“Blooming Where We’re Planted”: Mexican-descent Catholics Living Out Cursillo de Cristiandad

You might say that the cursillo is a serenity prayer actualized, or the beatitudes of St. Francis. You can be an instrument of peace. I see the cursillo as an actualization of the serenity prayer, ‘I’m not quite the person I want to be but I’m not the person I used to be either.’ The cursillo is a process, we strive to be better—we know we’ll never be perfect but we strive for it.

Jesse, San Diego, July 22, 2005

I had forgotten God, all I cared about was money. I was having problems with my adolescent son at the time and other family problems. Like Saint Paul, I fell off my horse and was converted. My objective in making the cursillo was to change my heart and mind and it happened. Gracias a Dios por el cursillo!

José, San Diego, July 26, 2005

El cursillo changed my life. I thought my life was perfect before—I had a great family and church life. I heard about the cursillo and thought I’d give it a try. I can’t begin to explain what cursillo has done for me but I can say that I am a better person now.

Berta, San Diego, July 26, 2005

Jesse, José, and Berta, first, second and third-generation Mexican-descent Catholics, offer us an intimate glimpse into their experiences with the Catholic Cursillo de Cristiandad (“little course in Christianity”), “cursillo” as they are commonly called. Catholic cursillos are weekend retreats that take place over a seventy-two-hour period.¹ These weekend-long events emphasize cultivating a personal relationship with Jesus and the Holy Spirit and forming a deeper, more meaningful faith life. Catholic cursillos originated in Majorca, Spain, and came to the United States in the mid-1950s.² These “little courses in Christianity” were part of the larger lay-initiated Catholic Action movement of the 1940s and 50s, “a movement that encouraged active engagement of laypeople working to transform society through the application of Catholic teachings.”³ Cursillos were part of what the Catholic historian Jay Dolan refers to as the “development of special-interest apostolates with national organizations” in American Catholicism.⁴

While the theology behind the Catholic Cursillo de Cristiandad movement as well as its chronology has been well documented, how the weekend retreat and movement itself has impacted Catholics has not been examined in-depth, nor has the proliferation of Protestant versions of cursillos.⁵ Mexican-descent Catholics are the pioneers of the cursillo weekends in the United States and what has become known as the “fourth-day movement”—a movement that consists of 72-hour-long cursillo courses, both Catholic and Protestant.⁶

By examining Mexican-descent Catholics’ experiences and interpretations of their cursillo weekends, we are able to understand the power of the weekend experience itself. On a larger scale, when we pay close attention to Mexican-descent Catholics’ stories of their cursillo encounter, we can begin to grasp why and how the cursillo movement spread rapidly among U.S. Hispanic Catholics (primarily Mexican-descent, Cuban and Puerto Rican) as well as white non-Hispanic Catholics. While there were some white non-Hispanics who were openly hostile to the movement, many more white non-Hispanic priests and laity embraced the movement and began offering the weekend experience in parishes across the country beginning in the late 1960s.⁷ These priests and lay Catholics saw for themselves how cursillistas, those who had been through a cursillo weekend, were spiritually refreshed and how they channeled their renewed faith into their communities and parishes. For the Mexican-descent Catholics interviewed for this article, their weekend cursillo was a powerful, emotional encounter with Christ—a place where a new community of believers was cultivated and new identities were shaped.⁸ The weekend was and remains today a place where Mexicano and Mexican American cursillistas claim to be healed of the pain of ethnocentrism, social disclocation as well as intra-familial problems. They emerge from the weekend encounter refreshed and renewed, individuals ensconced in a...