Print Issue: May 23, 2002

Professor: Latin American Traditions Can Help Evangelize Hispanic Catholics

Roberto S. Goizueta, professor of theology at Boston College, facilitates the formation session for Spanish-speaking priests at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, Atlanta, May 2. The session addressed the rich heritage Hispanics bring to the Catholic Church. (Photos by Michael Alexander)

By Priscilla Greear, Staff Writer

ATLANTA - At a workshop May 2, Boston College theology professor Roberto Goizueta, Ph.D., discussed how in Latin America - where Catholicism is engrained in culture like cornmeal in Mexican cuisine - Hispanics place more emphasis on experiencing their faith than on understanding it rationally, and how ministers here can use their popular religious traditions to evangelize and educate.

The Committee for the Continuing Formation of Priests sponsored the program in Spanish, the beginning of an effort to provide more formation in Spanish, and drew about 20 Hispanic priests and ministers. Goizueta, a Cuban-American and son of the late Coca Cola CEO Roberto C. Goizueta, has also taught at Loyola University of New Orleans, the Aquinas Center of Theology at Emory University and has served as president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States. His book "Caminemos con Jesus: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment" received a Catholic Press Association Book Award.

In his talk Goizueta spoke about the importance of religious symbols in Latin American Catholicism, in popular traditions and rituals such as processions, Our Lady of Guadalupe celebrations, novenas, Las Posadas at Christmas where people reenact Mary and Joseph's search for an inn, and Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations where persons erect altars with objects associated with loved ones who died to honor them. "In general what needs to be done is to try to integrate this religiosity of the people with the sacramental life of the church...The process is long, it takes years....It depends on the specific diversity of the church. There isn't a blueprint, but it has to be done with a lot of care and compassion... and try to understand before judging."

Goizueta said that all religions are based in the universal experience of being human and the mysteries of life such as death and that religious symbols like in the liturgy of Mass and sacraments are a tangible way humans try to express the mysterious, just as a man gives a woman flowers to express his love.

Yet he said that historically Catholicism in Latin America has been approached very differently than in North America, as the Spanish and Portuguese missionaries had brought over a medieval brand of it focused more on practice of faith and God's manifestation in the physical world. As in medieval times many couldn't read, the church then relied on the senses and things like art and music to teach the Gospel, and later in the Baroque churches in Spain emphasized God's manifestation through things like ornate, golden objects and in theater. Even Latin American literature integrates the spiritual and the physical in the writing style of magical realism.

On the other hand the English first brought in the 17th century to the United States a more rational view of the Catholic faith focused more on understanding and beliefs and skeptical of spirituality in the material world influenced by the Protestant Reformation. And as the majority of Latinos live in Third World conditions they have been less influenced by this more modern, rational faith perspective. "Medieval Christianity emphasizes not understanding but to do, to participate and act by means of the liturgy and devotions," Goizueta said. "We have a faith or a Catholic theology in the United States and Western World, the world of modernity, that transforms the faith from something practiced, to something understood. One believes but in an abstract way . . . a way of being Catholic (emphasizing) . . . the importance of belief."

Father Pedro de Oliveira, OFM Conv., left, parochial vicar at St. Philip Benizi Church, Jonesboro, and Father José Refugio Oñate Melendez, parochial vicar at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, Atlanta, participate in a formation session for Spanish-speaking priests around the archdiocese, May 2.

But people's experiences of the mystery of God in the world through the centuries are the roots of beliefs and doctrine and are used to explain the significance of symbols. While church doctrines are exact, there are many different ways people express faith.

The danger is "the tendency is to identify our faith with what we can understand empirically" and forget the deeper spirituality behind it. Yet "if the faith is something that has to do with my relationships with other human beings, with the love that I have for others and the love that God has for me, the faith has to do with something that can't be proven scientifically."

It's important for Hispanic ministers to understand people's cultures, as one can only find faith through it, he continued. "If we understand faith this way, I would say the most important part of faith is that it is the expression of a relationship that we have with God foremost, but also with the entire community, the family and the world. It has to do with connections...with a life one understands like a web that is connected, all the world is connected - our lives with each other, and us with our ancestors."

He also spoke of the value of staying connected with one's ancestors. "For me (it's important) to be faithful. to have faith involves maintaining these connections of love, these links, not only with my family now but with generations before me," he said. "One problem that Hispanic Catholics have in this country - a Catholicism that is defined through these connections - that is established through symbols and rites, Day of the Dead, processions . . . If these connections are lost . . . the community now is in danger, not only the community in which we live but the relationship we have with God, with the saints. The world of popular religiosity is a very rich world with many classes, the saints, the angels, the dead and the living and that is reduced when we begin to take away these instruments that we have to maintain these connections."

Elaborating on those connections, he said Latin American Hispanics receive their identity more through the families they are born into and heritage than in the United States where people find it more through how they work and achieve. The modernistic view is that community is less essential and even may limit the individual, and that one's only responsibility is towards immediate family and those with whom one chooses to have a relationship.

The challenge is to help Hispanic immigrants preserve those strong ties with family. They must also resist the tendency to feel like they must resist their popular, more emotional expressions of faith in a society that relegates faith to the private sector. Goizueta told his theory that Catholic Irish- and Italian-Americans and other European immigrants also experienced this pressure when immigrating here, feeling they must leave behind the Old World traditions of their grandparents to be successful here.

If they don't find the religious experiences and help they need in Catholic churches, many Hispanic immigrants leave Catholic churches for the Pentecostal ones, drawn to the emotional worship experiences they offer despite their different doctrines. "Oprah and in all these types of programs we are able to hear conversations of all classes of sexual acts. The only thing that we can't speak about publicly is faith. Nevertheless the religiosity is something that in our community is openly expressed, taking out the faith to the streets," Goizueta said.