Latino Catholicism


Book Description

Discusses the growing population of Hispanic-Americans worshipping in the Catholic Church in the United States.




Hispanic Catholics in Catholic Schools


Book Description

“The Church is called to be the house of the Father, with doors always wide open.” - Pope Francis, The Joy of the Gospel As the Church in the United States becomes increasingly Hispanic, it is important to ask: how are Catholic educational structures, particularly our schools, serving the next generation of U.S. Catholics who are largely Hispanic? In this groundbreaking study, Boston College embarked on an effort to name the realities, challenges and possibilities in Catholic schools as they adjust to cultural changes and new demographics. The National Survey of Catholic Schools Serving Hispanic Families provides reliable and actionable data that will help strengthen and prepare Catholics schools so that they can continue to serve as vibrant instruments of the Church’s evangelization mission. Written by leading researchers Dr. Hosffman Ospino and Dr. Patricia Weitzel-O’Neill, this study explores: Changing demographics among 21st-century Catholics Current practices in U.S. Catholic schools related to serving Hispanic families Timely Catholic school enrollment data with a systematic analysis of Hispanic enrollment numbers Practical ideas to help Catholic schools welcome and integrate Hispanic students and families




Reflexiones


Book Description

Timothy Matovina and Hosffman Ospino join their voices in this coauthored collaboration that brings together their best insights about ministry with Hispanic Catholics in the United States. Drawing from research and analysis done during the last decade, Matovina and Ospino help us to understand important realities that define the U.S. Hispanic Catholic experience today.




Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900-1965


Book Description

Within the American Catholic Church the Mexican American legacy is the longest, as is their struggle for full acceptance in the institutional church. In this volume three historians examine religious history, focusing on Mexican American faith communities. Originally published in 1994.




Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism


Book Description

In Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism, Edward Wright-Rios investigates how Catholicism was lived and experienced in the Archdiocese of Oaxaca, a region known for its distinct indigenous cultures and vibrant religious life, during the turbulent period of modernization in Mexico that extended from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Wright-Rios centers his analysis on three “visions” of Catholicism: an enterprising archbishop’s ambitious religious reform project, an elderly indigenous woman’s remarkable career as a seer and faith healer, and an apparition movement that coalesced around a visionary Indian girl. Deftly integrating documentary evidence with oral histories, Wright-Rios provides a rich, textured portrait of Catholicism during the decades leading up to the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and throughout the tempestuous 1920s. Wright-Rios demonstrates that pastors, peasants, and laywomen sought to enliven and shape popular religion in Oaxaca. The clergy tried to adapt the Vatican’s blueprint for Catholic revival to Oaxaca through institutional reforms and attempts to alter the nature and feel of lay religious practice in what amounted to a religious modernization program. Yet some devout women had their own plans. They proclaimed their personal experiences of miraculous revelation, pressured priests to recognize those experiences, marshaled their supporters, and even created new local institutions to advance their causes and sustain the new practices they created. By describing female-led visionary movements and the ideas, traditions, and startling innovations that emerged from Oaxaca’s indigenous laity, Wright-Rios adds a rarely documented perspective to Mexican cultural history. He reveals a remarkable dynamic of interaction and negotiation in which priests and parishioners as well as prelates and local seers sometimes clashed and sometimes cooperated but remained engaged with one another in the process of making their faith meaningful in tumultuous times.




Church and State Education in Revolutionary Mexico City


Book Description

Revolution in Mexico sought to subordinate church to state and push the church out of public life. Nevertheless, state and church shared a concern for the nation's social problems. Until the breakdown of church-state cooperation in 1926, they ignored the political chasm separating them to address those problems through education in order to instill in citizens a new sense of patriotism, a strong work ethic, and adherence to traditional gender roles. This book examines primary, vocational, private, and parochial education in Mexico City from 1917 to 1926 and shows how it was affected by the relations between the revolutionary state and the Roman Catholic Church. One of the first books to look at revolutionary programs in the capital immediately after the Revolution, it shows how government social reform and Catholic social action overlapped and identifies clear points of convergence while also offering vivid descriptions of everyday life in revolutionary Mexico City. Comparing curricula and practice in Catholic and public schools, Patience Schell describes scandals and successes in classrooms throughout Mexico City. Her re-creation of day-to-day schooling shows how teachers, inspectors, volunteers, and priests, even while facing material shortages, struggled to educate Mexico City's residents out of a conviction that they were transforming society. She also reviews broader federal and Catholic social action programs such as films, unionization projects, and libraries that sought to instill a new morality in the working class. Finally, she situates education among larger issues that eventually divided church and state and examines the impact of the restrictions placed on Catholic education in 1926. Schell sheds new light on the common cause between revolutionary state education and Catholic tradition and provides new insight into the wider issue of the relationship between the revolutionary state and civil society. As the presidency of Vicente Fox revives questions of church involvement in Mexican public life, her study provides a solid foundation for understanding the tenor and tenure of that age-old relationship.




The Pope and the CEO


Book Description

Former-Swiss Guard, CEO and business leader, Andreas Widmer gives a behind-the-scenes look into Pope John Paul ll, "the most authentically human person I've ever met," and reveals how those memories shaped and forged his success as a corporate executive.




The Street Stops Here


Book Description

"A harrowing, honest, and often moving story."—Andrew Greeley "McCloskey shows how challenging it is to succeed under adverse circumstances, how tenuous are the victories, how relentless are those who wage the battle to overcome the historic disadvantages of their students."—Diane Ravitch, New York University "Sheds light on important issues cutting across all city schools."—Joseph P. Viteritti, author of Choosing Equality




PADRES


Book Description

From the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the 1960s, Mexican American Catholics experienced racism and discrimination within the U.S. Catholic church, as white priests and bishops maintained a racial divide in all areas of the church's ministry. To oppose this religious apartheid and challenge the church to minister fairly to all of its faithful, a group of Chicano priests formed PADRES (Padres Asociados para Derechos Religiosos, Educativos y Sociales, or Priests Associated for Religious, Educational, and Social Rights) in 1969. Over the next twenty years of its existence, PADRES became a powerful force for change within the Catholic church and for social justice within American society. This book offers the first history of the founding, activism, victories, and defeats of PADRES. At the heart of the book are oral history interviews with the founders of PADRES, who describe how their ministries in poor Mexican American parishes, as well as their own experiences of racism and discrimination within and outside the church, galvanized them into starting and sustaining the movement. Richard Martínez traces the ways in which PADRES was inspired by the Chicano movement and other civil rights struggles of the 1960s and also probes its linkages with liberation theology in Latin America. He uses a combination of social movement theory and organizational theory to explain why the group emerged, flourished, and eventually disbanded in 1989.




Horizons of the Sacred


Book Description

Horizons of the Sacred explores the distinctive worldview underlying the faith and lived religion of Catholics of Mexican descent living in the United States. Religious practices, including devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe, celebration of the Day of the Dead, the healing tradition of curanderismo, and Good Friday devotions such as the Way of the Cross (Via Crucis), reflect the increasing influence of Mexican traditions in U.S. Catholicism, especially since Mexicans and Mexican Americans are a growing group in most Roman Catholic congregations.In their introduction, Timothy Matovina and Gary Riebe-Estrella analyze the ways Mexican rituals and beliefs pose significant challenges and opportunities for Catholicism in the United States. Original essays by theologians, historians, and ethnographers provide a rich interdisciplinary dialogue on how religious traditions function for Mexican American Catholics, revealing the symbolic world at the heart of their spirituality. The authors speak to the diverse meanings behind these ceremonies, explaining that Mexican American (and other Latino) Catholics use them to express not only religious devotion, but also ethnic identity and patriotism, solidarity, and, in some cases, their condition as exiles. The result is a multilayered vision of Mexican American religion, which touches as well on issues of racism and discrimination, poverty, and the role of women.