenth-century Spain. It then studies current theological reflection within the Mexican American Catholic community to see current reflection upon the faith experience presented. Chapter 4 highlights certain aspects of Mexican Catholicism presented by this study. In Chapter 5 a model of ministry from the Mexican Catholic Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. community of Santa Ana is examined as an example of effective ministry to the Mexican Catholic faith experience. Finally, Chapter 6 concludes with areas of further reflection, specifically concerning the relationship of Mexican Catholicism to American Catholicism and to questions raised by the experiences of the Catholic Church in Latin America. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to many in the development of this study. At the School of Theology at Claremont, I am especially grateful to Professor Dan Rhoades for his constant guidance and support in the formulation of this study. In addition to personal support, he offered an appreciation of the subject matter along with necessary guidance in planning and implementing a course of study in this examination of Mexican Catholicism. Professor Tom Head was very helpful in the study of the relationship of Catholic faith to culture. Father Frank Colborn assisted greatly in the theological and pastoral questions which ministry in the Mexican Catholic community present. The people of the parish of St. Joseph in Santa Ana, California are the ones who both motivated my study and presented the context for that study. They have touched me deeply and I am indebted to them. I am especially grateful to Laura Enriquez Billiter, Patricia Gonzalez, Manuel Guerrero, Norma Guerrero, Juan Guzman, Rosalinda Guzman, Rudy Vega, Mary Vega, and Yolanda Singh-Villa. They assisted me in the formation of the interview process and were the ones who conducted the interviews. I am also very grateful to Elena Alvarez Snyder for her help with the translations in this text and to Roberto Neri for his assistance in examining the youth ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. movement Jovenes Para Cristo. I am indebted to them for their generosity and the beauty of their Catholic faith. I am very thankful to Allan Figueroa Deck, S.J. He was very encouraging at the beginning of this project and generous with his time. His insights and pastoral reflection have been very helpful. Perhaps most inspirational, however, was the fact that his study of Hispanic ministry (see Chapter 3) was formed, in large part, by Hispanic ministry in the Diocese of Orange in California. These are the same people that I serve and with whom this examination of Mexican Catholicism has taken place. I am grateful to my diocese, to Bishop Norman McFarland and the Office of Continuing Education of Priests for their support of this study. Finally, I am grateful for permissions given for sources that have been used. Conversations with Allan Deck, as noted below, have been used with permission. The passage describing the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, presented in La Morenita; Evanqelizer of the Americas by Virgilio Elizondo is reprinted by permission of the Mexican American Cultural Center, San Antonio. iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1. Introduction........................................ 1 2. Interviews with Mexican Catholics..................5 3. Review of Pertinent Literature.................... 27 Religious Antecedents............................28 Contemporary Literature......................... 62 4. Aspects of Mexican Catholicism.................... 96 5. Jovenes Para Cristo................................99 6. Conclusion........................................ 117 Appendixes A. Interview Questions (English).................... 130 B. Interview Results (Spanish)...................... 134 C. Jovenes Para Cristo Statutes..................... 212 D. Interview with Members of Jovenes Para Cristo...241 E. Jovenes Para Cristo Tercero Encuentro Documents......................................... 257 F. Jovenes Para Cristo Retreat Schedule............ 278 Bibliography...............................................281 iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 Chapter 1 Introduction This study takes as its focus Catholic ministry in Santa Ana, California. In Santa Ana, the Catholic communities are predominantly Hispanic, mostly of Mexican origin. One statistical demonstration of this is that, the student population in the Santa Ana Unified School District is 81 percent Hispanic,1 a figure that parallels the enrollment in the city's Catholic schools. This means that the Catholic communities in that city are, for the most part, Hispanic. This reality in Santa Ana is set within the context of the Catholic dioceses in the Southwest which are themselves predominantly Hispanic. Presenting demographic evidence from the 1985 Census, Allan Figueroa Deck writes of the Hispanic presence in the Catholic community. The implications of these data (1985 Census) for the United States Catholic Church are far- reaching. The 1986 Official Catholic Directory estimates the Catholic population of the United States to be 52.2 million. A conservative estimate of the Hispanic population of the U.S. . . .is in excess of twenty million. How many of these Hispanics are Catholics? There is not any totally reliable study of this available, but the estimates range from a low of 75 percent to a high of 95 percent. If one takes the middle road and considers 85 percent of the Hispanics to be baptized Catholics, then approximately eighteen Dan Froomkin, "3% More Students in OC Classrooms: Minorities Make Up 45% of School Population,11 Orange Countv Register. 10 January 1990: Bl, 8. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 million of the 52.2 million U.S. Catholics are Hispanic, that is 34 percent. In some areas of the nation Hispanics already constitute a majority of the Catholics - California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, for instance. In nine of the twelve diocese of California, Hispanics constitute a majority of the Catholics. This is especially true of the archdiocese of Los Angeles, the most populous archdiocese of the nation, where the Hispanic population is in excess of 70 percent of the entire Catholic population.2 Regarding specifically Mexican immigration to California: Since 1975, 64 percent of all families leaving Mexico went to California. Another survey of 62,500 Mexican households in 1978-79 found that 50.9 percent of all Mexicans reportedly present in the U.S. at the time of the survey were living in California. . . . Where in California do the immigrants go? Massively they are going to Southern California, especially Los Angeles County and the four neighboring counties of Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura. A report of the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) points out that 500,000 immigrants came to the five southern California counties in the years 1975-1980. This is over half of the region's net growth. In fact, one of every eight immigrants (Hispanic or otherwise) coming to the U.S. during those years came to one of these five counties. . . . The SCAG report, in fact, projects an Hispanic population of 6,016,000 for just these five counties by the year 2000 if the optimum factors continue to obtain. The non-Hispanic white population of the region by the year 2000 is projected at 6,149,000.3 The emphasis presented by these figures continues. Preliminary results from the 1990 Census show that Orange Allan Figueroa Deck, The Second Wave: Hispanic Ministry and the Evangelization of Cultures (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 12. 3 Deck, Second Wave. 17. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 County grew at a rate to 24 percent, the population of Santa Ana growing the most, with a 41 percent increase during the ten years of the Census.4 First day enrollment for the academic year 1990-1991 showed an increase of 12 percent,5 reflecting the continued Hispanic immigration to the city. All of this indicates that the Catholic Church in California has become, to a large extent, a Mexican Catholic community. This is true not only for those cities in which the population is predominantly of Mexican origin because, as the numbers indicate, that population comprises such a large part of the general Catholic population that it is the Catholic community itself that is Hispanic,6 not just select pockets of it. This demands, as a consequence, that ministry and 4 Marilyn Kalfus, "Santa Ana Back on Top as County's Biggest City," Orange County Register. 28 August 1990: Al, . 10 5 Dan Froomkin and Marilyn Kalfus, l!0C, State Schools Face Huge Growth," Orange County Register. 15 September 1990: Al, 22. 6 In this project the words "Hispanic" and "Mexican" are used as interchangeable in the Southern California context. While there are large immigrant Catholic communities from other countries of Central and South America, in California "Hispanic" means, predominantly "Mexican." This is not true in other areas of the United States. See, for example, Presencia Nueva: Knowledge for Service and Hope. A Study of Hispanics in the Archdiocese of Newark (Newark: Office of Research and Planning, Archdiocese of Newark, 1988). Citing 1980 Census figures, the Hispanic population for the Archdiocese of Newark was 2 percent Mexican, 41 percent Puerto Rican, 24 percent Cuban and 33 percent from other countries. 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