Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943-1989: Transnational Faith and Transformations

2. First Impressions: Maryknoll Priests and the People of Puno, 1943–1953

CHAPTER 2 First Impressions Maryknoll Priests and the People of Puno, 1943–1953 Puno’s bishop, Salvador Herrera, responded enthusiastically when he learned that missionaries from the United States hoped to settle in his diocese . When he met Maryknoll Superior General Walsh at a gathering in Lima, Bishop Herrera had just come from the Santa Catalina Convent in Arequipa where he had been praying for the salvation of his abandoned diocese. The Maryknollers, it seemed, were the answer to his prayers.1 Peru’s apostolic nuncio described Puno as “one of the most unfortunate dioceses in the world.”2 It was the second largest department of Peru and also among the poorest and most remote. It had the nation’s second lowest literacy rate, 14.22 percent; its highest proportion of non-Spanish speakers; and one of its most dispersed populations . Ninety-two percent of the people spoke Quechua or Aymara, and 7,367 of its 9,764 settlements had fewer than fifty residents. The department’s mountainous geography and scarcity of roads made reaching people in outlying districts a nearly insurmountable challenge.3 Moreover, Puno’s average altitude was 12,500 feet, and its climate was marked by bitter cold, intense sun, and cyclical droughts and floods. When the Maryknollers arrived in 1943, just twenty-eight priests served Puno’s 645,000 residents.4 47 Puno department met all Maryknoll’s requirements for a “real mission ”: abandoned and needy people, multiple languages, and a challenging physical environment. But when the first missionaries settled, they knew little about the department, Peru, or Latin America. Half the young men had just been ordained and had hoped to serve in Asia.The other half had just been expelled from missions in Asia.5 None spoke Spanish, Quechua, or Aymara. But still the young priests believed they could save the local church by reestablishing sacramental life and developing a “native” clergy. Maryknollers did not recognize that their ideals and practices of faith were specific to their experience of Catholicism in ethnic communities in the northeastern and midwestern United States and to their training in the seminary. Instead, they believed that theirs was the official Romanized practice of Catholicism sanctioned by the Vatican. They immediately set to work to establish what they knew of the church at home in the highlands of Puno. The Maryknoll priests’ efforts to change the way Catholicism was practiced contributed to a social and political transformation in Puno, with dramatic unintended consequences. Among these was a slow process of chipping away at Puno’s social, political, and religious hierarchies . Within a decade of their arrival, the missionaries displaced Puno’s bishop and subordinated local clergy, thereby eliminating key power holders. They also began to undermine, in incremental ways, the power of large landowners and governing officials who dominated outlying provinces and exploited indigenous people’s labor. Because of these changes and the resources they brought to Puno, the Maryknollers became valuable assets for the weak Peruvian church and government. Maryknoll’s importance grew with the resources its missionaries brought. The Peruvian government recognized that the foreign priests could provide benefits to Puno’s indigenous people and to middle-class mistis (mestizos), and it sought to graft its own minimal aid programs onto those of Maryknoll. Despite being foreigners, Maryknoll missionaries became integrated into the Peruvian state and church.6 Yet no one could have predicted this outcome during Maryknoll’s challenging first decade of mission. In Puno Maryknoll priests lost the sacramental power that defined their authority in the United States. 48 The Maryknoll Catholic Mission in Peru, 1943–1989 Local people did not share U.S. Catholics’ reverence for the sacraments . Their faith was defined by distinct religious practices that they identified as the heart of Catholicism but that Maryknollers viewed as superfluous if not outright pagan. At the same time, the effects of the cold and the high altitude ruined the young priests’ health. In the early years few priests survived more than three years.7 The missionaries struggled to survive, to transform local practices of Catholicism, and to establish the authority that they took for granted as priests at home. Ironically, the changes Maryknoll introduced actually limited the potential for developing a local, Peruvian clergy, which was one of the missionaries’ principle goals. Peruvian clergy in provincial areas like Puno lacked the resources and power to confront the...