‘They see the Catholic Church as a white church . . . ‘ : Missions Must Adapt to Modern-Day Indians

They are missionary priests, and their backcountry churches are two of the oldest in San Diego County, but the men who spiritually minister to North County’s Indians are a breed apart from their predecessors 160 years ago.

Gone is the fervor and adventure of bringing Christianity and white man’s civilization to pagans who worshiped nature and lived in huts.

Today’s reservation Indians live in contemporary housing and discuss how to apply the Bible to contemporary living; some of their children receive Roman Catholic education in the mission school and address classroom guests with a smart “Bonjour!”

The priests are no longer evangelizing point-men; their challenges reflect those faced by most every Catholic parish pastor: how to raise money to pay the bills, how to boost Sunday Mass attendance, how to increase the number of lay leaders in the church and how to soothe the differences between competing factions of parishioners. In fact, the men who staff the county’s two asistencias --smaller, outreach missions for Mission San Diego de Acala and Mission San Luis Rey--would today be rank-and-file diocese priests if there were enough local priests to go around, officials say.

But given the shortage of local priests and given the missionary history of Mission San Antonio de Pala, founded in 1816, and Mission Santa Ysabel, founded in 1818, out-of-state missionary priests remain on hand to carry on the work begun in the early 1800s.

“Our superiors are inclined to take us away from here and send us back to Sudan or Uganda,” said the Rev. Frank DiFrancesco, one of three Italian priests serving the mission on the Pala Indian Reservation along California 76 in North County.

“But there are not enough diocesan priests, so here we remain,” he said.

Father Junipero Serra and his fellow priests generally were welcomed when they introduced Catholicism to the area’s Indians about 200 years ago. The relatively easy conversions to Christianity were possible because the new religion offered much of the same imagery, ceremony and belief in a superior being as did native Indian religions.

The early converts displayed a passionate interest in Catholicism, establishing a new religious heritage that was handed down through the generations.

But today, the priests acknowledge, much of that spiritual bloom is gone. Not unlike many of their Catholic non-Indian counterparts, many Indians display a rather disinterested attitude toward their church; even though a great majority of North County’s Indians are baptized Catholic, many who were interviewed for this story admitted they do not regularly go to church--or, they attend Sunday Mass but are otherwise not actively involved in their parish.

Views on the importance to the Indians of the Roman Catholic Church and its missions vary from person to person.

“The mission may not play as important a role in our lives today as it did in the early 1800s, because our world is larger today, but it still has an important role in our community,” said Pala resident Patricia Nelson.

Local Indians come out in force, she noted, to support the mission school’s fund-raisers and the church’s two annual fiestas.

But Anita Castillo, another Pala Indian, said she has left the Catholic Church after raising her first four children as Catholic, and her younger four children as non-Catholics.

“How many of us have gone to church without knowing why we were going?” she asked. “My mother was a great Catholic and she brought me up strictly, but she’s no longer Catholic--she’s a Jehovah’s Witness--and now I’m going to other churches, too. I’m beginning to understand the Bible for the first time. I didn’t know what the darn thing was when I was going to (the Catholic) church.”

Why are Indians leaving the Roman Catholic Church? “Because we’re not brainwashed anymore to stay Catholic,” she said.

The Rev. Xavier Colleoni, pastor of Mission San Antonio de Pala, acknowledged that many Catholic Indians are being lured away to other Christian churches which have a stronger tradition of turning to the Bible for the direct word of God.

“This is my own, personal opinion, but I believe that in the past, we Catholic priests kept too many Catholics away from the Bible. We were not sure the people would understand it. We were afraid to put the Bible in their hands whereas the Protestants have lived in the Bible.”

To counteract the attraction of the other Christian churches, the Catholic church at Pala has begun offering Bible classes and discussion groups to feed the Indians’ interest in the Bible.

“Today’s Indians are different than the ones who went to the mission when the first fathers arrived,” Colleoni said. “These Indians can read the Bible themselves, and understand it themselves.”

Priests are not altogether concerned that many Catholic Indians do not regularly attend Sunday Mass or receive the church sacraments.

Said the Rev. Msgr. Paul A. Lenz, executive director of the Catholic Church’s Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, based in Washington:

“We white people follow the Anglo-Saxon interpretation of everything, which is the letter of the law. We strive to have the people (Indians) go to Mass all the time and be active participants, but culture has a lot to do with it. We’re dealing not just with paper facts but culture facts. Whereas we (whites) start Mass at 8 and have to be out by 8:45, that’s not the way it is with Indians.”

The Rev. Donald Huntimer, the pastor of Mission Santa Ysabel and who more often than not would be seen in an open-collar sport shirt and jeans rather than the Roman collar and black trousers, said that he also does not become overly concerned about poor Mass attendance.

“I’d rather counsel them privately, and help them develop their self-esteem as Indians, than admonish them to come to Mass. They have to feel good about themselves before they can praise God. If they are alcoholic or unemployed and don’t have good self-esteem, they are not going to go to church as their ancestors did.”

At Mission Santa Ysabel, the only sign of Indian culture inside the church is an Indian weaving; at Mission San Antonio de Pala, the only sign is a mural of Indian symbols painted on the interior of the church wall.

The Mass itself, as well as other prayer services, generally do not incorporate Indian tradition or customs, the priests say.

“That topic has come up, such as instead of burning incense, to burn sage, or to use feathers in blessings,” Colleoni said. “But the Indians said they first had to ask the elderly people to see what they thought of that, and the elderly people said some of their symbols should not be used in church.”

That is not to say that religious celebrations flavored with Indian culture do not occur. On Saturday night, for example, All Soul’s Day was observed with a cemetery candlelight ceremony; funeral wakes last a day or more, and the first anniversary of a death is traditionally observed with a graveyard service in which hymns are often sung in four languages--English, Spanish, Latin and an Indian dialect.

Both pastors--Colleoni at Pala and Huntimer at Santa Ysabel--say some Indians may have soured on the Catholic Church because of festering anger toward the white man.

Colleoni said, “There remains to this day a natural resentment of the church because they see the Catholic Church as a white church--and we white people have lied to them, we have taken away their territories and we have broken treaties.”

Huntimer said that at Santa Ysabel, Indians no longer hold the same personal stake in the church as they did 150 years ago because of the infusion of white settlers to the area who have claimed the church as theirs.

Many of the valley’s settlers arrived to the area in the mid-1900s from Europe and simply have little interest in the area’s history, Indian or otherwise, Huntimer said.

“They (the white residents) consider this to be their church,” he said. “The Indians say they no longer feel welcomed at the church and then, because they are not present, the others complain that the Indians do not participate. At the last church fiesta, the Indians were not asked to perform any of their native dances. Instead, the organizing committee had caballeros riding down the side of the hill. We had cowboys instead of Indians.

“There are a lot of raw feelings on both sides. What I’ve got to do is get everyone beyond not liking each other because of our differences, and to get to liking each other because of what we have in common.”

In addition to trying to ameliorate friction within the parish and the loss of Indians to other churches, the missionary pastors have to concern themselves with more worldly problems.

Huntimer, for instance, is concerned that his mission’s revenue is only about $30,000 a year--which has to cover his living expenses, the salary of a handyman and the operating and maintenance expenses of the mission.

Those Indians who do attend Mass cannot afford to contribute much to the Sunday offering, and only one in 20 tourists leaves a dollar in the donation box, Huntimer estimated.

At Pala, a modest $450 annual tuition is charged of those students--Catholic or not--wanting a private, parochial education. But no one is turned away for financial reasons, and last year the mission absorbed $20,000 in unpaid tuitions.

One of the mission’s most popular fund-raisers was the sale of Christmas cards created by the school’s children. The silk-screened cards typically would depict Mary as an Indian maiden, Joseph as an Indian brave and the baby Jesus as a papoose--with a feather sticking out of his halo.

When the cards were first introduced in the 1960s, they generated upwards of $25,000 a year in sales. Today, sales barely cover the cost of printing.