The Power and the Priest

The priest is Luis Olivares, and the power, he insists, lies not with him but with his following. It is a following that includes farm workers, unionists and community activists, both inside and outside his Our Lady Queen of the Angels Roman Catholic Church, the biggest in the archdiocese. A ‘radical’ to some, a ‘prophet’ to others, Olivares has built his power base upon an unwavering commitment to social justice and a bilingual eloquence on behalf of his largely Latino constituency.

“If it is expedient for the church’s survival to align itself with the rich and powerful, I’d go as far as to say that the church should not survive.” --Father Luis Olivares The Assembly committee had only agreed to the meeting on auto insurance redlining under duress, but the nearly 4,000 Eastside residents who had demanded the meeting in the first place were making too much noise in the auditorium for the hearing to get under way.

Startled and unable to control the crowd, committee members turned to Luis Olivares, the priest at the head of the group, and asked him to intervene. Without a word, Olivares turned to the audience and lowered his hand. The crowd-- all members of UNO (the United Neighborhoods Organization)--sat down in silence.

When Olivares completed his testimony, he thanked the committee and stood up to leave. “If you’ll excuse us, we have to go now,” he said.

Stunned Lawmakers

As the crowd filed out, leaving the stunned legislators alone in the empty auditorium, one assemblyman commented: “That priest has too much power.”

Olivares, 52, now pastor of historic Our Lady Queen of the Angels Roman Catholic Church, would be the first to insist that the power in that auditorium 10 years ago belonged to UNO, then a newly formed community organizing group on its way to scoring its first major victory.

Yet, while Olivares was acting only as UNO’s designated spokesman that day, there are those who insist that he nonetheless wields considerable power from his downtown Los Angeles pulpit--a power stemming from his unwavering commitment to social justice and his passionate, bilingual eloquence on behalf of an ever increasing constituency.

Huge Constituency

His church, long a focal point for Southern California’s Latino Catholics, boasts the largest congregation in the sprawling Los Angeles archdiocese. But his constituency, which some place at upwards of 100,000 families inside and outside the church, has grown far beyond parish boundaries.

He began planting the seeds a decade ago through his work with Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers and his involvement in UNO’s grass-roots activism. Now, besieged by Central American refugees who daily seek assistance at his church’s door, he has expanded his ministry to embrace them, as well as the growing movement opposing U.S. involvement in that region.

Each of these “conversion experiences,” as Olivares calls them, have been part of his personal odyssey from a “highly autocratic” priest and church financial officer to a charismatic social crusader.

Last December, in a direct challenge to U.S. immigration policy, Olivares made headlines when he declared his church a sanctuary for Central American refugees--the first in the archdiocese to do so.

Central America Travel

He has traveled extensively in war-torn regions of Central America, visiting refugee camps and meeting with government officials. He maintains that refugees who have escaped to the United States “are instruments of evangelization for the American church and the whole of the country.” Public declarations of sanctuary, he says, serve to challenge Americans “to really think about what we’re doing in Central America.”

In some circles he is labeled a “radical,” in others a “prophet.” Whatever the label, Olivares maintains that his strength lies in his “identification with the people we work with--the rejected, the undocumented, the refugees. . . .”

His moral stance has come with a price, even in a church whose national leadership is on record as opposing U.S. military aid to the anti-Sandinista contras in Nicaragua. Members of his own congregation have taken him to task for his sanctuary declaration and his friendly relations with Sandinista leaders.

May Be Unpopular

Although he is vicar, or second in command, in his religious order and sits on the archdiocesan council that represents priests in the area, Olivares suspects that his reputation as “controversial and excessively confrontational” has made him unpopular among his clerical peers and has impeded his career.

But his adversaries probably don’t know that the tall, dignified man with the booming voice and self-assured manner frequently throws up on his way to an important meeting or before going on stage in front of a large crowd. Much of his manner is simple bluster, he confessed, laughing at himself.

He once pounded his fist on the table while arguing a position with a bishop.

“Louie,” the bishop said, “I know you’re just a bunch of bull. You don’t have to talk to me that way. Just tell me what you want me to consider and I’ll consider it.”

“He knocked the wind clear out of my sails,” Olivares said, laughing again.

Has Some Supporters

Still, his uncompromising, sometimes strident advocacy has its supporters.

“He’s very dedicated and not afraid to say what he thinks,” said Carol Wells of the Nicaraguan Task Force, one of dozens of organizations across Southern California working against U.S. involvement in Central America. “Father Olivares is one of the most important links between the Central America nonintervention movement and the Latino community.”

s”I think he’s a real prophet,” added the Rev. Ramon Gaitan, pastor at a Latino parish in Watts and president of a national organization of Latino priests that Olivares once headed. “He (Olivares) announces and denounces,” Gaitan said. “I think it is of great value to the church and to the community at large to have people with strong convictions who are willing to take the risk of confronting issues. A lot of priests admire him but wouldn’t feel comfortable taking those risks.”

As a young seminarian in Compton, Olivares showed no sign that he would ultimately take such a socially active role in the church. His interests lay in organizing fund-raisers and leading the prestigious seminary choir.

As a young priest in the late 1960s, he moved into the fast lane, hobnobbing with Los Angeles corporate executives and dealing in the dizzying world of stock market investments and real estate deals as corporate treasurer for the Claretian Missionaries, who work primarily in Latino communities in the United States.

It appeared that Olivares’ status as a priest would come from his skillfully navigating the Byzantine corridors of church politics and finance.

Then, while supervising a young seminarian working in California’s emerging farm labor movement in the 1970s, he met Cesar Chavez.

“It marked a complete turnaround in my life,” Olivares recalled.

Organizing the Boycott

In 1974, he helped organize the the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott in East Los Angeles. And, as he put it, he was touched by the “disarming” appreciation he received from his fellow Latinos for nothing more than raising his voice “about things that mattered so much to their lives.”

Later, he continued to share their victories and defeats, bestowing the church’s blessings in either case, and he was deeply moved, he said, by “the pain of burying our own fellow (workers) killed in the fields for no other reason than wanting to have a decent life.”

That involvement thrust a mirror up before him, enabling him to once again see himself as the scrawny, timid kid who was raised in a poor but socially active immigrant family in San Antonio’s Mexican barrio. That image--that reality--had been obscured after years in the seminary’s “very Anglo” training program.

“I see our lives in this world as a series of conversion opportunities,” Olivares said. “With each step we take in the development of a ministry or a career, the Lord gives us these opportunities to get close to Him.”

Major Assignment

In 1975, Olivares arrived at Our Lady of Solitude Church, known as “La Soledad” in its East Los Angeles neighborhood, for his first long-term parish assignment. His well-tailored black suits and sophisticated manner left parishioners with the impression that he was arrogant and unapproachable.

Ana L. Reyes, his former secretary and long-time friend who continues to work there, still teases him with the reminder: “We at La Soledad taught you how to love. You didn’t come that way.”

In exchange, Olivares taught them some of the organizing lessons he learned from the farm workers’ struggle. He enrolled the parish in UNO and became instrumental in the organization’s formation. Firmly rooted in Catholic Eastside churches, UNO, along with its counterpart in South-Central Los Angeles, has since flourished into the largest and most influential grass-roots organization in the city. The groups have scored impressive successes on campaigns ranging from reducing auto insurance rates to cleaning up dirty supermarkets, and from pressuring police to crack down on drug trafficking to lobbying the Legislature to adopt a package of anti-crime bills.

Defending Their Rights

“He taught us to defend our rights so that we wouldn’t have to put up with so many injustices,” said Reyes, a great-grandmother who became an early activist in the parish. “He started opening our eyes. . . .”

But his most lasting contribution to UNO has been his development of other leaders, said Larry McNeil, the professional community organizer who now supervises UNO and its two sister groups in the county.

Maria de la Luz Hernandez still tells anyone who asks that she is Olivares’ “creation.”

Hernandez, 53, recalled the “great difficulty” she had in speaking, even in her native Spanish, to a city commission UNO successfully lobbied to improve traffic signals in her neighborhood, or to large crowds at UNO conventions.

“It was tough,” she said. “But Father Olivares pushed and challenged us to prove our mettle.”

A mother of nine children who once never ventured from her home without her husband’s permission, Hernandez later rose to be UNO vice president in 1983.

“For 24 years I lived in silence at home,” said Hernandez. “Father Olivares dared to come to our home to ask my husband permission. My husband had too much regard for him to say no.”

Going Into Action

Olivares’ activities in UNO also showed other church leaders “a concrete way to put their faith into action,” McNeil said, adding that the priest developed a following by moving “with the two institutions that probably offer the most hope for social change--the church and the American trade union movement.”

After his arrival at Our Lady Queen of the Angels Church five years ago, Olivares rallied behind workers at General Motors’ Van Nuys plant when the company threatened to close it. At a meeting two years ago, he told GM Chairman Roger Smith that “not only do Hispanics seem to have an attraction for Chevrolets,” but so does the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese, which buys the bulk of its vehicles from GM.

Olivares also made it known that, as pastor of the busiest church in the archdiocese and an UNO leader, he has a loyal following. With those kinds of credentials, “they usually listen,” he said.

That encounter illustrates what McNeil, the UNO organizer, sees as a key to Olivares’ effectiveness: His ability to “move easily among people in the national limelight and then go back to hear confessions from the people in his own parish.”

Even on weekdays, the church’s courtyard fills with a cross-section of Los Angeles’ Latinos: A Chicano family from El Monte arranges a baptism, and a newly arrived Nicaraguan immigrant plans a wedding; a Guatemalan refugee seeks asylum, a Salvadoran youth needs a job.

On weekends, more than 12,000 people--most of them poor and nearly all of them Latino--come from throughout Southern California to attend services at the church, affectionally known as La Placita (Little Plaza).

Daylong masses fill the church and spill over to its outdoor courtyard, where strolling families dressed in their Sunday best make up part of what appears to be a crowded fiesta. A crippled beggar--a common sight at Latin American cathedrals--sits outside the church door. And, the strains of a guitar and the aroma of fresh tamales and churros compete for attention with volunteers at information tables soliciting donations for Guatemalan refugees, or signatures against U.S. funding of anti-Sandinista rebels.

Refugees in Churches

Every night, scores of homeless refugees are allowed to sleep inside on church pews. Central American refugee families are offered sanctuary, and some are given safe passage to Canada, Mexico and other parts of the United States.

The presence of so many Central American refugees in Los Angeles is, for Olivares, testimony of the failure of this country’s Central American policies, and their pain has moved him to a radical--some say “revolutionary”--posture.

One of the cornerstones of his Central American position is the “intimate contact with suffering people” that he experienced during his trips to Salvadoran refugee camps in Honduras, he said.

The “overwhelming” images of women, children and old people forced to live as virtual prisoners in the “inhumane conditions” of those camps still haunt him, Olivares said.

The camps offer the refugees one of the few alternatives to death in their Salvadoran homeland, he said, adding that U.S.-supplied bombs and bullets are used indiscriminately in attacks on villages and farms.

Existence of ‘Social Sin’

“You cannot be witness to the human suffering and not be convinced of the existence of social sin,” he said. “We are all responsible unless we take a stand and speak against it.”

Olivares said his plans are to continue his work with Central American refugees--whether at the church or by moving directly to the region.

On one of his church’s unadorned side aisles, a large painting brutally depicts the 1980 assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who championed his country’s poor and was outspoken in his criticism of El Salvador’s military government’s human rights violations.

Olivares lists Romero among his heroes. His office walls are adorned with a portrait of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, a quotation from Nicaraguan revolutionary Augusto Sandino and a Christmas card from Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

Anti-War Sentiment

Noting that Nicaraguan church leaders allege that the church is being persecuted by the Sandinista government, Olivares said: “I don’t care how you cut it, the war in Central America is wrong, no matter what happens to the church.”

The weight of his ministry, however, has not suppressed Olivares’ abiding sense of humor, and he has lately taken to calling his assistant pastors comandantes. They, in turn, call him comandante y jefe (commander in chief).

The church staff carefully screens refugees seeking aid, out of fear that immigration authorities might attempt to plant informants in their midst as authorities did in Arizona in a case that led to the felony conviction of eight sanctuary activists in Tucson in May.

While Los Angeles’ Immigration and Naturalization Service regional commissioner Harold Ezell charges that Olivares is “promoting lawlessness,” he denies Olivares’ claim that the church is under surveillance.

Ezell argues that the “real issue” is one of “sanctity over our own borders . . . whether or not America in the next five to 10 years will be a Third World country.”

They’ve Never Met

Although the two men have never met, Olivares lambastes Ezell for “playing on an anti-immigrant mood in the country and feeding the fire of prejudice and racism.”

Two years ago, when Olivares hosted a breakfast meeting at the church for Ortega, about 70 church leaders attended, but many sent their regrets.

“That’s one of the things that makes him unique,” said the Rev. Michael Kennedy, an assistant pastor. “He’s not afraid of controversy. Most priests hate it.”

Asked whether Olivares’ activities had ever placed him in conflict with his superiors in the archdiocese, Bishop Juan A. Arzube, one of three auxiliary bishops under Archbishop Roger M. Mahony, said, “No comment.”

But, calling Olivares “a great moving force,” Arzube said that “because he’s been involved in controversial issues, he (Olivares) can sometimes be misunderstood . . . even hated. But for the same reason, other people love him dearly and consider him a great apostle of justice.”

After the Ortega breakfast, church phones began ringing with angry, even threatening, calls. Some labeled Olivares a “communist,” as they did when he declared the church a sanctuary. But Olivares maintains that through his sermons and talks with individuals, “the mood has changed.”

During recent rededication ceremonies of the church as a sanctuary for refugees, Olivares gave his congregation an accounting of the 250 Central American families who have sought refuge at the church.

“It’s gratifying to help,” he told them. “But more important is what has happened to our hearts and attitudes on Central America. Before we declared sanctuary, a lot of you thought that La Placita was here for Mexicanos alone. But now you have learned that anyone in need is your neighbor.”