Followers of this blog know it focuses on the need to build a new intellectual framework for the development of a new HispanicLatino identity that is critical to the country’s future. A HispanicLatino community – fortified with a new sense of self – might be able to accelerate its current economic, social and political standing to help the country remain fiscally and demographically viable. How a new HispanicLatino identity forms that incorporates their new nation-saving mission depends on HispanicLatinos themselves. But in undertaking a reformulation of their personal selves that can lead to new self-development and self-determination, HispanicLatinos must be on guard to not fall prey to religions – especially hierarchical ones – that threaten the creative potential of the individual. Dogma wrecks self-expression and stunts personal growth. Corroding the status of the individual is but a small step from jeopardizing the democratic concepts of self-government.
The Vatican made the danger of institutionalized religion come alive startlingly last week when it landed on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization that represents the vast majority of Catholic nuns, who in the modern age have evolved – unlike the current set of bishops and so many priests.
Like other women in an advanced society, nuns have become stronger, more confident and unafraid. The new kind of nun that formed after the Vatican Council of the 1960’s rankles the Vatican and the current pope since the sisters, unlike most bishops, have direct contact with reality and the human suffering of individuals some of whom have to deal with crises in family planning, unwanted pregnancies and painful choices of sexual orientation. HispanicLatinos – especially those in leadership positions and those thinking of how to contribute their leadership skills to the community – should pay attention to this latest nonsense from Rome.
If the HispanicLatino community remains mostly Catholic in the future – increasingly less obvious – and it adopts political positions that are of evident benefit to itself but contradicts the Church’s position, what should give? Too often in the past, the predecessors of today’s HispanicLatino population gave in and allowed church authorities to make decisions for them that did not benefit the human spirit.
The nuns have done nothing wrong except minister to those whom the bishops first condemn. The Vatican accuses the nuns of grave theological errors, continuing a crackdown against progressive voices that, finally and frankly, are telling the bishops they have lost their way — and worse.
However undemocratic the church can be and however denigrating to the individual, the nuns often make it right – ironically – through the philosophical strain in Catholicism that does redeem and save and that has done so much to form the HispanicLatino psyche. The impulses from their salvationist religious tradition engendered in HispanicLatino thinking a deep sense of community that cherishes the family, unity and social justice.
But church authority is an incessant machine that has to be monitored and checked lest it returns us to the days when the Church endangered human progress. Indeed, what would it profit HispanicLatinos to help save America but lose the Constitution in the process at the behest of irrelevant bishops?
Despite the threat religion can engender, a new HispanicLatino identity can emerge from a cultural experience that emphasizes penance, renewal and resurrection. HispanicLatinos would do well to keep Catholicism or any fundamental religion at arm’s length – but keep the nuns close.
Feel free to forward these blogs adapted from previous writings, with additional thoughts published invariably in between.