Lonely ministry in an Indian parish

Father Earl Henley and Sister Deanna Rose von Bargen drove deep into the Torres Martinez Indian Reservation, past a boarded-up schoolhouse, spindly palms and fallow lettuce fields.

Finally, they reached the Church of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

Henley kicked aside four cantaloupe-size rocks lodged against the front door, ballast against the dry desert winds that often outwit the simple latch.

The tiny church has no electricity. Decorative stickers on the windowpanes stand in for stained glass.

With a few yanks on a thick rope, Henley rang the church bell to summon the faithful to the 9 a.m. Mass.

Moments later, tribal elder Ernie Morreo arrived wearing a camouflage bandanna, jeans and tennis shoes. He held an abalone shell filled with smoldering mountain sage. With two eagle feathers, he fanned the smoke over Henley and von Bargen to chase away evil spirits.

Then Morreo sat and waited for the service to begin. Only one other tribal member joined them that Sunday.

“Peace is flowing like a river,” they sang, Henley’s mild Kentucky twang rising above the echoes.

“Flowing out into the desert, setting all the captives free.”

The priest’s face appeared heavy with frustration.

“The message from Jesus tells us that we’re not supposed to look for results, we’re supposed to keep giving and believe that the Lord will do his work,” Henley said toward the end of the service, as much to himself, it seemed, as to the two parishioners. “Maybe he’s teaching us patience. Maybe he’s teaching us endurance.”

As head of the Native American Ministry for the Diocese of San Bernardino, Henley tends a parish of scattered tribes that include the newly wealthy, awash in casino profits, as well as the destitute hidden in the deep folds of the San Jacinto Mountains.

They are a people bound by loss, having suffered the near-obliteration of their native languages, homelands and ancestral ways.

In the 1700s, Spanish Franciscan missionaries preached the word of God while conscripting tribal members into forced labor. The Roman Catholic Church’s harsh treatment of Native Americans and intolerance of their spiritual rites persisted well into the 20th century. Elders still tell of having been ripped away from their parents and shipped to parochial schools.

For the last decade, Henley has tried to salve those wounds and increase the flock.

It is hard going.

On Sundays, the pews at reservation churches are rarely full. Wedding bells almost never ring. Confessions are seldom uttered.

“I don’t have 1,500 people to say Mass for,” Henley said, flashing a smile that quickly disappeared into the crevices of his face.

The priest’s territory is vast. On Sundays, he can be found behind the wheel of his Toyota 4x4 pickup, driving dusty roads near Coachella Valley date orchards or navigating the steep mountain passes into Anza’s high desert.

He talks of taking a sabbatical to reassess his mission. He wants to live on the reservations, insert himself into the daily routines, as he once did as a missionary in Papua New Guinea.

“This job is tougher,” he said. “Just being a priest doesn’t make it.”

::

The Native American Ministry includes 15 tribes, most tended by other priests and sisters. Henley regularly visits five. Though overseen by the diocese, he is a member of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, a congregation that sends evangelizing priests worldwide.

Born in Louisville, Henley, 69, describes himself as a “city slicker at heart.” He said he felt the “calling” to become a missionary when he was a 16-year-old sophomore at a boys high school run by the Xaverian Brothers.

His faith was tested early. While he was at seminary, his younger brother drowned in the Ohio River.

A few years after he was ordained in 1969, Henley was off to the South Pacific. Papua New Guinea, one of the most isolated and culturally diverse lands on earth, was his home for the next 23 years.

His faith was tested again after he returned to the U.S., when a woman who was a longtime friend proposed to him. He declined.

“This is where I find fulfillment. This is where I find happiness. This is where I want to be,” Henley said. “But it doesn’t come easy.”

His sanctuary is St. Joseph’s Catholic Church on the Soboba Reservation. He lives next door in a cluttered one-bedroom cottage with few comforts. A swamp cooler hums in the corner. Dream catchers, the webbed Native American charms believed to protect children from nightmares, dangle from the ceiling.

The tiny dining table is hidden beneath paperwork and a Ziploc bag filled with prescription bottles, including a blood thinner for the clogged arteries in his neck.

“The doctor said I’m lucky to be alive,” he said.

The church lies just across the road from temptation. The neighboring Soboba Casino rises from the San Jacinto foothills east of Hemet, pulsating with the whir and techno-clatter of 2,000 slot machines.

“Soboba is a hard place,” Henley said. “They’ve got money now. They’ve fixed up their houses, they drive around in nicer cars, but there’s still some difficulties, some growing pains.”

In 2008, three tribal members were killed in gun battles with sheriff’s deputies. Tensions peaked when the then-chairman of the tribe declared that the Soboba were at “war” with authorities. Firefighters refused to enter the 6,000-acre reservation without a police escort.

Henley stepped forward, calling for “peace, forgiveness and unity.” Eventually, all sides came together to quell the violence.

It was a rare public moment for the priest, who resists discussing the most sensitive issues rising from the reservations: substance abuse, domestic violence, political battles over tribal leadership. Henley prefers to focus on the good, like the Soboba council’s generous donations to St. Joseph’s.

“You can’t have a priest who comes in saying he will straighten out the Indians, because he will be destroyed and he will destroy whatever has been planted here,” Henley said. “So you come with a missionary vision. That means hang out and listen. You have to have the patience of Job.”

::

The church’s attitude toward tribal practices began to soften after the Vatican II reforms of the 1960s. The change accelerated in the late 1980s when Pope John Paul II met with Native American Catholics in Phoenix and acknowledged that the church had committed “mistakes and wrongs.”

The church began to support the use of Indian culture and traditions in its teachings, a change Henley fully embraces.

In the spring, he held a memorial Mass at the Pechanga Reservation’s century-old clapboard chapel. Henley led a procession to the cemetery and sprinkled holy water on the grave of Anthony Mares as the words to “Amazing Grace” rose from a circle of mourners.

“Don’t blame yourselves,” the priest told the family of the 2-year-old, who had drowned in a Jacuzzi a year earlier. “God had another plan.”

The service ended the Indian way. An uncle plucked a wooden cross from Anthony’s grave, raised an ax and smashed the cross into kindling.

He picked up the pieces and placed them on a cloth that moments before had shrouded Anthony’s headstone. He wrapped up the wood splinters with wildflowers and a rosary and stuffed the bundle into a freshly dug hole at the foot of the grave. Then he struck a match, setting it ablaze.

The Mass had celebrated Anthony’s pure, everlasting soul. The burning of the cross, a Luiseño tradition on the first anniversary of a tribal member’s death, signified the release of his spirit from earthly bonds.

“We take from both,” said the boy’s great-grandfather John Paul Vasquez. “When it comes down to it, tomorrow is promised to no one, no matter what you believe.”

::

Much of the work at the Native American Ministry falls on a small circle of devout sisters and lay ministers like Michael Madrigal.

Madrigal, a member of the Cahuilla band who has spent much of his life on the Soboba Reservation says the church is finding its way back onto Indian lands, but growth in the faith is slow.

“The traditional culture was crushed and forbidden by the American government, by the church, the Catholic Church,” Madrigal said. “We’re trying to recover from that still, to rediscover, reconnect, with our traditional culture and traditional spirituality.”

Cahuilla elder Annie Hamilton, 78, embodies Native Americans’ conflicted relationship with the church. She lives outside the reservation’s web of unmarked dirt roads, in the high chaparral near Anza — hard to find and harder still for the church to reach.

She was in the seventh grade when a priest came to the reservation and took her and other Indian children away to St. Boniface boarding school in Banning, where they were forced to abandon their tribal ways.

Life at St. Boniface was stark and cruel. Hamilton remembers scrubbing floors and hand-washing dishes in scalding water.

“They hit us with rulers so we wouldn’t talk our language,” she said.

Hamilton is one of the last known speakers of desert Cahuilla. Though baptized Catholic, she puts her faith in the Cahuilla story of creation: the tale of two spirit brothers, Mukat and Temayawet, who fashioned people, animals and all aspects of the earth from clay and then argued over whose were better.

“Mukat, the great creator, first put us here,” Hamilton said. “It doesn’t really matter what’s in the Bible.”

::

On Easter Sunday, Henley jumped into his pickup and wound his way from the desert floor into the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains, where heavy gray clouds pressed down through the peaks and pinyon pines.

A dirt road off Pines to Palms Highway east of Anza leads to a small adobe church on the Santa Rosa Reservation. It’s the smallest and poorest of the tribes Henley visits.

A necklace with a silver cross inlaid with turquoise dangled from Henley’s neck, a gift last year from a handful of families in recognition of the 10 years he’s been coming to Santa Rosa. Henley was overwhelmed. For the first time, he felt accepted.

Before Easter Mass, Henley rubbed his hands to ward off the chill. The church’s cast-iron wood stove lay in pieces in a back room. A cheap desk lamp lighted the altar. Still, the restored adobe, perched among 7,000-foot peaks, possessed a natural grandeur that made the heavens feel within reach.

“How do I explain the Resurrection? I don’t know. It’s a mystery,” Henley preached to those who drifted into the church’s three pews. “I see this power of God, how it works in our lives. We need to reflect on the little resurrections in our lives.”

After Mass, he stood at the front entrance as families headed out, wishing them well, knowing it might be months or a year before they return. But they had come on the holiest of days, and that was something.

“Small steps,” he said.

phil.willon@latimes.com