Immigrants Bringing Change to the Church

When he crossed into the United States over the hills of Tijuana a decade ago, Agustin Escudero didn’t bring much: his family, his religious beliefs and a singular tradition that every year honors his beloved Virgin of Guadalupe.

Each December, Escudero, an assembly line worker and father of five sons, creates an enormous image of Mexico’s most revered religious figure on the steps of his neighborhood church. Working with colored sawdust and flowers, he shapes the draped Madonna as she is said to have appeared to an Indian peasant in central Mexico 465 years ago.

Escudero works through the night Dec. 11 so that his creation is ready by 5 a.m., when hundreds of parishioners backed by a mariachi band gather to sing “Las Mananitas,” an early morning song to the mother of their faith.

“It’s not easy to be bent over for eight hours, standing on cement, in the cold and the wind,” he conceded. “But it’s the one little thing I can offer the Virgin once a year.”

Like the tiny shavings of wood that make up his alfombra, Escudero’s imported ritual is just part of a larger transformation in Orange County’s Catholic Church. Prodded by a sustained wave of immigrants from Mexico, the church is embracing feast days, rituals and styles of worship that were once considered foreign, even bizarre.

No feast day is more significant to the Mexican immigrant population than the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Dozens of churches in Orange County have prepared for the celebration all week with nightly processions, readings and prayer. Today, hundreds of believers are expected to join a procession led by Bishop Norman McFarland through Santa Ana. (It starts at 2 p.m. at Broadway and 4th Street and ends at 4th and Spurgeon streets.)

On Thursday, some parishes will include costumed Aztec dancers as well as mariachis in their Mass for the Virgin of Guadalupe. That sort of celebration during what is normally a time of Advent, or solemn anticipation, in more traditional congregations has made some parishioners uncomfortable even as it fills the church.

“It doesn’t happen without a lot of work and preparation and sensitivity to each others’ traditions,” said Rev. Justin MacCarthy of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in La Habra, which is one of the churches to incorporate Aztec dancers into its Dec. 12 Mass. “We have made very positive efforts to accommodate one another,” he said.

For example, he said, the La Habra church alternates the language of services for Christmas Eve midnight Mass from one year to the next: This year it’s Spanish, the next year English.

When Latino parishioners at St. Cecilia’s Church in Tustin recently asked for a Mass in Spanish, Rev. Tim MacCarthy headed off dissension by mailing an explanatory letter to all parishioners.

The approach worked. More than 500 people turned up for the first Spanish-language Mass, celebrated with an Irish brogue by MacCarthy last Sunday. “I haven’t heard anybody complaining,” said MacCarthy, who came here from Ireland 37 years ago. “I think they saw why we had to do this.”

Judging from the comments of a dozen clergy members and church administrators, parishes facing changing demographics seem to have made a relatively smooth transition to multiculturalism.

At St. Columbun in Garden Grove, which just added a Spanish Mass, a newsletter is published in English, Spanish and Vietnamese and a newly formed church council includes equal representation from each group.

Church council member Gerry Teahen said he’s heard some grumbling, but church-goers overall have accepted the mix of languages and rituals. “We’re just starting to scratch the surface though,” Teahen said. “It’s going to take years for us to really come together.”

Demographic shifts have brought other changes as well: Latino church-goers tend to be younger and have larger families, swelling demand for baptisms and weddings. At St. Anne’s church in Santa Ana, where all four priests are bilingual, about 40 baptisms are performed every Saturday, said Rev. Salvador Landa, who, like many of his parishioners, was born in Mexico.

More and more Masses are being celebrated in Spanish, which has so drained the supply of Latino priests that Vietnamese and Irish immigrants are taking a stab at the language.

Mexican immigrants also are more likely to celebrate their faith with colorful rituals rather than in solemn or intellectual study, said Jeanne Stella, an administrator at La Purisima Church in Orange, where parishioners representing a different state of Mexico made offerings to the Virgin each night this week.

“They seem to be more zealous. Their faith is simpler,” Stella said. “They’re not complicated like we are with material things.”

Perhaps the most exotic Mexican feast day to find its way into the traditional church in Orange County is the Day of the Dead, which is celebrated each November in an outdoor Mass at a cemetery by Msgr. Jaime Soto, the vicar for the Hispanic community in the Diocese of Orange.

But it is the day of the Virgin, Our Lady of Guadalupe, that draws the greatest crowds and most intense devotion among Mexican immigrants. “For Mexicans, she is like the fourth person in the Trinity,” said Humberto Gomez, the vicar for Hispanic affairs in Sacramento.

“From an early age, we were taught to pray to God through Mary,” said Gomez. “Hispanics are very family oriented, they have strong traditional family values and the mother plays a vital role in the family. That might be part of it.”

Gomez, who has extensively studied the history and cultural significance of the Virgin of Guadalupe, led a one-day session of prayer and reflection on the subject at Diocese offices in Orange two weeks ago.

The room was packed with more than 200 devoted Guadalupanos, or believers, many of whom spend the year running bake sales and social events to raise money for the December celebration. Although they knew the story by heart, the crowd of mostly women nevertheless listened with rapt attention as Gomez described the significance of every detail of her appearance, from the stars on her blue cloak to the flower petals at her feet.

According to church history, the Virgin appeared three times in 1531 on a hilltop outside Mexico City to an Indian peasant named Juan Diego. Local church officials wouldn’t believe Diego’s story until he brought proof: a bundle of out-of-season roses that appeared on the hillside during her final apparition.

It was a watershed moment for the church in Mexico. Indigenous people who had rejected the imported Spanish faith began to feel included, given that the Virgin appeared to one of their own.

“It gave dignity to the indigenous people,” said Soto. “For us, it’s a reminder that Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to an Indian, an Aztec.”

Now the celebration of the Virgin is seen as an opportunity to draw immigrants from Mexico into the U.S. church. “It’s what we call a moment of evangelism,” said Gomez of Sacramento. “It’s an opportunity to talk to people about the pride of being Catholics.”

The celebration begins before dawn on Thursday, as believers gather for candlelight processions, carrying banners into their churches as mariachis play. Generally, Mass is celebrated at 5 a.m., followed by a reception with hot chocolate and pan dulce. Several churches will have dramatizations of the apparition.

“It’s intoxicating,” said Soto. “Every place you go has its own way of flowing over with Guadalupanismo.”

Parishes are becoming more comfortable with the celebration, Soto said. “They’re letting it happen, not necessarily trying to control it,” he said. “Like the Mass at 5 a.m. People wondered why that ungodly hour? But if you do it, the church is just full. People get their kids up, and even if they’re in pajamas, they’re there.

For Escudero, the sawdust artist, Dec. 12 is a culmination of months of preparation. Each year, he creates a different image of the Virgin, incorporating a current theme, and almost always includes the flags of Mexico and the United States. This year, her image looms over the bowed head of the Pope.

On the walls of Escudero’s garage hang templates he’s cut out of cardboard and rough paper, which will be used as guides for the colored sawdust. For the most intricate parts of the design, Escudero uses colored concrete powder that he buys in Tijuana.

An enthusiastic man whose life is devoted to his family and church, Escudero first began creating his sawdust art in his hometown of Puebla 33 years ago, after having seen similar artwork celebrating another religious holiday.

When he first offered to create his artwork on the steps of Our Lady of Guadalupe church in Santa Ana, he said the priest was skeptical. That was 11 years ago. Now parishioners have come to expect the sawdust Virgin when they turn out for the early morning Mass.

“I promised to do it until I can’t work anymore,” said Escudero. “It’s a personal satisfaction for me. And deep in my heart, I think she has to know that I do it.”