Latinos and Catholicism

Latinos, with a long cultural tradition of Catholicism in their native countries and in the United States, are turning in increasing numbers to Protestantism or simply leaving religious affiliation altogether.  This is disconcerting for Catholic schools and educators because in many dioceses across the country, Latinos are a primary ethnic group in parish classrooms and in the pews on Sundays.  This information comes from the Pew Research Center’s 2013 National Survey of Latinos and Religion, out this month and available online.

In the report, 55% of the 35.4 million Latino Americans call themselves Catholic.  Approximately 22% are Protestant and 18% declare themselves unaffiliated with a particular religious group.  According to the report, this means the number of Catholic Latinos has dropped twelve percentage points in the last four years.  “Nearly one-in-four Hispanic adults (24 %) are now former Catholics.”

Why is this happening?  The report explains that evangelical or born-again Protestants have “very high levels of religious commitment,” which in turn offers Latinos a more engaging religious experience each Sunday along with Bible study groups and opportunities to share their faith with others.  Latinos also tend to be a more conservative political block, and therefore wish to be part of a more conservative religious affiliation.  Although Catholicism globally might still be considered conservative, American Catholics tend to fall somewhere in between liberal and conservative views.

Demographically, the switch involved Latinos under the age of 50, but there is a split within that group.  In Latinos age 18-29, all of the participants in the study identified themselves as having no affiliation with a particular religion while those 30-49 moved “toward both evangelical Protestantism and no religious affiliation.”  When asked, many of the participants in the study (55%) said they simply “drifted away” from Catholicism while 52% said “they stopped believing in the teachings of their childhood religion.”  Those who left said they were seeking “a congregation that reaches out and helps its members more.”  Others left because of a “deep personal crisis.”  There was also some attrition due to marrying someone of another faith.  Three percent specifically mentioned the sex abuse by clergy as a deciding factor for leaving the Church.  About three-quarters (74%) of practicing Latino Catholics said the Church needed to do more to address the scandal.  Many of them also took exception to the Church’s position on divorce, contraception, allowing priests to marry, and the role of women, including permitting them to become priests.  Half of Latinos who attend Mass weekly “support changing the church’s position on these issues.”

Pope Francis merited high marks with 45% giving him a “favorable” rating and 38% giving him a “mostly favorable” rating.  Latinos who remained in the Church found the Catholic Mass to be “lively and exciting,” with 62% saying they felt new immigrants were welcomed into the fold.  However, Pew research in the last decade has detailed the growing appeal of Pentecostalism to Latinos.  Many desire a more “charismatic” experience in their liturgies and worship.  These Pentecostal religions have been “burgeoning in Latin America and other countries in the ‘global South’ for the past century or so.”  The research identifies this sect of Christianity as “renewalists” due to their desire for spiritual renewal by the Holy Spirit.  These believers practice “speaking in tongues, divine healing, and prophesying.  They also nurture a strong sense of God’s direct, often miraculous role in everyday life.”

All of this research backs up the idea that the Church is in a state of flux and change, and this puts the focus on Francis and his ability to bring back Catholicism as an instrument of spirituality and renewal in the world.  While the number of Catholics continues to grow in Asia and Africa, those in America, always more liberal socially and politically, want their needs addressed as well.  The Church must adopt a more transparent and definitive procedure for dealing with sexual misconduct among clergy, and study ways to adjust Church teaching to address issues in the LGBT community, to increase the role of women, and on social issues like birth control and same-sex marriage.  Francis has made overtures in his letters, sermons, documents, and statements to the press, and he has backed up his words with actions to reform the Vatican bank and to appoint advisors and officials who might offer a fresh approach to Church teachings.  The danger is in not moving fast enough to stem the tide of Latinos and other ethnic groups, long a staple of the Catholic faith, from leaving their childhood religion behind for something new and more dynamic.

This Notebook Will Save Your Life

There was a point, a long time ago, when I had no idea what I would do with my life, but I was writing stories.  The urge was insistent, always bubbling underneath whatever was happening.  And little did I know, I was preparing for a future I had yet to imagine.  I was improving my writing skills, and I did not know it.

I worked in a parts warehouse for an aerospace firm, a job I got through connections.  We were all college kids trying to earn money for tuition, for a beat-up first car, to try to get out of whatever hell we were trapped in.  The job was easy and paid well.  For four to six hours a day, we pulled parts—washers, nuts, small diodes and circuit boards—which would be packaged into kits and sent to another area of the plant to be assembled into cockpit displays in fighter jets, or radar consoles on a Navy ship.  We had no idea where those tiny bolts and grommets and electrical detritus were headed, or what they would become, but the job involved a lot of counting and monotonous work, but the hours could be managed with classes, so it was fine.  Unbeknownst to us, we were assembling our future lives while assembling parts for something far more powerful.  Weapons of war.  Instruments of destruction.

We had to package up the disparate parts in a box, check the list to make sure everything was there, and then place it on a conveyor belt to be pushed down to the shipping area to be padded and taped up and labeled:  a complete kit ready to be sent to wherever it was that they assembled those weapons of war.  Most days, the number of orders I had to fill was in the hundreds, but if I ran through them as fast as humanely possible, I could finish with time to spare, and then I could climb up into the rafters next to the arc of the roof and read or write in my notebook.

The warehouse containing all those college kids was like a living soap opera.  We dated each other, had crushes, double-timed, cheated, argued, loved, hated.  At break we regaled each other with horribly perverse stories, tales so raunchy that we laughed hard while fighting back the urge to projectile vomit.  Some Mondays we would arrive to find paper packing blankets spread in a sheltered area of the shipping bay surrounded by used condoms.  Some of the passion had boiled over into a tryst over the weekend.  We looked at each other suspiciously.  Who had left the evidence behind?  No one would fess.

I smuggled in notebooks so that I could scribble away in stolen moments.  At first, I wrote about my life, my hopes and dreams for the future, but when those idealized moments in the sun seemed too far away and even hopelessly impossible, I turned to the stories unfolding all around me.  I turned every worker into a character, and the workplace became the stage where I set my scene.  I sketched out hundreds of episodes or chapters.  I was heavily influenced by my television viewing:  Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere.  My reading included copious amounts of Dickens’ dark Victorian stories in all their episodic glory.  It got so I could not wait to come to work to compose another few moments of my seemingly endless story.  Like real life in the warehouse, my characters fought, had sex, faced crises, worried about the future, and sometimes, they died.

Now, from the distance of years, I know what I was doing.  I was becoming a writer.  I was learning the craft of story from real life, and often, the reality of our existence was less believable than anything I could make up.  Truth really is stranger than fiction.  I was also improving as a storyteller.  There was a disconnect, however, between my college coursework and the writing I was doing—I saw no improvement in the classroom.  Writing academic papers did not get any easier.  There was no story to tell, in my immature mind, regarding the analysis of a poem.  After one particularly bad grade, I complained to my instructor, a man I much admired.  I bemoaned the fact that the school literary magazine had recently accepted one of my stories, yet I could not write a decent essay analyzing a poem to save my life.  He looked at me with sad eyes, knowing I just didn’t get it.  “Writing is writing,” he said.  “Just tell the story of your analysis.”  It took me awhile to wrap my brain around that concept.

Those moments years ago made me a writer, and they also made me a life-long lover of notebooks.  I keep one to this day, scribbling down notes, snippets of dialogue, potent images, special moments when planets seem to align and all is right with the universe, or when all seems dark and lost.  I never go anywhere without something to read and a notebook to write.  Standard equipment in my kit.

Over the years, moving from apartment to apartment to house to apartment, that story notebook of the warehouse world got lost.  We all grew up and went on with our lives.  Somewhere along the way, I decided stories are everywhere.  There are always more of them if you look.  And those early imaginings, although youthfully urgent and necessary to compose at the time, consisted of practice, of me learning to tell the tale.  Still, I wish I’d kept them.  They would probably be good for some laughs today.  My overwrought imagination of heated love affairs and unrequited angst.  Funny stuff, no doubt.

If you want to learn to write, practice it like a craft, because it is.  You can’t give someone something to say.  If you lack ideas, well, go and do something else with your life.  But if you are intrigued by story, hopelessly in love with arranging details on a page and bringing a world to life, then you can become better at writing with practice.  But you must write all the time, morning and night, rain and heat, through exhaustion and exhilaration.  Write like it is a drug habit you can’t kick, the monkey you can never get off your back.

I can’t stop, even when my mind tells me there is nothing there to bring out.  I know if I keep scratching my way across the page, something will come.  Ghosts will rise up.  I fill my notebooks, page after page.  The stories keep coming, and in their birth and fruition, they save the life of the writer.  The notebook, ready and willing to receive my words, saves my life.

Academic Versus Journalistic--A Throwdown

tcs.cam.ac.uk

Lately, I seem to be coming up against a number of academics who hate the faintest whiff of journalism.

“Journalists are overly emotional,” one sniffed, nose resolutely in the air.  “The writing is too sensational and of dubious merit.”

“There is no careful reasoning in journalism,” another added.  “There’s not even a recognizable logic to it.  It’s all sensational idiocy written by lemmings.  They follow one another right over the cliff.”

It is the same disdain reserved for Wikipedia (Garbage, I tell you!) and Google searches (A plagiarist’s only friend!).

A quick search of much maligned Google yielded the following, courtesy of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University English Language Centre:

“Academic writing style:  writes to appeal to logical reasoning; ideas logically organized; longer structured paragraphs; longer sentences; sentences always grammatically correct; rhetorical questions are rarely used; abbreviated words are rarely used; informal words and phrases are rarely used; does not use exaggerated, emotive words; emphasis markings (exclamation marks) are not used; abstract terms are clearly defined; generalizations supported by evidence; draws heavily on outside reading and references are documented.”

That’s the recipe that gets us “The Post-Apocalyptic Milieu in the Financial Structure of Elizabethan Theatre,” or “I Tweet, Therefore I Believe:  Social Media and Latino/a Catholicism in the Global Village.”  A quick search of Google Earth turned up no hits for the “Global Village.”  Maybe I should try MapQuest.

Do academics design these titles so that no one will want to read the paper that follows?  The rule seems to be, the more obtuse the subject matter, the better.  Who wants to write for the four other people on the planet who have a passing interest in whatever jargonistic title you’re peddling from your ivory tower?

On that note, I must retitle this piece:  “Obtuse on Purpose:  An Examination of the Intricacies and Enthusiasms When The Cranial Structure Enters the Rectal-Sphincter Crevasse.”  To the academics out there who eschew journalism as the Dark Side, pull your head out!

And how do the snobs at Hong Kong Polytechnic describe journalism?

“Journalistic writing style:  writes to entertain or to arouse emotions; loosely organized; short paragraphs; shorter sentences; some sentences may not be grammatically correct; rhetorical questions are usually used; abbreviated words are usually used; informal words and phrases are usually used; use exaggerated emotive words; emphasis markings (exclamation marks) are used; abstract terms are used without definitions; generalizations are seldom supported by evidence; relies on verbal reporting rather than written references.”

Oh, the sin and debauchery of the daily scribe!  Journalists are the anti-Christs of the writing world.  They are the sacrilegious heathens roaming the earth telling stories using short sentences and exclamation points.  The horror!

Academics, the guardians of sanity and equilibrium, are so calm and unemotional, so intelligent, so, well, boring and irrelevant.  Never let having something vital to say to a worldwide audience get in the way of tenure!  And yes, I’ve been using exclamation marks, willy-nilly!

I’m hot on this subject because the 2014 Pulitzer Prizes were announced recently, and after glancing over the work of the winners and those who were nominated, I am struck by the quality of the writing and the necessity of the stories to be told.  Long before there were ivory towers and elitist attitudes, there was the story, the narrative, the thing that got us all gathered around the campfire to listen.

Journalists bring us the world.  (The New York Times—yes; TMZ—not so much!)  Seventy of them lost their lives bringing us the world in 2013.  This year, 14 have been murdered in the line of duty and we haven’t hit the halfway point yet.

How many academics lost their lives bringing us “Gender Issues:  Some Biosociopsychological Discussions?”

Give me the NYTimes reporters David Barstow and Lowell Bergman writing about death and injury among American workers and the employers who violated safety regulations (2004 Pulitzer).

Or, David Halberstam’s seminal reporting from Vietnam (1964 Pulitzer).

Or the weekly columns of wisdom brought to us by Russell Baker (1979), Rick Bragg (1996), Maureen Dowd (1999), and Nicholas D. Kristof (2006).  And those writers are just from the NYTimes.  There are hundreds more slaving away at newspapers, magazines, and media outlets across the country who are creating similar work embodying what Joseph Pulitzer deemed excellent back in 1917 when the award was first given.

Because in journalism, excellence is everywhere; it includes vital writing that is alive with compelling narratives and memorable characters, and the words of journalists demand to be read.  They do their work on impossible deadlines in dangerous places and at great personal cost.

“Too emotional,” the academic said?  Third person objective reporting strives to be clear, concise, and not emotional.  The emotion comes from the reader’s response to a well-told story.  The good stuff presents the facts and leaves it to the reader to decide what to think.

I was discussing using journalism in one of my classes with a colleague.  He asked what news media I’d be using, and I told him the school provided a subscription to The New York Times for each student, as well as a wealth of resources for teachers.  “I’m not going to use that liberal rag,” he said with more than a hint of bitterness.

Get with the program, dude.  A newspaper is the perfect confluence of teaching tools: a plethora of stories that will stimulate writing and debate for each and every class.  Why not use this valuable asset in the classroom?

“I want something less biased,” he added.

“Like?”

“I’ll use Fox News.”

I thought he was joking.  He was not.

All journalism has bias as all human beings have bias, and the best journalistic writing inspires strong emotions in the reader, as I’m sure researching and investigating the story evoked strong emotions in the journalist.  Bias can come simply from the facts that are included in the story, or even left out of the story.  Hell, bias can be introduced in the organization of the facts in the story—what comes first, and what is left to the last paragraph in the inverted pyramid structure of most journalistic writing.  However, even that can result in a teachable moment for students.  Have them try to detect, through critical and analytical reading, the reporter’s bias.

In the end, though, journalism is vital to our world, and I find it offensive the way such writing is denigrated by academics.  Hide in the ivory tower if you must, but in the real world, we need journalism to stay informed and connected to the stories that matter.  We need to read both sides of every issue, every angle, every narrative fractal we can find.  How much academic writing, outside of the academy truly matters?  That’s a rhetorical question, and I use it proudly.

No Strangers To Tragedy

Courtesy CBS News

Two recent stories continue to haunt me, as I’m sure they haunt the rest of the nation.

At a Pennsylvania high school, young Alex Hribal, age 16, greeted his fellow students one morning last week by stabbing 21 of them with a set of kitchen knives.  He also attacked a school security officer.  Four of his victims remain in critical condition.

Tomorrow, the school will reopen so parents and students can do a walk-through.  The school plant has been cleaned and sanitized of the blood and gore, but the fear, I’m afraid, will be much harder to clean away.  Classes begin on Wednesday, but it is safe to say no one in the community will be the same again.

Hribal did not stand out as a troubled teen before the rampage.  Mental illness does not necessarily broadcast its presence to the world before bullets fly or steel flashes, bloodstained and corroded, in a school hallway.  There are sleepers out there, psychologists warn us.  Some of them sleep in our homes with us.  They are the children we thought we knew, until the day without warning when they rise up and act out.  Then we are left to wonder why.  I still cannot believe there were no signs from Alex before the morning of the knives.

Maybe his signs were not so obvious, as they were with Sandy Hook school shooter Adam Lanza.  He refused to communicate with his parents except through email even when they were in the next room.  He blacked out his bedroom windows with trash bags and duct tape.  One would think that was evidence enough that the dam was about to break.  We don’t know what his mother was thinking because she was his first victim.  In this latest knife attack, the perpetrator did not give the kind of warnings Lanza did.

Post-attack, it is clear that Hribal will face the consequence of his actions, if he even comprehends what he has done.  If convicted, he faces 585 years in prison, which is a long time to think about things, or he may be institutionalized to simmer away in his madness.  Whatever happens, it is doubtful he will ever see freedom.

The second tragedy befell students about to graduate this spring, and was not the fault of an insane kid carrying a gun or a knife.  On board buses headed for California State University at Humboldt in northern California, five students and three chaperones were killed when a Fed Ex tractor-trailer crossed the center median and struck one of the buses head on.  This is a tragedy without a clear evil intent, but it is a horrific tragedy nonetheless, and equally nonsensical.  Many of these victims, only a few months away from starting a new chapter in their lives, were severely burned in the inferno, leaving both physical and mental scars that will last a lifetime.

Graduation.  The cusp of the rest of your life.  Death should come for us in old age and include a celebration around the casket for a life well-lived.  Now we mourn what never will be, a life aborted in its infancy.  These kids never had a chance to bud, much less flower in this burgeoning spring of their lives.

We have become inured to the horror.  The phone call from the school administration, the state police, the county coroner, has become the expected, not the exception.  Tragedies happen and we prepare for when, not if.

It is naïve to wish events like stabbings and shootings and car crashes would never happen, or to wish those lost souls alive once more.  I’d be happy to go back to the days when such events happened so infrequently as to be the aberration they should be, the horrific anomaly instead of the more commonplace events they have become.  Now we stagger, from tragedy to tragedy, anticipating this nightmare that has become our reality.  And we try to go on.