Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . Fr. Esequiel Sanchez . June 13, 2003

Read more of the R & E interview with Fr. Esequiel Sanchez, pastor of Holy Trinity Croatian Catholic Church in Chicago's largely Hispanic Pilsen neighborhood and director of the Archdiocese of Chicago's office to expand its ministry to Hispanic Catholics:

On public enactments of the Stations of the Cross:

In the Hispanic community, [veneration of the cross] takes on a life of its own. The Hispanic community has taken the Catholic tradition of the Way of the Cross and made it public. Many of the pastors, when they organize these manifestations or reenactments of Jesus, are very intentional that it's on the streets where the community lives. Part of the theology behind it is that when the community sees the reenactment of Christ going through his Passion, they are also helped to remember that there is violence on our streets, there is pain, there is suffering, there is hurting, there is betrayal, there is judgment, there is innocence lost. Making the Way of the Cross come alive redeems, in a way, that horrible experience of innocence lost and violence that happens in the community so often. [The enactment] is somehow fused with worship. It is fused with love and redemption, in religious language. It is used to say, "Even Christ goes through this. He doesn't just suffer on Good Friday. Jesus has his Passion on our streets daily."

On the impact of Hispanics on the American Catholic Church:

We have to remember that Hispanic Catholicism or Catholicism in Latin America is over 500 years old. It has gone through several manifestations of how it expresses itself. Linked with it is the very history of America -- not just the United States, but the history of America. I think the biggest impact Hispanics have on the Church in the United States is that they bring that history very clearly to bear here. It is a history of great faith yet of great violence. It is a history of two worlds coming together. It is Europeans finding life and a home in the land of the indigenous, and the indigenous making a family with them, and the family is us. The traditions and the history and the spirituality, the popular religious expression -- it's the fusion of the two cultures. It's the marriage of the two -- of Christianity from Europe with the deep sentiment, faith, passion, and grandeur of the Aztecs, the Inca, the Maya, the Native Americans of the Americas. Catholicism has the ability to find language in the indigenous heart, and the indigenous heart transforms Catholicism in America. That's what makes Catholicism in America so unique and dynamic. It's not the Catholicism of Europe. It is a very different kind of expression. As Hispanics from Latin America come north, that is exactly the blessing and yet at the same time the clash between the two cultures.

On differences between Anglos and Hispanics:

There are rituals and ceremonies that Hispanics value that are not available to North Americans or Europeans necessarily -- for example, el Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Hispanics have taken it beyond just the Day of the Dead and have infused it with the memory of ancestors, as understood and celebrated through the indigenous community -- not just visiting with someone who has passed away, but really making the life of that person available and accessible during the celebration. Hispanics view the Day of the Dead as a way to laugh at death: "Death, where are you?"

Like the Way of the Cross, las posadas [literally, "place to stay"] reenacts the search of Mary and Joseph looking for a place to stay. It's significant to us because, again, our faith is real people. Mary and Joseph are real people to us. We relive that to put into our hearts that Mary and Joseph always look for a place to stay in our homes and in our lives. We reenact the meaning of the posada to remind us of the poverty of people -- that Mary and Joseph even today are turned away, that Jesus does not have a place to live, not even in Chicago -- instead of being born in a manger, he's born under a Dumpster in Chicago. It's trying to make the historical leap between then and now, to make it real. That's the point of it.

[There is also] the celebration of quincianera [a girl's 15th birthday]. And the way we do weddings is very different. Though it's the same ritual, Hispanics have added to it. In English or American, you have the exchange of rings and vows. Hispanics have added a whole cadre of symbols, such as coins, which means the exchange of economy; rope, the unity symbol; a crucifix, Bible, and rosary -- each member of the couple has a specific responsibility to prayer and wisdom; and the roses to the Virgin (of Guadalupe, specifically). There are a whole bunch of new symbols brought into the liturgy that you wouldn't necessarily find in traditional American Catholicism.

On the U.S. Catholic Church and the growing predominance of Hispanics:

I believe that the Church in the United States is blessed by and attributes a lot of its growth to immigration. Immigration is the single greatest factor that has led the Catholic Church in the United States to have the numbers of people that it has. It's not by conversion. It's the immigration of people that's been filling up churches. That is a blessing and at the same time a challenge. You go through generations of people, and you don't find the same generations staying in the Catholic Church. For Hispanics, however, it's a little different, because much of the history of Hispanic identity is so infused with Catholicism. Even our Protestant brothers and sisters who do theology in their own traditions write that you have to deal with the Catholic Church if you're going to understand Hispanics in any venue. The Catholic Church is very much a part of the history of Latinos. It makes it much more difficult to let go of that, and at the same time it is a much more wrenching experience when it is let go.

It's difficult to determine the future, which is also determined by policies, governments, so many factors. In Chicago, the Catholic Church is already 36 to 40 percent Hispanic. That's no minority. That's a significant number that you have to deal with. "Having to deal with" means figuring out ways you are going to incorporate their gifts, their talents, their treasures, and their leadership into the life of the Church in the United States. Those are steps that the Church in the United States is grappling with at this point, in my mind. As more and more Hispanics come from Latin America, they enrich the Church, but at the same time they challenge the Church to provide masses in Spanish, to understand their cultural heritage, their religious heritage, to understand their current problems. Religion has to somehow respond to them. That's the point of faith. Faith responds to life. It's an answer, it's a proposition. If we don't get the question right, the answer won't mean much, and that's the challenge for the Church.

On Hispanic Catholic dictinctiveness:

Anglo Catholics for many years have made a distinction between what they believe and how they live, in many ways. Religion is one component of their life. For Hispanic Catholics, Jesus is next door. He's a member of the family. He is so palpable to them. It's a profound awareness of the divine around you, all over the place, versus something to be understood and grasped. Each culture has a different approach to how it wants to respond to its issues.

Hispanics want spirituality to be exciting, emotive for them. They are very passionate people to begin with. If it doesn't move them, they won't believe you. One time I asked a group of parishioners, "What are the criteria for a good sermon?" One of the ladies in the neighborhood said, "You have to convince me that you believe what you just said," versus saying the right thing or saying things in a way that is academic. It's not about necessarily being politically correct; what they are looking for is, "Can you convince me in a very real way that you believe what you just said?"

On Hispanic Catholicism and miracles:

We're permeated with miracles. Miracles are not something that happens from time to time. They happen every single day. There is a very clear sense of the mystical -- of everything around you. The danger for Hispanic Catholics is that the truth faith becomes religious superstition. That's where the clergy and the Church have to play a very important role. It's a balance between popular belief versus what a statement of faith really is. There is heavy belief in the intercession of the divine in one form or another, in the saints especially. But that's Catholic teaching; that's part of our Catholic heritage. The saints are not just "up there" singing in the choir. They are here, busy. They are acting because of our prayers, and they are acting in the name of Jesus as well. In the U.S., Catholics are not the majority; they are a minority. The culture is very suspicious of [miracles and the mystical] because of our Puritan history. It has a little harder time with them; it struggles with them, but it hasn't reconciled where they belong in our lives. Hispanic Catholics know exactly where they go.

On problems and challenges:

In terms of their faith, Hispanic Catholics face the problem of acceptance and being understood. Unlike other immigrant groups that came to the United States, the biggest difference is the time in history when Hispanics are coming. First, they are not coming with their native clergy, as the Irish, the Germans, the Poles, and other folks have done. Second, they are coming at a time in the history of the Catholic Church when it's overinstitutionalized, in my mind. Hispanics are not building [churches], they are renovating [them]. Hispanics occupy churches that don't reflect them or their history. This is Holy Trinity Croatian Catholic Church, for heaven's sakes, yet it is filled with Hispanics. Hispanics find a very real challenge in trying to be 1) accepted, 2) understood, and 3) nourished as they were before they left their countries. You don't know what you've got until you're gone. That's the Catholic Church's biggest, biggest challenge -- providing spaces for Hispanic Catholics to be able to express their faith.

The Church in the United States is slowly coming to grips with the fact that you have to invest in this community. Hispanics are leaving the Catholic Church. But they're not leaving because they want to be in some other church. As a matter of fact, quite the opposite: they are just leaving religion altogether. They haven't traditionally received a welcome. Most Spanish masses didn't begin in the churches. They began in basements or somewhere else, but they weren't welcome inside the Church itself. Hispanics have felt a very cold, cold reception from American Catholics traditionally and even today. We still struggle with that even in Chicago.

On barriers to Hispanic leadership in the U.S. Catholic Church:

There's always a barrier to Hispanic leadership. It's not easy to let go of power, to begin with. The other side, too, is that Hispanics are always being served. They have to be allowed to serve as well. Hispanics are not just leaders of other Hispanics. They have to understand their self-identity as leaders in the Church, as leaders to the entire community. Insofar as you can't do that, then your leadership will always be compromised. So yes, we have a struggle with developing Hispanic leaders because most of the clergy who do Hispanic ministry -- 90 percent of them -- are non-Hispanic. They are always doing for the community or trying to develop leadership, but they themselves are not the role models.

On Hispanic assimilation:

Hispanics don't assimilate. They just don't. You cannot assimilate with [our] kind of history behind you. We're not assimilating into a 200-year history. We're trying to bring a 500-year history to a new context. Hispanics are maintaining their language. They want their culture, they want their traditions. Geographically, they are closer than any other immigrant group has been to their own countries. We have access to those cultural and historical places in our lives, so we can't just give that up to take on something else. It doesn't happen.

The problem with other immigrant groups today versus yesterday is, you don't want to go across the Atlantic on a boat again. It took forever to get here. Travel access was very different. People's ability to access their cultural heritage was more difficult than we imagine. The concept that other immigrant groups didn't bring their identity and their history here is wrong. That's exactly what they did. They built schools specifically to teach Polish history and language, to teach Italian history and language. They didn't assimilate either. They wanted to preserve their cultural heritage. Subsequent generations, on the other hand, did. The first generation always has a hard time of it. Subsequent generations, with the use of the English language and more participation, have a little easier time, but they always remain connected [to the past] in one way or other, as they should, as will happen for Hispanics, and as it has happened and is happening for them.

If I scratch an Italian Catholic, I find a lot more Italian than Catholic. They have their traditions. Their parents taught them things. They have all those traditions available to them, and they won't even know where they come from, but they know they are there. Catholicism is not prescribed. It's a skeleton. We are the ones who enflesh Catholicism. Catholicism doesn't say, "This is the only thing you can do." Absolutely not. It's meant for you to put your life, your faith, your skin into Catholicism. That's what Christianity is. The more we do that, the more we enflesh what the expression of Catholicism will be for this generation as well as for the next. The next one might be Hispanic, and then after that it might be somebody else. The point is the face of Catholicism is constantly changing.

On the American Catholic Church in ten years:

If the Church opens up more to Hispanic Catholics, then the Hispanic Catholic experience will penetrate, will be pervasive. But the Church won't become Hispanic Catholic. It will be whatever people come to this land. The next big immigration we are having is Asians. They will bring to the Catholic Church of the United States their own flavor. They will have something to teach us, and we will need to learn from them. [American Catholicism of the future] won't be a Catholicism of Mexico, of Colombia. It's going to be an American Catholic experience with different immigrants, but it will be American, because here you have the exciting ability to encounter other people with different histories and traditions and make them your own. That's why American Catholicism won't remain the same. So I have no idea what the Catholic Church in the future is going to look like. It depends on the people and their ability to love one another.

On differences between Hispanic communities:

When the Way of the Cross is celebrated in Guatemala, the whole community gets involved to prepare the way, the route, and they make beautiful, ornate carpets of sand and flowers. They really go all out to decorate their homes and houses. It's a very different kind of tradition from Mexico. It's a different kind of piety. The closer a culture is to its indigenous roots, the more the indigenous roots will show themselves. But the farther away they are, the more European they look in their expression and appearance. In Rio de Janeiro, they have the African experience as well [and] the Caribbean experience. They may have posada, but the way they celebrate it is very different from the way Mexicans will do it.

On the importance of community for Hispanics:

That's part of their identity. We in the United States self-identify as individuals. Hispanics identify in the context of community. Before they ask who you are, they will ask, "Who's your mother?" They'll ask, "Whose son are you? Whose daughter are you?" They will "contextualize" you first before they go into any further sense of identity. In the U.S., we want to show who we are as individuals. The importance of the individual has its grace, but [it gets] taken to extremes, to its detriment. [The same thing is true] with the communal aspect of identity. All of a sudden you have no autonomy; you are dependent on the communal structure around you. It's the balance of the two that winds up helping to [create] a new expression of "person" here in the United States, which is great.

On resistance to Hispanics in some Catholic churches:

Much of it has to do with racism. There is no assent to the faith that says, "Do not welcome." There is no precedent of God saying, "Only give the gospel to your kind." The members of the dominant community have been [in a parish] for many, many years and are used to their traditions and their ways. When they see the encroachment of the Hispanic community into the parish, there is a tremendous backlash: "If they want to be part of our community, then they have to do things the way we tell them they have to be done." Well, that doesn't work. It happens consistently in Chicago and in many parishes outside of Chicago: "This is the way we've always done it." Well, you can't accept another community with that answer. You have to change as a community, because the encounter of another person demands change, and the more resistance there is to change, then the more friction there is going to be. Two things have happened. We've had white flight. Pastors were not willing to open up a Spanish Mass because of that. White flight means they will lose money and the ability to keep things going. The Hispanic community is a poor community; they're not going to be giving the contributions you're used to. And they don't have the same moral authority in the community as they would in their own cultural context, so they can't talk to the people in the way they can talk to their own kind. People see change and interpret it as a loss, but they don't see the gain. They don't know what the possibilities can be. So, you have the experience of people leaving the Church because another group has come in. Or, in other communities, Hispanics just consider the church irrelevant -- they won't even go there: "That's for those people. They don't welcome us there." You also find experiences where non-Catholic churches who don't have that hang-up welcome Hispanics into their communities.

On the movement of Hispanics away from Catholicism to Pentecostalism:

It's an issue, but it's not their issue, it's the Church's issue. The Pentecostal movement or Baptist movement -- what they have that the Catholic Church doesn't have is native clergy. It doesn't take much to become a preacher right away. You don't go through the long seminary training that we Catholics have to go through. You get a pastor very fast who speaks your language; it's a smaller community, so he has time for you; and it's not as complicated with record-keeping, sacramental structures, and a lot of other structures we have in the Catholic Church that weigh on Catholics. For them, the pastor has all the liberty in the world to do nothing but minister to people in the strict sense. Once the [Pentecostal] community grows to a certain size, though, the turnover of Hispanic Protestants is pretty big, too. [Hispanic Catholics] leave a lot, but the question is, do they stay? You see a generational overturn that you don't see [in Catholicism]. The fact that Hispanics will go somewhere else is not necessarily indicative of the greatness of the Christian community that receives them; a big reason is that the Catholic Church has not said, "This is your home. Welcome. Come on in." If I were an immigrant Catholic and my pastor tells me I've got to celebrate Mass in the basement [and] I'm a second-class citizen in his mind, and then here comes this [Pentecostal] pastor and I'm first-class to him, he wants me to go to his church, he knows my name, he knows my family, then I'm going to him. He loves me; [the other one] doesn't. I don't blame the Hispanic community. That is an issue of the Church, not the community.

Did you like this story? How can we improve our program or Web site?