A Return to Ritual

Well before noon today, a man will take up a cross and stumble along his city’s streets. He can hardly move under the weight, 12 feet long and 150 pounds of solid wood. It is almost as heavy as the man himself.

Dozens of people will crowd around him, shouting, spitting, cracking rawhide whips. Soldiers in golden helmets, veiled women who cry uncontrollably, servants, farmers, itinerant preachers. No one can resist the grotesque procession.

Inching through narrow market walkways, flowing onto the main road, the parade will finally come to an abrupt stop. By then thousands of people will be watching as the man is crucified and left to die.

Today, Good Friday, members of San Fernando parish and visitors from around the country will re-create the death of Jesus Christ in all its bloody, tear-stained detail, using the city as their stage. The annual pageant is perhaps the most visceral example of how sacred folk customs are being restored in many religious circles.

The experience is so moving--and so popular--that it has attracted attention from around the country, including Los Angeles, where a new cathedral is being planned for dedication in 2000.

In San Antonio, people who have never set foot in a house of worship get swept into the drama as the mostly Latino parish renews a tradition introduced by the earliest Spanish missionaries.

Professional actors used to perform this annual passion play, and they confined it to the church grounds. Fourteen years ago, volunteers from the parish took it over and let the drama course through historic downtown with its Spanish colonial governor’s house and its shrine to the Alamo.

As much as this suggests about rising religious fervor and ethnic pride, it speaks to a more pervasive yearning for ritual in all of its intimate, evocative fullness.

A similar longing now finds expression in a variety of religions. Increasing numbers of young Jewish parents are holding the Passover Seder at home, careful to learn the meaning of the special foods and practices they did not really understand as children. A new generation of American Muslims is making the journey to their holy city of Mecca during Ramadan, a month of fasting and prayer. And the number of people trekking to remote pilgrim sites across Europe has increased measurably over the last five years.

Several Los Angeles congregations are expanding their reenactment of events surrounding the Crucifixion. In Santa Monica, the youth group of St. Clement Catholic Church takes its passion play to the streets. In Pasadena, members of St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Church will process around the outside as well as the inside of their church, carrying a funeral bier draped with flowers after sunset on Good Friday, which they observe on April 25.

These emotional dramas of few words seem to lift people out of time and bring relief from the daily overload of soulless information.

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San Fernando cathedral, in a city whose population is about 55% Latino, is nationally known as a center for the nurturing of Mexican American rituals, infusing them into the world outside the church doors.

“It’s not that I was so creative,” says Father Virgil Elizondo, who led the way in this adventure as rector of San Fernando cathedral until 1995. “I was only reclaiming the genetic memory of the people.”

Drawing on his boyhood experiences in a San Antonio barrio, Elizondo invited parishioners to hold processions, candlelight vigils, Masses with mariachi music.

For the events of Good Friday, he talked the city into issuing permits, blocking off streets and allowing volunteers to build a stage in Market Square where Jesus could be tried by the authorities and condemned to death.

One of the first years of the pageant, David and Jorge Cortez lent Elizondo 10 waiters from their restaurant, Mi Tierra, to help fill out a crowd scene. But they never had to do it again. Members of the parish come back every year to play new roles.

The crowds that gather along the procession route from the mercado to the cathedral reaches close to 15,000.

“The Latinos’ love for public ritual is a contribution we make to American society,” Elizondo says. “I think there is a hunger for it in American life. It lets you enter into the power of a collective experience.”

More than folk ritual, Elizondo’s approach includes liturgies to bless newly elected city officials, public school educators, bus drivers and cafeteria workers. On Thanksgiving, Jewish, Muslim and Protestant religious leaders come together to pray in their individual ways.

Elizondo is writing a study of the wide range of events he sees as community building. He says Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony has asked for a copy. (A spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles said he was not aware of such an invitation.)

Says architect Armando Ruiz, a member of the litugy and design committee for the new L.A. cathedral and an admirer of Elizondo’s work, “I do know the Cardinal is sensitive to the diverse cultures of Los Angeles. He is looking at ways to incorporate ritual moments. A large plaza will present a great opportunity for ritual and processions that have never taken place at our cathedral before.”

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It is night, one week before this year’s event. A cool breeze pushes away a rainstorm and rehearsal finally begins. Fifty performers, their families watching from the sidelines, fill the public plaza beside the church. Two years ago it was renamed for Elizondo, to honor him and the parish for contributions to the city.

Jesus, played by Marco Antonio Lopez, drags the leaden cross along the stone pavement. It was built by David Acosta, a retired meat inspector now in his 80s, and Alfredo Ramirez, the head custodian for the church. Ramirez was the play’s director for more than five years.

Janie Garcia, 74, who prepares engaged couples to be married by the church, steps into character. She hides her face in her sleeves when she and the other weeping women of Jerusalem meet Jesus on his way to be crucified.

“Five years ago she played the Blessed Mother,” recalls Janie Dillard, Elizondo’s secretary. “She cried real tears. People still talk about it, we’ll never forget.”

The basic script was written by Father Roberto Paredes, a Guatemalan priest who worked at the cathedral for a couple of years. Mario Mandujano, age 30 and now directing his second pageant, hardly touched the script but is making other changes. He holds auditions rather than simply assign roles. He is also bringing younger people into the play. More than half the cast is younger than 20.

Mida Manterola, 14, and Guadalupe Hernandez, 15, stand behind Herod, the Roman governor who mocked Jesus by dressing him in a regal robe. The girls fan Herod with languid strokes. “Like the rich ladies,” Mida explains.

She and Guadalupe have come to rehearsals twice each week since they began in February. At 9 p.m. practice is over and people stop by the church hall for doughnuts.

Florencio Morua, 38, has performed 12 roles in 12 years. This time he is a soldier. A member of the parish brought the soldiers’ red plumed helmets from Mexico--Roman centurions in Spanish conquistador garb.

They carry hubcaps for shields, wear gold lame tunics from the collection of costumes that grows with each performance. This year, for the first time, they have genuine huaraches from Mexico instead of plastic sandals. Mandujano requested them as the play’s one major expense. He expects to pay about $300.

Despite that, Father David Garcia, rector, says the play’s budget is not more than $800. Almost everything comes from volunteer work and donations.

The pageant reinforces memories. Each year, a new layer of history is added. One year the sound of nails seemingly hammered through human hands into wood moved a little boy to tears. He ran to comfort Jesus.

Another time there was rain and the crowd spent hours outside despite frequent downpours. Some people ended up in the hospital.

Last year, late in the evening, people pressed into the cathedral for a wake service to honor the grieving mother, Mary. Suddenly a dreadful wail sounded from the doorway. A flamenco dancer, draped in black, moved down the aisle in a stylized dance for the dead.

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Afew days before the pageant, over coffee at Mi Tierra, where the walls glow with murals of regular customers and photographs of Mexican movie stars, Elizondo cannot finish a sentence without someone stopping by his table.

As a boy, he came to this mercado with his father, a grocer, to shop for produce to stock their store. He knows every inch of it, and every merchant’s story.

They aren’t intimidated by his doctorate from the University of Paris, his groundbreaking books on the mestizo experience or the role of Our Lady of Guadalupe for Mexican Americans, or by his recognized place as the premiere Latino theologian of his day.

He isn’t overly impressed, either.

“It’s a different way of celebrating religion,” he says of the customs he has fostered in San Antonio. “There’s no preaching or proselytizing.

“If you experience something you remember it. It’s like eating cake or drinking punch at a party. You can talk about it all you want. But that comes later.”

Now the producer of San Antonio Catholic television, as well as a professor at the Mexican American Cultural Center he founded 25 years ago, Elizondo never loses sight of the real source of heartfelt ritual.

“It comes from the people,” he says. “It is far too important to leave in the hands of the hierarchy.

“You let yourself go, you’re not looking for rational explanations. Of course you know that this guy in the passion play is really Joe Blow and you had a few beers with him the other night. But at this moment you believe, ‘My flesh touches the flesh of God.’ ”