Church’s Immigrant Role

Your article, “Caring Priest Wishes Diocese Would Do More” (Oct. 22) was timely, accurate and interesting, but it seems to me that it is not possible to grasp the complete dimensions of this problem without a reference to the Roman Catholic Church’s traditional relationship with immigrant groups.

Up to Vatican II and actually even later than that, the church was, along with the school system, one of the primary agencies of Americanization for the various ethnic groups that came to our shores. Zealous priests and nuns (many themselves descendants of the Irish dislocations of the 19th Century) worked strenuously and sometimes fanatically in their attempts to eradicate all traces of foreign influences in their recently arrived immigrant pupils. The San Diego Diocese was just as influenced by this ethnocentrism and racism as any in the nation. I vividly remember the storm of protest that took place in my own parish when a flood of Hispanics, mostly Mexicans, began to arrive for the first time.

It was only in response to the political pressure created by these groups of “new” immigrants that the church began to alter her traditional practices. The reason that I say “new” is that these immigrants came in such great numbers and with such a high level of nationalistic consciousness, that they refused, perhaps for the first time in the American church’s experience, to be assimilated and Americanized in the terms of the past.

So, actually, not only the San Diego Diocese, but also even that of Los Angeles, and across the nation, are now still searching for new pastoral approaches to a problem that it has never faced before with such magnitude. The difference between Los Angeles and San Diego is that Los Angeles has a larger and better organized Hispanic population than San Diego, which in turn has created greater political pressure on the churchs, which in turn, have given rise to such sensitive leaders as Archbishop Roger Mahony.

RAMON OCEGUERA

San Diego