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 Editorials | Issues | February 2008 
Catholic Immigrants Go Protestant
 Pablo Jaime Sáinz - La Prensa San Diego
go to original
| | Where have all the followers gone? | | |
San Diego - Before migrating to the United States, Rolando Figueroa would never eat red meat on Fridays during Lent in his native Mexico. But when he arrived in San Diego, he began attending a Baptist church looking for answers.
“It was there that I realized that I was following Catholic traditions that I never understood,” Figueroa said. “Now that I’m a Baptist and know my faith, I don’t follow absurd traditions that I didn’t even know the meaning of.”
It is during Lent season that many immigrants like Figueroa have begun to change their trips to the beach on Holy Friday for Bible study.
One of them is Maria Quijada, a Mexican woman living in Imperial Beach. She left the Catholic Church because she didn’t relate to its practices.
“The truth, I was looking for a faith that would fulfill my spiritual need,” said Quijada, who is a Jehovah’s Witness. “I started looking for something better.”
Like Figueroa and Quijada, there are thousands of Latin American Catholics that, when they migrate to the United States, leave Catholicism to join a different Christian denomination. The first thing that comes to mind is that these immigrants are betraying their traditions to embrace the new Anglo culture. But this change goes beyond just assimilating into a new culture?
The reasons
Alberto Hernandez, a sociologist at Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana and author of the study “La conversión religiosa como proceso transnacional” (“Religious Conversion as a Transnational Process”), said that the sociological and psychological factors of migration affect all aspects of an immigrant’s life.
“The experience of migration is an experience of changes, where there are also religious changes,” Hernandez said. “Immigrants, when experiencing all the changes included in migration, begin to ask themselves a series of questions. Maybe other churches, and not the Catholic Church, has the answers for them.”
Orlando Espin, professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Science at the University of San Diego, a Catholic university, said that several factors make Mexican immigrants leave Catholicism.
“The most common reason is that they didn’t feel welcomed in the Catholic Church in the U.S.,” Espin said. “Another reason is that they feel truly convinced of the ideas of other churches. Another reason is to maintain family harmony. When a member of the family converts to another denomination, sometimes there are confrontations among family members. In order to avoid this, for example, the husband also changes denominations.”
There are three different forms of Catholicism in Mexico and the rest of Latin America, according to Espin.
The first group includes those who are practicing Catholics. These attend Mass every Sunday, are involved in Church activities, and are an important part of their Catholic communities.
The second group is made up of Catholics who follow the cultural traditions. They attend Mass and follow Catholic traditions because it’s the norm in their families and their societies.
There’s a third group of Catholics that rarely attend Mass, but still they practice a popular form of Catholicism. On December 12, for example, they pay tribute to Our Lady of Guadalupe. But in general, they’re not committed to the Church. According to Espin, the majority of Mexicans practice this form of Catholicism.
“Many of them, even though they’re Catholics, don’t practice Catholicism firmly,” he said.
Enrique Mendez, retired director of the former Hispanic Affairs office that’s now part of the Office for Cultural Diversity at the Diocese of San Diego, said that arriving at a new country causes religious confusion among immigrants.
“They don’t know how to distinguish among churches because there are so many,” he said.
Hernandez also said that “many non-Catholic churches give social support to undocumented and field workers. This creates a sort of commitment in part of the immigrants.”
But Hernandez said that perhaps in Mexico, immigrants only knew the Catholic Church, and many didn’t even know people from other religions.
“When they migrate, options begin to grow,” he said.
Other Mexican immigrants, such as Maria Quijada, who is a Jehovah’s Witness, are disappointed at the Catholic clergy. The sexual scandals that have been made public in recent years have something to do with this.
“A priest in Mexico tried to rape my sister,” Quijada said. “Little by little in our family we realized what was happening in the Church: Priests raping children, something that had happened for years, but until today everything is public.”
The Catholic Church in the U.S.
Some critics argue that the U.S. Catholic Church, which for the most part is administered by bishops of Irish origin, doesn’t meet the needs of Mexican immigrants, because they don’t speak the same language and don’t follow the same traditions.
But Orlando Espin, professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Science at the University of San Diego, said that this isn’t always true.
“It would be an injustice to generalize. I think that this varies from church to church,” Espin said.
Sociologist Meredith Mc-Guire, cited in the study “The Latino Face of American Catholicism,” completed by the Center for the Study of Latino/a Catholicism at Univ. of San Diego, states that the differences between the Church in the U.S. and Latin America are strong.
“Many Latinos don’t find a sense of community in the U.S. Catholic Church; many have become Protestants, but many others don’t identify with Catholicism so strange to their cultural experience.”
Rodrigo Valdivia, director of the Office of Cultural Diversity at the Diocese of San Diego, said there are several reasons why many Latino immigrants end up joining other denominations when they arrive in this country.
One of them is that the Catholic Church reflects the culture of the U.S., just like in Mexico, Central, and South America it reflects the cultures of those regions, Valdivia said.
“The majority of immigrants find a Catholic Church that doesn’t look familiar on the surface,” he said. “They meet other communities that offer support but guide them towards different believes that don’t include the seven sacraments nor do they give a place of honor to the Virgin. Also, many Latino immigrants come from rural zones but settle in urban areas in the U.S. In their homeland they knew their brothers in faith and the priests, but when they get here they meet with very large and impersonal communities.”
There are almost one million Catholics in the Diocese of San Diego. A little bit less than 50 percent of those are Latinos, Valdivia said.
“This means that the Catholic Church of San Diego is responding to the Latino people which is made up of about 500,000 faithful,” Valdivia said. “This year, 15 to 20 percent of those converted to Catholicism in Easter will be Latinos. Every year hundreds of Latinos turn to Catholicism.”
Valdivia said that the number of churches that offer mass in Spanish is growing in San Diego County.
Without a doubt, Spanish is an important aspect among Catholic immigrants. In San Diego, 57 churches and chapels offer Spanish-language mass on Sundays, Valdivia said.
The Church in this country, like many other things, works in a more orderly fashion than in Latin American countries, he said.
“The clergy culture reflects the characteristics and values of the society –organization and individualism,” Valdivia said. “The result it’s more difficult for immigrants to recognize the Church. It would be impossible to try to change the dominant culture, and it would be ignorant to ask it to change, but we have, and we continue to, tried to serve all cultures in the Diocese.”
Some critics say that smaller churches offer a sense of community that’s lacking in the U.S. Catholic Church.
Those same critics say that the percentage of Catholic people that really knows their religion is really low. When they come to the U. S. they have feel a spiritual emptiness.
Feeling far from their homeland, they try to fill it. In their places of origin they were used to attend Mass together or participate in church events. Non-Catholic Christians in the U.S. tend to have more activities around their church, some Protestants say.
But Valdivia said that many Catholics, although they join other denominations, still consider themselves Catholics.
“Many of our Latino brothers that celebrate in other religions return to the Catholic Church to celebrate Ash Wednesday, Christmas and Easter. The Church still recognizes them and respects their Catholic rights, such as matrimony, confession, and burial. The Church supports religious freedom and treats with respect other Christian denominations and even other religions (Muslims, Jews, etc.),” Valdivia said. |
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