By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Three Phoenix-area Hispanic Catholics commented to The Wanderer about a recent nationally publicized study of Hispanics in the United States leaving the Catholic Church, either to become Protestants or to drop religious practice.
All three cited an environment in the U.S. that’s either less supportive of or more hostile to their religion. The three, all orthodox, practicing Catholics, spoke during separate interviews in early May.
Nearly one in four Hispanic adults in the U.S. is a former Catholic, said the Pew Research Center’s 2013 National Survey of Latinos and Religion, as reported at the web site of Pew Research’s Religion & Public Life Project.
It said that “a majority (55 percent) of the nation’s estimated 35.4 million Latino adults — or about 19.6 million Latinos — identify as Catholic today. About 22 percent are Protestant (including 16 percent who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical) and 18 percent are religiously unaffiliated.”
The study said that while roughly half of the Latino adults in this nation were born outside the U.S., 16 percent of those who have a religion different than in their childhood switched after arriving here, and 13 percent did so before arriving.
Rey Torres is a third-generation American whose family came here legally from Mexico. He attended university in Mexico City and is fluent in Spanish.
Hispanics arriving here are losing a support system, both spiritual and cultural, that they had at home, Torres told The Wanderer. He added that in Mexico, the Church is very “intertwined with aspects of Mexican cultural life….When they arrive here…it’s a very different kind of Catholicism.”
Torres said he traveled throughout that nation, from the Mexico City megalopolis to small villages whose residents spoke Indian dialects instead of Spanish.
Families there may have spent centuries celebrating a local or regional saint without acquiring a deeper knowledge of the Catholic faith, he said, then they’re exposed to more of “a Protestant setting” in the U.S. and more opportunity “to entertain those ideas.”
“Those superficial celebrations [of saints] . . . aren’t going to be sufficient here,” Torres said, adding that deeper intellectual education is needed, not only for them but also longtime U.S. Catholics.
“The Church has not done a very good job at speaking to the intellect of the faithful,” he said. “. . . The intellect needs to be fed,” too. Without this, the Church “becomes less and less relevant.”
As for those who simply stop practicing religion, Torres said he’s been concerned for years about “the inability of people to find a place for the Church in their daily lives in our society.”
People need to see the faith’s relevance down through the centuries, he said, not attempts at supposed “relevance” like “teen Masses,” which “got us nothing — one step farther away from being Catholic.
“. . . What is the theology behind the practices of the Mass itself?. . . Without those missing pieces [of information],” Torres said, “how could you find the Church to be relevant, much less understandable?”
Torres said it’s not useful to suggest that Hispanics would be encouraged to remain in the Church if they could have some more exuberant or spontaneous type of worship.
A charismatic style would be “a cancerous type of bridge” leading them away from Catholicism to a more individual-focused, “look at me” type of Protestant religion, he said.
As for newly arrived Hispanics seeking material assistance, Torres said the inducements are more readily available at local evangelical churches than the Catholic Church, which provides them through Catholic Social Services — a more remote agency than the individual parish.
American-born Remi Ruiz, dean of the Upper School at suburban Scottsdale’s Ville de Marie Academy, told The Wanderer that education about the faith is the key. “I think if most people knew the value of the faith, a pearl of great price, who would throw it away? Clearly, we have a failure to communicate.”
There’s a lack of emphasis on the Sacrament of Reconciliation, he added.
Ville de Marie is a K-12 independent, orthodox Catholic school approved by the Diocese of Phoenix. The school’s mission statement says its purpose “is to cultivate wisdom and virtue by nourishing the souls of our students on all that is true, beautiful, and good, so that, in Christ, the student is better able to attain the noble end for which he was created — to know, love, and glorify God.”
Ruiz said he heard on the Eternal Word Television Network that about 55 percent of U.S. Hispanics are Catholic, down from about 85 percent. Regardless of what ethnic group is involved, “I guess it’s pretty bad if they’re losing the faith,” he said, adding later: “What’s bad for Hispanic souls is bad for any souls. . . . I didn’t know souls have colors.”
Asking himself what the influences are against faith, Ruiz said, “We live in a culture that is anti-Catholic to the core. Any culture that is willing to kill its own babies…is doomed. Literally, it’s a dead-end culture” that also “preys on the elderly and the weak and feeble-minded. . . .
“The United States is a society of secular humanism. I’d even say a boiling culture of secular humanism,” Ruiz said. “…Not only is our food poisoned with awful hormones, etc., but our whole intellectual culture is poisoned with disgusting filth.”
The answer: “We need to restore our grace places, as opposed to sin bins. A grace place would be for example a confessional, or the Sacrament of Confirmation. A grace place is anywhere where you can come to Jesus in the sacraments.”
He also mentioned the women of Chile successfully wielding their rosaries against the far-left government of Salvador Allende in the early 1970s.
Ruiz said he’s hopeful and proud in the new generation he teaches at Ville de Marie.
The “Happy Churches”
Another Phoenix resident, Luz Fuenzalida, also commented to The Wanderer on newcomers to the U.S. being induced to attend other churches through the provision of material goods.
Fuenzalida is a native Spanish-speaker born in Chile who became a U.S. citizen last year after decades of legal residency. She devotes much of her time to saving unborn babies from abortion clinics and bringing their Latino mothers back into the Catholic Church.
After a Wanderer telephone interview, she elaborated in an e-mail, reflecting on numerous temptations toward a sinful life when moral boundaries are broken.
In Latino countries, she said, “you don’t see this large amount of Catholics leaving the Church for other churches.” Fuenzalida said she wouldn’t describe it as a “conversion” when a person joins a different church, “because they’re walking away from Christ and His True Church.”
From the time they arrive in the U.S., Fuenzalida said, illegal immigrants face a problem because they’re “coming here into a foreign culture and foreign language, frequently with very little family connection because they’re scattered around the U.S.
“They’re looking for material goods that many non-Catholic churches are happy to offer them,” she said. “These are sometimes used as baits in order to bring them into these pseudo-churches.”
Fuenzalida criticized what she called non-Catholic “Happy Churches,” where people are told they’re saved, regardless.
“The ‘Happy Churches’ are welcoming them with open arms,” she said. “These … churches are where they’re all ‘saved,’ no matter what they do, even when living in an adulterous or fornicating lifestyle, contracepting and/or aborting way of life.”
Male illegal immigrants, she said, “are coming here with what seems to be a very beautiful initial intention, to raise [up] the family economically” that was left behind, but they could set up a second family here outside the spiritual law.
“Once here, they are faced with a major temptation of hooking up with other women [who are] in need of financial support, frequently do not speak English, and are searching for a father replacement for their children,” Fuenzalida said.
“These hookups are at the expense of the sacramental family left behind,” she said. “The initial goal to support their family left behind vanishes. So we Catholic believers can easily get into a position of aiding and abetting adultery. . . .
“Many of these ‘half-families’ end up with strangers living with them,” she said. “This is by no means the normal family unit. . . . Too many pedophiles are willing to jump in, to help these vulnerable mothers with children, which unfortunately too often has a very painful ending,” with the children accessible to the pedophiles.
Detrimental effects take various forms, she said. “Broken parents, living in mortal sin, stop receiving the sacraments, and often put work and any excuse above their duty to worship in the True Church.”
Meanwhile, children are “more vulnerable and exposed to real dangers, frequently by the man the mother brings in, and the easy avenue of prostitution, drugs, theft….A criminal lifestyle becomes a solution for many of these spiritually broken and often physically ‘abandoned’ children,” Fuenzalida said.
A possible legal solution for work-seekers, she said, would be companies providing “legal work visas for no longer than six months, with taxes automatically deducted for all foreign workers. For longer work-permit visas, employers should offer housing, and also schooling for children in the family [and] English classes for the parents…in order to minimize difficulties and maximize basic benefits for the family that is relocating for longer periods.”
Mexico “doesn’t open its borders because it can’t afford to support citizens from other countries,” Fuenzalida said. “The Mexican citizen comes first in Mexico. Just like in the U.S., a U.S. citizen should come first.”
When a Mexican diplomat told her that the U.S. should open its borders, Fuenzalida said she asked if Mexico would open its borders, and he replied, “Absolutely not. We cannot afford them!”
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