One hundred years hence, it is possible that the history books will note the on-going ups-and-downs of the clergy sex abuse crisis. Perhaps, the treaty the President signed this morning to reduce the number of nuclear weapons will be the first of many which will, in one hundred years, reach fruition with a world free of nuclear weapons. But, I can guarantee that the history books will definitely note one event this week: The appointment of a Latino archbishop, Archbishop Jose Gomez, to the cardinalatial see of Los Angeles. Gomez is virtually guaranteed to become a cardinal given that the archdiocese he will take over is not only the largest in the United States, but if you took out the 3.5 million Latino Catholics in Los Angeles and made them into a separate diocese, it would also be the largest in the United States.
There was a time when many U.S. bishops were foreign born, but they came from Ireland. France also provided some of the earliest bishops to America. But, the future of Catholicism in this country is largely a Latino future. While the historic Irish, Italian and French Canadian churches of the Northeast are losing numbers, in dioceses like Houston, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Orlando, they can’t build churches and schools fast enough. Already the Vatican has recognized the changing demographic by awarding a red hat to Houston, and consigning St. Louis to the rank of cities that once had cardinals but no longer do. I suspect Detroit will join that list and probably Baltimore as well.
The Church, so often mocked for being behind the times – or celebrated for avoiding the slavish indignity of being a child of her own age – is here ahead of the curve. The demography of the country is on track to mimic the demographic changes we are already seeing in the Church. There are a handful of prominent Latino politicians from Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico to the sister-congresswomen, Reps. Linda and Loretta Sanchez. Marco Rubio, who is running in the GOP primary in Florida, is probably the leading Hispanic in the Republican Party. But, Gomez’s appointment is more like that of Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor, a very exclusive post in which the inclusion of a minority screams “We have arrived!”
Gomez is also the first Opus Dei bishop in the United States. (You can bet Dan Brown is looking for increased sales of “The DaVinci Code” in LA over the next few months.) There was a time when that might have worried me, when Opus Dei had not been homogenized with the universal Church, and was still a little too close to its Spanish origins and the specifically fascistic associations those origins entailed. But, today, Opus Dei strikes me simply as a highly motivated and organized group of Catholics, who certainly tend to the right, but who are not prone to the kind of cult-like regimens that characterize the Legionnaires, for example. Yesterday, a bishop, who has known Gomez for years, recalled his election to head an organization of Hispanic priests. The organization was left-of-center and the bishop said he had been surprised that they selected an Opus Dei priest. “That gives you some flavor of the man’s personal qualities,” he said.
It will be interesting to see how Gomez puts his stamp on the sprawling LA archdiocese. For the next year, he will be working hand-in-glove with Cardinal Roger Mahony, known nationally for taking up the Common Ground Initiative after the death of Cardinal Bernardin. When Gomez first became a bishop, he served as an auxiliary to Archbishop Chaput in Denver, who is – how to say this? – not exactly a poster-boy for Common Ground. Which model will Gomez pursue? Will he even care to exert a national influence? Can such a role be avoided from such a prominent position? Time will tell. We can be certain, however, that the Church in the United States has passed a milestone in its journey. Soon, Latino Catholics will be able to observe meetings of the U.S. cardinals and recognize that, for one of them, English is his second, more heavily accented language. It is difficult to measure what effect such a seemingly small thing has on a people, but it is a good effect to be sure and one that really runs deeper than you might think. The Vatican has come under tons of criticism lately but they deserve a shout out for this appointment.
Michael Sean Winters
I can't personally speak to "the legacies of the racial-ethnic injustice of US Church leadership." Maybe I'm ignorant. But I do know that San Antonio under Bishop Drossaerts was an extremely welcoming place for Mexican clergy (who at that time were fleeing revolution and Church suppression), that Archbishop Gomez has pioneered an extremely significant bilingual diocesan seminary program, and that half of the Texas episcopal conference today is Mexican-American. No amount of bitterness over past wrongs can mask the demographic significance of all that, and the fact that Gomez is heading west, announcing the Vatican's symbolic and practical investment in these matters, is one way among many that the history of the Catholic Church in the US demonstrably has moved westward...or that the Church is, at least, regrouping itself in the southwest.
Politically, I'm not sure whether Gomez will be "ahead of the curve." He's only been here in our city for five years, and San Antonio has yet to form a consensus on him. Many of us grumble about his lack of charisma (which stems, I think, from a deep humility) and somewhat by-the-book administrative style. But to answer one of your questions, Michael, I think that he will care to exert a national influence. In many ways, he already has. (Nearly every time I've heard him speak to seminars and conferences and on his local Catholic channel TV show, he mentions trips to Washington and to Austin to advocate for immigration reform.) Many of us feel that it's on the immigration issue that the US Church is most publicly and most laudably "ahead" of some sort of curve.
And he was a hit at their Prayer Breakfast last year:
http://www.archdiosa.org/bishops/jgomez/Documents/Speeches/OrangeCountyPrayerBreakfast.pdf
Funny, the text of his speech was there yesterday!
I realize you may read this as "parsing" and "bitterness" but these are not insignificant points, though they do inconveniently disrupt the pride that you say many Caucasian Catholics want to feel right now. I'm sorry to take that from you, but I have to remind you that this conversation is not primarily about Caucasians. It's about Chicano/a and Latino/a people who have been suppressed and excluded within our Church. Is this appointment of some symbolic importance? Yes. Will it be good for humane and just immigration reform? Maybe. Is it a sign that the Church is ahead of the curve? Absolutely not. It's a sign that the pope and bishops are conceding to some realities that they can't continue to simply suppress, control, and ignore. [Since you bring up Pres. Obama, an analogy would be to ask: Is the U.S.A. "ahead of the curve" because it elected as president a half-Black male who got there by relying on white-male-corporate money and whose main support (numerically) was the roughly 28% of eligible white voters who chose him over McCain or nobody?]
I don't know much about Bishop Drossaerts, but I know some Church history in Texas and it's not pretty. I'm not particularly impressed that a European bishop "welcomed" Mexican Catholics into land that had just been stolen from them. Kind of strange that we're talking about a Dutch bishop "welcoming" Mexican Catholics to "SAN ANTONIO." Again, I realize this disrupts feel-good assessments of history and our current situation, but we need an accurate and serious conversation here if we're really going to have a Church worthy of its call. You and Winters don't seem to grasp just how deep the suppression of Latin American and Latino/a practices and ministerial agency have been and continue to be in the U.S. Church.
Your points are very well taken. I didn't mean to elide the important difference between "Latin American" and "Latino," nor to overgeneralize about anyone, nor yet to sound petty or dismissive in calling such careful distinctions "parsing." I should have been more careful with my words. I guess my main question, which I didn't really articulate, is whether you think the Vatican could have done better with this appointment? I don't mean that defensively and I won't presume the answer is yes; I'm honestly curious. Put differently, what should the Church do to get, in fact, ahead of the curve or become "representative of the demographics of the people"? Maybe I reacted strongly because your post seemed short on illustrations which could help us to understand the real scope of the problem of "the suppression of Latin American and Latino/a practices and ministerial agency...in the US Church." (The quotation marks are non-derisive.)
Incidentally, I would actually be more willing to say that the US is ahead of the curve for electing Obama than that the Church is ahead of the curve for appointing Gomez to LA. True, Obama had white support, but he also galvanized more black voters (of course) than any candidate ever had and just as the Gomez thing isn't all about the Caucasians, I think it would be wrong to attribute that historical moment exclusively to white power. To put it all in (one) context, I myself witnessed the election from France, which despite its sophisticated liberalism found itself wracked with guilt that it could never, by its pundits' own admission, elect a black person or Muslim to its highest office.
There's always another side of the story, as you well know...and as valuable as pointing out the hidden dark side of history may be (and indeed it is), I think it's also important to be explicit about the virtues when progress is made. Hope can easily become a slogan, but it is also a theological virtue; I think it's a good thing to cultivate and it's good to see what is beautiful in people, in the Church, and in the world...
Why did “La Opinion” have the headline on 7 April: “Un arbizpo latino para Los Angeles?”