ARTICLES
March 2003 ARTICLES
Contents © 2003
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
Devotions of the Blood
La Placita Threatened
By Jonathan Fierro
For over two centuries, it has been the soul of Mexican Catholicism. It is also the founding place of Los Angeles and the city's oldest church.
But now, according to a group of its lay members, Our Lady Queen of Angels Church -- better known as "La Placita" for being next to historical Plaza Olvera Street -- is being stripped of orthodox Catholicism and of devotions that are an intrinsic part of the life of Mexican immigrants. The group adds that a new pastor has taken over with a bold agenda: to stamp out Mexican religious traditions for good.
Administering as many as 800 baptisms per week, downtown's La Placita was considered the center that baptized more babies than any other parish in Southern California. Yet baptisms have recently been curtailed under strict parish guidelines that require written consent from home parishes -- something hard to come by.
Confessions have been drastically reduced, as well as daily Masses, the opposition group says. They add that venerable movements like Acción Catolica Juvenil Mexicana (Mexican Catholic Action Youth), which is credited with having inspired canonized martyrs during Mexico's religious Cristero war, have been suppressed, paving the way for groups influenced by Liberation Theology.
Mexican Christmas traditions, like the beautiful Las Posadas, or even the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico's most potent religious symbol, were allegedly downplayed during the holidays, said the opposition groups. They add that popular religiosity, which has for centuries been the backbone of Mexican Catholicism, is being undermined deliberately, causing grief to immigrants who often have no other place to turn to in Los Angeles.
Parish officials insist that the accusations are groundless. They add that the new pastor, Claretian Father Dennis Gallo, who was appointed six months ago, has only installed a new pastoral team and that with them comes minor changes.
Gallo did not return my phone calls requesting an interview for this story.
While both sides traded barbs, what was clear to many Los Angeles-based Catholic Latinos was that there was turmoil at La Placita. A hunger strike by former sacristy worker, Simon Hernandez, brought local Spanish-language media attention, causing yet another ruckus in the scandal-plagued Archdiocese. Archdiocesan officials said that the Placita case was a matter for the Claretians, the order that has for decades run that parish. Claretian officials would not comment on the issue.
Still, the opposition groups, led by Hernandez, say that they will not go away. Father Gallo's new staff may try to impose their will, but the opposition says that the staff will fail. The issue is a dolorous one for Hernandez, who has been the sacristy worker for the Placita for 28 years, he says. He has been through a lot there.
A small, mild-mannered man from Mexico, Hernandez, 65, is well known to the local Spanish media. Through the years, he made sure that the local media groups sponsored religious Latin American traditions like Las Posadas, the feasts of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Guatemala Black Christ of Esquipulas. "I would rather die than see them do away with Mexican traditions," said an emotional, Hernandez. "My people from Mexico suffer too much just to let a man [Gallo] who doesn't seem to like Mexicans, get away with destroying the Faith that cost our ancestors their lives and blood."
Mexico, indeed, was the only country in the 20th century that held a Catholic religious war and much blood was spilled that would later be indirectly connected with La Placita.
La Placita has a rich history. The year he founded the city of Los Angeles, Felipe de Neve, then the governor for the Spanish royal crown, established La Placita in 1781. A massive, tired but unbowed wooden cross that was erected that year still stands on the back patio of the church. The church quickly became the center of life for the new city. About four decades later, Mexico would win its independence, while the parish continued to be where things happened. Through the years, La Placita lost its spot as the center for the Church hierarchy -- especially after California was annexed to the U.S. But for Mexican-Americans, it remained the heart of Catholicism.
Catholic faith in La Placita was very much alive when the Cristero war broke out in Mexico in the late 1920s. The atheistic government in Mexico banned religious education and prohibited the Catholic Church from opening up its temples in July 1926. With the Virgin of Guadalupe on their banners and the war cry Viva Cristo Rey (Long Live Christ the King), the "Cristeros" took up arms and battled government forces throughout Mexico. Last year, Pope John Paul canonized 22 priests and three lay men who belonged to Acción Catolica, a youth group that aided the Cristero movement. All of them are considered martyrs for being tortured and killed for not revealing Cristero secrets.
Two months after the Cristero war broke out, members who had links to the Cristeros established the Acción Catolica Juvenil Mexicana at La Placita. The youth group flourished, spawning dozens of vocations and men and women who grew strong in their faith. Last September, the Acción Catolica celebrated 76 years of being part of La Placita. Hernandez says that two months later, Father Gallo banned that group, as well as others.
"How could he do that?" asked Hernandez, in his small study in Lincoln Heights. "How can he just come in and in less than two months destroy the work of 76 years? Of so much heritage?"
A great part of La Placita's modern heritage is owed to Father Alberto Vazquez, a 74-year-old Claretian who landed at La Placita scarcely five years after he was ordained in 1960. Texas born, Vazquez through the years became synonymous with La Placita. As the Latino immigrant community grew, Vazquez saw to it that La Placita became a welcoming haven for the city's poorest workforce. Besides maintaining devotions and other traditions, he also helped developed social groups, like the United Neighborhoods Organization, that fostered civil rights causes in the barrios.
Father Luis Olivares replaced Vazquez in 1981. A priest well known for his social causes, Olivares declared, in 1995, that La Placita would be a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants, where the homeless among them would be permitted to live inside the temple. Olivares drew the ire of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, but won the praise of social activists everywhere. From senators to movie stars, Olivares, who was also known for his expensive taste in cars and suits, became somewhat of a celebrity.
But many parishioners complained that the homeless at La Placita often mugged the elderly -- including, on one occasion, a priest -- and dirtied the temple. Some, it was claimed, even practiced prostitution within the church. Police -- who were not permitted within church property upon Olivares' orders -- said that drug selling flourished there.
"It was not a very pretty sight," recalled Hernandez.
Hernandez remembers that once some in the church tried to invite the sanctuary dwellers to join their Eucharistic Adoration group, which still stands. But they were told that they were not to invite the homeless to such services. The Claretians removed Olivares in 1989, but not before he appealed to Rome. After an interim priest served for a year, Vazquez was once again called back to La Placita. Olivares contracted AIDS in the late 1980s from a needle infection in El Salvador. He died in 1993.
With the sanctuary program terminated, Vazquez got back to work, Hernandez said. He ordered a mural of the Virgin of Guadalupe to be painted behind the pastoral center. A grotto dedicated to the Santo Niño de Atocha was built in 1998, drawing thousands of devotees every week, Hernandez said. And while baptism and confessions declined in other parishes, these sacraments increased dramatically at La Placita.
But in July, Vazquez was retired and sent to the Claretian seminary in Compton, said Hernandez. Gallo, an Italian-American priest, replaced Vazquez as pastor.
Hernandez said that Father Gallo quickly brought changes to La Placita. In a matter of months, he rejected several of the oldest parish groups, which had been serving there for decades. Gallo also prohibited groups from inviting media coverage of the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as well as for Las Posadas, something that Hernandez had been doing for decades. According to Hernandez, Gallo told him that this was because he didn't want the media involved in those traditions.
One of the big changes also happened in the parish's bookstore. Once filled with devotional booklets -- which are very popular among Latino Catholics -- the books have been removed and replaced by books geared towards a more socially conscious Catholicism.
And as for Vazquez's work, Hernandez said that Gallo doesn't want to hear about it. Hernandez added that there's a new pastor in town, and its not Vazquez. "He doesn't like nobody to mention Father Vazquez. He hates it," said Hernandez. "I think that he has banned Father Vazquez from the Placita."
Despite considering himself a faithful Catholic, Hernandez decided to go on a hunger strike on January 13. Sleeping out in the cold and carrying a makeshift sign, Hernandez drew media attention, with most of the radio stations supporting him. Hernandez demanded that baptisms and devotions be brought back. He also demanded that the parish support Las Posadas and the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe. On the third day of the fast, when Hernandez was weak and his supporters had momentarily left to bring him a doctor, Deacon Arnold Abelardo allegedly showed up in tears, begging Hernandez to meet with the priests. Once inside the rectory, Hernandez said that the priests promised him that they would seriously consider his demands; they also presented a document, asking him to sign it.
"I thought that the document was for me to admit that I was going to retreat myself from the hunger strike," recalled Hernandez a few days ago. "But it was really a document saying that I was going to retire from being the church's sacristy worker."
Bertha Hernandez (no relation to Simon Hernandez), a current parish worker, said that she believes that Gallo and the other priests duped the sacristy worker into signing the document. She added that they saw the right moment, when Hernandez was alone, and cajoled him. "They took advantage of him when they knew that we weren't there to help him," said Bertha Hernandez. "They played into his feelings, even going so far as to crying in front of him so that he would feel guilty about what he was doing."
Ruben Bermejo, a Hernandez supporter, said that, despite all of Father Gallo's attempts, devotions will never be driven out of Mexican immigrants. He added that they can have the nearby glitzy cathedral, but Spanish-speaking Latinos will always prefer their Virgin of Guadalupe and their saints to opulence.
"Do you honestly think that Latinos will leave La Placita and go to the cathedral?" said Bermejo. "Of course not! The cathedral is a place for fat cats being driven there in limos. Our people are more simple, they see themselves in a Christ-figure that is bloody and crucified, one that is suffering like them, not in something that's fake."
To La Placita's visitors, it's clear that popular religiosity is alive and well there. Pilgrims show up to the patio or walk into the smaller church to visit the Blessed Sacrament, which is displayed for adoration during most of the day.
During an early February weekday, at the Santo Niño de Atocha grotto, with its cascade just below the enshrined figure of the Christ-child figure, a steady trickle of pilgrims stop by to pray or pay their respects. On a board next to the grotto, some leave locks of black hair, others leave white baby t-shirts or little mittens, thanking the saint for doing the miracle of curing them. Someone attached a hospital bracelet that belonged to a baby, Neydin Leon, to the board. A white, lined note says that the infant weighed seven pounds, eight ounces. "Thank you Santo Niño de Atocha for doing the miracle of permitting my little sister to live," said the note.
Esther Ramirez, a middle-aged woman from Michoacan, Mexico, said that she stopped by the grotto because she is ill. She lived in North Carolina but recently moved to Los Angeles, where she learned that the Santo Niño was at La Placita. "He is very miraculous, so I stopped by to plead him to cure me," said Ramirez, after lighting a veladora [a votive candle].
In the back of the pastoral center, where the Virgin of Guadalupe mural stands and where thousands pay homage to her every December 12, hundreds of flickering votive candles are surrounded by kneelers. All through the day, pilgrims stream in and stop by to pray.
Often facing loneliness and the harshness of adapting to more relaxed social mores, immigrant Latinos often turn to evangelical cults when they don't have access to their beloved devotions, said Bertha Henandez. She added that, for that reason alone, she will fight to stop Gallo and his alleged reforms.
"Can't they see that what they are doing is a crime?" she said. "They are driving Latino Catholics away to other churches."