PADRES: The National Chicano Priest Movement (review)

Patricio Flores's keynote address at the 1972 First National Hispanic Pastoral Encuentro in Washington, D.C. included his painful recollections about a teenaged girl who had attempted to commit suicide. When Father Flores visited her and mentioned that her mother was crying outside her hospital room and wanted to see her, the young woman replied that she never wanted to see her mother again. She explained that when she was fourteen her stepfather had attempted to abuse her, but when she told her mother she was rebuked and her mother even suggested that the young teen had been "teasing" the older man. Finally the stepfather "did what he wanted with me" and she ended up living on the streets; within a few years she had gotten to the point where she felt her life was no longer worth living. Flores went on to explain that Hispanics had felt the same sense of abandonment from their mother, the church: "We have appealed to the church, and have been abused, and the church has remained silent" (113).

Flores's memorable presentation and anecdote, which to this day I still occasionally hear one of his hearers repeat, came on the heels of his appointment as the first Latino Catholic bishop in the United States and the establishment of PADRES, or Padres Asociados por los Derechos Religiosos, Educativos, y Sociales (Priests Associated for Religious, Educational, and Social Rights). Based primarily on thirty-one in-depth interviews of key leaders and others associated with PADRES, Richard Martínez's lively narrative is the first book-length analysis of PADRES' twenty year history and its influence on church, society, and especially the lives of the Chicano priests who founded and developed the organization.

Mirroring Flores's speech at the First National Encuentro, Martínez summarizes the broad context for the emergence of PADRES as the ethnic Mexican experience of neglect and second-class status within the Catholic Church after the U.S. takeover of what is now the Southwest. He notes some positive efforts such as the establishment of parishes and the 1945 founding of the Bishops' Committee for the Spanish Speaking under the leadership of Archbishop Robert E. Lucey, but focuses greater attention on Frenchman Jean Baptiste Lamy, the first bishop (and later first archbishop) of Santa Fe, whose conflicts with Hispanic clergy and laity are infamous. Missing from Martínez's overview are examples of the efforts Hispanic Catholics made to resist their victimization. Given the book's focus on a Chicano priests' organization, Martínez could have profitably recalled the courageous efforts of nineteenth-century clergy in the Southwest like Ramón Ortiz of El Paso, José González Rubio of California, and particularly Antonio José Martínez of New Mexico. Significantly, PADRES member and frequently-quoted interviewee for this book Juan Romero has spent half a lifetime studying Padre Martínez in an effort to clear the name of his fellow Hispanic priest whom Bishop Lamy excommunicated.

Martínez is especially insightful in his analysis of the more immediate context for the rise of PADRES. He enables the reader to sense from the perspective of PADRES leaders themselves the frustration, pain, and anger they experienced in seminaries which ignored or belittled their people and their religious traditions and seemed to weed out rather than encourage Latino vocations to the priesthood. Their angst grew progressively worse after ordination as they entered active ministry and witnessed first hand the contradictions between the teachings of the church and the negligence and discriminatory treatment their Mexican American people endured. At the same time, the future founders of PADRES were inspired by Catholic social teaching, the hope and call for renewal of Vatican II, the deep spiritual lives of their people as expressed in movements like Cursillo, the direct social action of the Black Civil Rights and Chicano movements, and role models such as César Chávez and activist priests the young Chicano clergy sought to emulate. Collectively, their experience...