Posted on 04/10/2005 8:45:39 PM PDT by neverdem
LOS ANGELES, April 8 - Lily Velazquez, who turned 18 on Thursday, is the sixth of 12 children of Mexican immigrants in a poor suburb of Los Angeles. She considers herself both a devoted Catholic and a hopeless sinner.
She attends Mass every Sunday but has had two children out of wedlock. She thinks abortion is murder but chafes at the Vatican's ban on birth control. She mourns the death of Pope John Paul II but hopes his successor will be "new and different."
"My mom gets mad if I don't go to church," Ms. Velazquez said, as her 2-year-old daughter, Emily, sucked on a bottle of juice outside the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the official hub of the country's largest Roman Catholic archdiocese. "As for me, I think I've done a lot of sin and if I go to church, it's better."
Ms. Velazquez was among the tens of thousands of Roman Catholics who visited the imposing cathedral in downtown Los Angeles this week to pay respects to the pope by lighting a candle or kneeling at his photograph. She is also a vivid example of the contradictions felt by American Catholics as they wait with uncertainty and some anxiety for the selection of a new leader in Rome.
American Catholics, be they Latinos here or African-Americans in Atlanta, or those of Irish, Italian or Polish ancestry in Boston and Baltimore, have come to accept that being Catholic means living with inconsistency. The roughly 65 million Catholics in the United States no longer have as distinctive an identity as they did a generation ago, and as they assimilated more thoroughly into American society, their views on social and moral issues came to mirror those of other Americans.
"Catholics as a whole occupy the mainstream of American life, when 50 or 60 years ago, they were on the periphery of society," said John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron in Ohio and an expert on religion and politics.
As a result, the Vatican's teachings on a number of subjects, including contraception, the ordination of women and homosexuality, are out of step with the beliefs and lifestyles of most American Catholics. But the Americans mostly find a way to stay in their faith by adhering to values most important to them and quietly ignoring those they disagree with.
"Catholics right now are à la carte" in the practice of their religion, said Diana Gonya, 61, a retired insurance agent in Baltimore whose wedding 36 years ago was officiated by Pope Paul VI.
Certainly there are problems. Fewer Americans these days send their children to Catholic schools. Mass attendance in the United States has fallen during John Paul's papacy. The church faces an acute shortage of priests. And the sexual abuse scandal continues to roil dioceses across the country.
While few American Catholics say they expect doctrine to change markedly under the successor to John Paul, the transition has allowed them to dream a little about what their church could be. Broadly, they say they hope for a church that more readily embraces modernity. For some, it means that priests might be allowed to marry. For others, it could entail the arrival of women as priests. Most, polls show, would like to see a softening of the church's stance on birth control. After years of sexual abuse scandals, many look for a pope who will make ending the abuse a priority.
"If it wants to stay one of the major religions in this country, it needs to progress with the times and let women priests in," said Katie McDevitt, 20, a sophomore at Boston College, a Jesuit university. Ms. McDevitt says she attends church relatively regularly, and she recently went to a memorial Mass for John Paul. "It needs not to be so sexist and patriarchal. There is a lot of emphasis on the wrong principles."
American Catholics grieved for John Paul, as did their brethren all over the world, but a recent Gallup poll indicated that they think who the next pope might be matters less to them than to Catholics elsewhere, especially in Africa and Latin America, where the church has grown most robustly over the last two decades. There is a widespread acceptance among Roman Catholics in the United States that they can be out of step with the Vatican and still unequivocally call themselves Catholic.
Mrs. Gonya said that her attitude toward the pope and the church hierarchy was something like people's feelings about their parents. "We respect them for what they believe, but we have new information that takes us in different directions," she said.
Mrs. Gonya and her husband, Gary, are enthusiastic lifelong Catholics. Mr. Gonya studied to be a priest in the 1960's. The couple proudly show photos of their wedding during Pope Paul VI's visit to Mrs. Gonya's native country, Colombia, in 1968, and of an audience they had with John Paul in his summer home, Castel Gandolfo, for their 25th anniversary.
Mr. Gonya, 62, says he attends Mass at two churches every Sunday: the activist, liberal-leaning St. Vincent DePaul nearby, which inspires him with its liturgy and homilies, and the conservative St. Leo's just across the street from his house in the Little Italy neighborhood of Baltimore.
Despite their devotion, the Gonyas differ from the church on most central doctrines. They say they would be delighted to see women ordained. If the church took married men, Mr. Gonya would be first in line, his wife said.
"Rome is important, but I don't think the typical American Catholic leans on that alone," Mr. Gonya said. "We have to continue to explore our beliefs in our own culture."
That division between doctrine and one's own beliefs does not alarm Mrs. Gonya. "The pope's positions make us think more about what we believe," she said. "It is an invitation to a deep search on an issue."
The breadth of priorities Catholicism embraces permits people to identify themselves as Catholic while disagreeing with doctrine, said Luis E. Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, based in Washington. Catholicism's agenda spans personal morality issues that evangelicals also emphasize, like the fight against abortion, and the liberal social issues that mainline Protestant churches champion, like anti-poverty campaigns. "In Catholicism, there is something there for everyone," Dr. Lugo said.
Certainly there are traditionalists. "If it works, why mess with it? It lasted 2,000 years. Why mess with it?" asked Joseph M. Perry, 51, a mechanic from Reading, Mass. Mr. Perry says he does not agree with abortion and thinks priests should remain celibate and male.
But some younger Catholics say they can no longer live their lives in keeping with doctrine. Adam Williams, 17, goes to Mass at Mount Carmel, the Catholic high school he attends in Baltimore, but rarely goes to church otherwise. The church's prohibitions on "almost everything a kid can do," Adam said, has made him ever more reluctant to identify himself as Catholic.
"At school, they taught us that there are so many people in Africa with AIDS," Adam said, as he took a break from working after school last week at Vaccaro's, a local pastry shop. "But the church won't let them use condoms. I think that's stupid."
The growth of the Roman Catholic Church in America since 1960 has been largely driven by an influx of Latinos, according to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Already about one-third of Roman Catholics in the nation are Hispanic, and the percentage keeps growing.
Here in the Los Angeles Archdiocese, the older generation of Latinos follows a tradition of obedience. Ms. Velazquez's mother, Maria, 48, of Compton, spoke of seeing John Paul in her dreams before he died. Clutching a crucifix dangling around her neck, she said she could think of nothing she would change about the church.
But younger Latinos, like Ms. Velazquez, have begun to resemble other Americans in their attitudes toward Catholic doctrine. Ms. Velazquez said unhesitatingly that many Catholics of her generation have abortions, use birth control and generally lead lives not in keeping with church teachings.
A 2001 study by the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute in Los Angeles found that only 38 percent of second-generation Latino Catholics in the United States relied "a great deal" on religion in daily life, compared with 53 percent of their parents' generation.
Maria Velazquez's only wish for the new pope is that he might be a Latin American. "He would understand our culture better," she said in Spanish.
A recent Gallup poll showed that an overwhelming majority of Catholic respondents would find it acceptable for a new pope to be chosen from Latin America or Africa. But whoever the new pope is, he will have to face an American church at odds with most of the rest of the world, Catholics interviewed noted.
"I'm afraid the church as a whole is coming to the point where it isn't one size fits all any more," said Jack Scalione, 66, a turnpike inspector, who was watching the papal funeral on television at Our Lady of Mount Carmel church in East Boston. "What's good in Europe isn't necessary good in America, and what's good in America isn't necessarily what's good in Latin America. You have to fit to the wishes of the people because the people are the church."
Dean E. Murphy reported from Los Angeles for this article, and Neela Banerjee from Baltimore. Ariel Hart contributed reporting from Atlanta, and Katie Zezima from Boston.
Be a Catholic, or join another church. What's so hard about that?
ping
The secular MSM sure is working hard to convince us that the Ten Commandments are a "living and breathing" document and that many of the commandments need to be repealed or amended.
>>>> but has had two children out of wedlock. <<<<<
Can't be that much of a devoted Catholic
Sure she can... we are all sinners, no?
Depends whether she repents and decides to sin no more.
I am not without sin but I want my kids to know that the mistakes I have made were not the right decisions. If you can't raise your kids to be real Catholics and not just those who warm seats during mass but don't follow the beliefs, then don't call them Catholic!! Some Catholics seem to believe that as long as they eat the host on Sundays, that's all that matters.
An article quoting a bunch of dissidents and one orthodox?
The high school boy whose Catholic school taught him the Church is accountable for the spread of AIDS in Africa?
The radical feminist at BC who exemplifies the problem in our "Catholic" universities?
The substitution of "a la carte" for "cafeteria" -- the fact they needed to choose a French euphemism suggests where they really stand.
The fact is, this type of thinking ("we need liberal changes") exists but it is out of touch with the reality of faithful Church-going Catholics.
One can attend as many masses as one wishes; one may only receive communion once in a day.
I wish the NYT and others would interview the Catholics I know. They don't want these changes. Most of them want the church to take a less liberal stance in the US than that which it has taken in the last 10 years.
By the way, I was a lapsed Catholic and just went back to the Church recently. I attended a church denomination that was more liberal married preachers, women preachers, etc...I thought that was what I wanted and I was wrong.
What it seems like to me is a lot of people wanting a religion of convenience rather than true beliefs. I'm not a very religious person (call it a crisis of faith, if you will), and never was Catholic, but it disgusts me every time I hear someone saying a church either has or should conform its message to popular political trends.
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