To mend rift, U.S. church needs to embrace gifts of Latinos - Catholic Education - hispanic american catholics

National Catholic Reporter, March 22, 2002 by Cesar Diaz

As such, religious devotions to Our Lady of Guadalupe or her feast on Dec. 12 are seen as real and direct expressions of God interacting with humanity for many Latinos throughout the United States.

A representative figure of what Goizueta and other Latino theologians call the "cultural and religious mestizaje [mixture]" of Latinos in the United States, Guadalupe is indicative of how popular Catholicism is misunderstood and underappreciated in the United States.

"I suspect that a lot of Euro-American Catholics who had to leave behind their devotions are now looking at Latinos and saying `I don't want to be associated with this brand of Catholicism,'" noted Goizueta.

One indicator of this feeling is that many Latino devotions and feasts are described in liturgical manuals as para-liturgical celebrations. To Goizueta and other Latino theologians, what this says to the Latino community is "we're telling people who experience God most closely in such celebrations that it's an inferior experience."

"However, in some ways," said Goizueta, "the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is really an Easter experience for Latinos."

The challenge, as he and many of the congress participants noted, is how to integrate the U.S. Latino community without forcing its members to lose their highly regarded religious expressions.

"We should be seen as a gift that needs to be embraced," said Banuelas. "And the church's pastoral emphases should be geared toward evangelization, not assimilation."

Cesar A. Diaz is a graduate student at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, Calif.