Ethnicity Colors Views of Scandal

Mary Ellen Burton-Christie is angry about the way Roman Catholic leaders have handled the church’s sex scandals, and she used her weekly offering Sunday to express her displeasure: She wrote “parish only” on her check, withholding her money from the Los Angeles Archdiocese in an attempt to spark change in the church hierarchy.

Salvador Hernandez said he was saddened, not angered, by the scandals and would not take it out on the archdiocese. Instead, he helped organize a massive rally Saturday that drew hundreds of Latino Catholics into downtown Los Angeles streets singing hymns and waving signs proclaiming support for their faith, their priests, the abuse victims and Cardinal Roger M. Mahony.

Burton-Christie, who is white, and Hernandez, a Latino, are faithful Catholics who express deep love for their church and distress over its woes. But their responses underscore dramatic differences in how the archdiocese’s 5 million Catholics are reacting to the crisis. These differences are often visible through three prisms: whites versus Latinos, immigrants versus U.S. natives, and the affluent versus the working class.

Catholics in some largely white, affluent congregations report moves in their churches to withhold offerings, boycott Mass, demand more lay input in selecting priests and other attempts at change. Many describe themselves as part of an awakened laity that is demanding equal status with clergy, rather than being “spoon-fed” church policy.

“This may mark another seismic shift in the rise of the laity,” said Claire Henning, pastoral coordinator for St. Paul the Apostle Church in Los Angeles. She likened the moment to 1968, when American Catholics widely rejected church teachings by disregarding a new papal encyclical that reaffirmed the church’s ban on artificial birth control.

At St. Paul the Apostle, which Henning said has sponsored three forums on priestly abuse in the last few months, the most significant outcome so far has been the outpouring of conversation about the need to challenge church hierarchy on everything from financial accountability to rules barring married priests and women clergy. Contributions have dipped 3% to 4%, she said. Lay leaders in other churches report cuts as deep as 20%, along with demands to allocate money to the parish and not the archdiocesan hierarchy, or to nuns and not priests.

Burton-Christie, a parish council member at St. Agatha Church in Los Angeles, said she began to withhold her Sunday offerings from the archdiocese--which takes out 8% of parish collections--because “it’s one of the few tools I have to get my message across.”

She envisions a church in which leaders such as Mahony start treating the laity as “equal brothers and sisters.” She said she is perturbed that Mahony has written at least two letters on the scandal to “my brother priests,” leaving out the laity. Partly in response, she is drafting a letter inviting Mahony to embrace the laity as well by appearing for a discussion on the issue at St. Agatha.

“If Mahony came to a meeting and sat with the people and apologized to the people, it would be transformative in our relationship with the hierarchy in the church,” said Burton-Christie, a longtime community organizer and spiritual director who, like Henning, is pursuing a master’s degree in pastoral studies at Loyola Marymount University.

At St. Agatha, a small group of parishioners has started boycotting Masses. But Burton-Christie said widespread goodwill has also been voiced, along with an eagerness to engage the church hierarchy in moves to make the church more open, accountable and faithful.

*

Rallies and Vigils

Among Latinos, who make up 70% of the Catholics in the Los Angeles Archdiocese, the general response seems strikingly different. Since the scandal broke in January, the community has held rallies, marches and vigils in support of the church--including Saturday’s march sponsored by the evangelical Latino organization El Sembrador.

Latino priests in immigrant and Americanized churches say they have seen no moves to withhold contributions, boycott Mass or demand engagement with church leaders on issues such as celibacy or women’s ordination. At the march, several Latinos said they were saddened and disappointed by the scandals, but they did not voice anger.

And although many supported the idea of zero tolerance--ousting from the priesthood anyone found to have abused minors--not one focused blame for the problem on the church hierarchy, pointing instead to wayward individual priests.

Gus Govea, a 39-year-old Mexican native and foreman at a Southgate floor-mat firm, said he did not know why church authorities handled the problem as they did, and “those who don’t know shouldn’t talk.”

“They have their motives,” he said. “Although I can’t support the priests who molested the children, it’s not right to judge or point fingers.

“I don’t follow the priests,” he said. “I follow Jesus Christ. I don’t follow man because men are not perfect.”

According to Father Vicente Lopez of St. Raphael Church in Los Angeles, many Latino faithful, especially immigrants, continue to defer to church leadership as an extension of a paternalistic culture, embrace even fallen priests as family, and see the furor as an attack on their faith reminiscent of the long years of persecution against the church in their ancestral Latin American homelands.

*

Fighting Persecution

Humberto Ramos, who served for 15 years in the archdiocesan Hispanic ministry, said that feeling of persecution is particularly strong among Mexicans from Jalisco and other central plateau states, which provide large numbers of immigrants to Los Angeles. In the 1920s, he said, the region’s Catholics took up arms to defend the church against government persecution, producing 25 martyrs who were canonized as saints two years ago. Today, he said, many of them see the same need to take action to support their besieged church.

Ramos said rural Latino immigrants have long learned to maintain a religious life without priests. In some rural Mexican communities, he said, priests manage to visit and celebrate Mass only three times a year--helping to produce a religious life based more on lay prayer gatherings and feast day celebrations.

Yet here, too, American assimilation complicates the response.

In the Sandoval family of Corona, opinions diverge between mother Maria, a Mexican immigrant, and daughter Maria, an American-born junior high school teacher. Both women, who attended the Saturday rally with the rest of their family, said they would not consider withholding donations or boycotting Mass, and retain trust in Mahony and other leadership.

But daughter Maria said she fully supported ousting abusive priests, while mother Maria did not, saying they should be treated with therapy and returned to ministry after repentance and recovery.

“I feel very upset that people are making the scandal bigger than it is, and people are accusing innocent priests,” mother Maria said.

At St. Anne Church in Santa Monica, Father Michael Gutierrez said some immigrants in the largely Latino congregation still retain traditional attitudes of not challenging church authority. But Gutierrez, a U.S. native, said he learned to speak out growing up in the largely white community of Diamond Bar and is teaching his congregation the need to do the same. He said, however, that issues of church authority and hierarchy probably rank “fifth or sixth” on his congregation’s list of priorities.

African American Catholics pose another cultural complexity. Father Gregory Chisholm, a black Jesuit priest who leads the predominantly African American church of Holy Name of Jesus in South-Central Los Angeles, said the most prevalent emotion among his flock was distress that the scandal has made Catholicism seem yet again a strange cult to their overwhelmingly Protestant black community.

*

Life on the Cusp

Many non-Catholic blacks, he said, are openly skeptical about the Roman rites, devotions and practices of priestly celibacy. The scandal has placed many of his congregants in a defensive position, as they “live on the cusp” between Catholics and the black community.

Blacks, like Mexicans, also remember far worse times in the church that help them place the current scandal in perspective. While the scandals may pose the biggest crisis in modern times to white Catholics, Chisholm said, blacks have long suffered more direct iniquities, such as church support of slavery and Jim Crow laws. In the 1930s, he said, his own parents were met at the door of a Harlem church by the white priest and told to go worship with the black congregation down the street.

“To be [black] Catholics in light of the history of this racism means we’ve had to go through much worse than bishops not doing what the gospel calls us to do,” Chisholm said.

He added that the church’s religious services are as exuberant as ever and that pledges to the archdiocesan “Together in Mission” annual fund-raising appeal have actually increased since February.

Such diversity has long defined the Roman Catholic Church. The European immigrants who made up the early American church brought with them a tradition of unquestioning support of clerical authorities. This eventually gave way to American offspring who challenged church policies.

Today, Latin American immigration--which is projected to boost the American church’s Latino population to 50% by the year 2050, according to one national study--is reshaping the church yet again. To complicate matters, the church is also experiencing a rising surge of traditionalists who want to return to Latin liturgies and faithful conformity to Vatican authority--as opposed to liberals who are calling for women’s ordination and other dramatic changes.

“No one really understands what the laity is now, because the spectrum is so broad,” Henning of St. Paul the Apostle Church said. But unified by the scandal, she said, “a lot of people seem to think that the church will never go back to being the same again.”