Catholic Leadership Told to Aid Latinos

As more Latinos join the Catholic Church in the United States, its leaders must break down language and cultural barriers to help members of the nation’s fastest-growing minority assimilate but also maintain their own social identity.

That was part of the message Father Virgil P. Elizondo delivered to more than 5,000 participants attending the keynote speech of the National Catholic Educational Assn.’s 83rd annual meeting, which opened Monday at the Anaheim Convention Center.

“We have in our hands the possibility to the key to world peace,” said Elizondo, who suggested the formation of a Catholic Peace Corps, so that young Catholics can work directly with the poor of the world and learn a “new way of looking at each other.”

Elizondo, founding president of the Mexican American Cultural Center in San Antonio, told the group of Catholic educators that they can learn from Latinos while also teaching them--with each side deriving the best from the other.

In the Latino culture, for example, a “profound sense of family” has helped those who traditionally are on the margins of society, he said. That closeness softens the stigma of being an outsider and is one of the unique values that Latinos bring to American society.

“I’ve heard psychologists speak about this Hispanic value, saying the one thing that has kept the Hispanic from having profound psychological damage is the tenderness received at home. Even though they may have setbacks in society generally, they have a profound sense of security within their families,” Elizondo said in a December interview with Momentum, the journal of the National Catholic Educational Assn.

Although they have suffered stigmas, Latinos seem to have a “personal intimacy with God,” added Elizondo, who is the rector of the San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio. Elizondo told the crowd that he often is inspired when he hears members of his congregation “speaking” to God, saying, “You can almost turn and see God eyeball to eyeball right there.”

In the December interview, Elizondo said that Catholic leaders can tap into Latinos’ spontaneity and festivity and thus personalize church doctrine, which “seems so impersonal and so distant.”

The church can also help Latinos maintain their culture by encouraging them to use their own language, liturgy and arts, he said. To attract Latino youth to Catholic schools, Elizondo suggested more active recruitment, financial aid and relocating schools to Latino neighborhoods.

Educators need “to be able to learn from those people who society says are problem people,” he told convention participants, whose meetings continue today and run through Thursday.

Catholic leaders can also give new heroes to the young, he said, adding: “We have our heroes--and we have great heroes.”