Católicos: Resistance and Affirmation in Chicano Catholic History

Six: Padres: Chicano Community Priests and the Public Arena

171 six Padres Chicano Community Priests and the Public Arena It is no longer sufficient for Church people to try to straddle a middle course, but it is necessary to advance the concrete application of the principle of justice. —father juan romero We addressed . . . issues from a justice perspective with the concept that injustice goes contrary to our faith. —father luis quihuis All of a sudden we had discovered a fascinating new entity—ourselves. . . . [N]ow we could be. —father virgilio elizondo católicos por la Raza marked a new chapter in Chicano/Church relations not only in Los Angeles, but in other areas of the Southwest as well where the majority of Chicano Catholics resided. Certainly movement activists began to demand more support from the Church for its agenda. In addition, some Chicano Catholic priests and sisters, inspired in part by Católicos as well as by Vatican II and liberation theology, represented what the theologian Harvey Cox in 1967 called the “New Breed in American Churches” and began organizing themselves and functioning as a pressure group within the Church to achieve reforms that would reflect Chicano interests.1 This led to the formation of Padres Asociados para los Derechos Religiosos Educativos y Sociales (padres) and Las Hermanas.2 This chapter concerns not the organization padres, but rather presents case studies of three individual Chicano priests, the padres, who, beginning in the movement years and beyond, have functioned as what I refer to as community priests. 172 católicos In my work in Chicano history, one of the principal themes I have stressed is that of the role of leadership.3 For the most part, I have addressed political and community leadership. In my recent work in Chicano Catholic history, however, I have been impressed with another form.4 This is the leadership, both spiritual and temporal, of Chicano Catholic priests. Overlooked in Chicano history as well as in contemporary Chicano studies is the major part that many Chicano priests have played and continue to play in their communities. This gap also reflects the lack of emphasis by scholars on the contributions of Catholic parishes in providing both organization and a sense of community among Chicano Catholics, and here I am using the term Chicano in a generic sense, including both Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals. One fine exception is Roberto Treviño’s recent study of Mexican American Catholics in Houston.5 As leaders, some Chicano priests represent a version of the “worker-priests” that surfaced in post–World War II Western Europe, principally in France. Reacting to the devastation, dislocation, and class unrest unleashed by the war, these priests left the safety of their churches and took the Church directly to the workers. Laboring in factories and industries, worker-priests immersed themselves in working-class life and culture as a way of promoting Catholic social doctrine. At first supported by the French Church hierarchy, many of the worker-priests left their parishes and secured employment in factories as a way of associating with the workers. They no longer lived in their comfortable rectories, but in poor working-class quarters. Some emerged as trade union leaders and merged their faith with socialist beliefs. As the worker-priests became more militant and public, the Church by the 1950s withdrew its support and brought an end to this experiment.6 Despite the short life of the worker-priest movement, what strikes me about the leadership they provided in their communities is how in these pre–Vatican II years they were redefining “Church” as “people.” By the same token, some Chicano priests in our time, and probably earlier as well, embodied a modi- fied version of worker-priests. By this I mean not that they are to be found working in factories but that, like their French counterparts, they are taking and have taken the Church beyond its institutionalized structure to the people themselves. Through their community leadership they have sought not only to redefine the Church, but also to assist in the empowerment of the Chicano community in the United States. They represent what Richard Martínez, in his study of padres, refers to as an “insurgent state of being.”7 As such, they symbolize what I call community priests. To an extent, of course, all Catholic chicano community priests 173 priests are community priests in that they engage with their parish communities...