ARTICLES

Why Can't the Virgin of Guadalupe Be the Holy Spirit?

USD PROFESSOR SAYS 'READ MY BOOK'

The third time I went to see Professor Orlando Espin, it would have made a great photo. He was perched in his office at the University of San Diego, brooding over a computer, an appointment book close at hand A classic pose, except it wasn't a pose. He wouldn't let me take a photo.

But he smiled, perhaps at my perserverance. Hadn't he turned down me down twice before when I asked for an interview? That smile was an open door.

"Prof. Espin, you should be interested in us," I said, meaning News Notes. "We're not 'official Catholicism' either." Espin has written a book called The Faith of the People: Reflections on Popular Catholicism. "Latino popular Catholicism" is Espin's theological specialty; he teaches a course in it at USD. "We like to think of ourselves as reflecting at least some Catholic people some of the time," I said. "I don't see why you're not interested in us, too."

He puffed with exasperation and began shaking his head. "I just don't have time," he said. "Why can't you just write a book report? Say, 'here's what he said, here's what I think.'"

"Because, Professor Espin, I write for a newspaper. Academic journals can review books, but newspapers have to have the viva vox."

"Ideally," I went on, "I should have an interview with you -- as I told you the first time I asked. But you wouldn't agree to that, so I did the next best thing: I read your book closely, and asked other experts to comment on what you're saying. Can I at least get your reaction to what they're saying about what you're saying?" He was still shaking his head.

"For example," I went on, "you said that Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers seem to be "instrumentalizing" the Virgin of Guadalupe. I talked to the UFW spokesman about that. Aren't you interested in what he had to say?"

"I don't think I said they were 'instrumentalizing,'" Espin said.

"Sure you did," I was fishing through my bag for my copy of The Faith of the People when the phone rang.

Espin talked for about a minute as I fumbled through footnotes. It was almost within my grasp --

"Hold on a minute," Espin told the caller, putting him on hold. "Look," he said to me, "I don't have time for this now. You can't expect me to talk to you without an appointment."

"Okay," I said, "can I make an appointment?"

He cracked a smile but reached for his appointment book anyway, warning, "It'll be two weeks from now...."

"That's fine," I said, "all I need is half an hour --" But at that, he snapped the book shut. "I don't want to do this," Espin said, and went back to his phone call.

Perhaps it was too much to expect: parallel lines, after all, don't meet; and -- according to the author Of Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America -- right-wing and left-wing Catholics live in parallel universes. Mary Jo Weaver, who coauthored the 1996 book with Scott Appleby, lectured at Santa Clara University that year, saying that "a traveler can get from one to the other, but only once in his or her lifetime." The book sprang from a two-year seminar funded by the Lilly Endowment; one of the participants was Orlando Espin.

And that's just one of the highlights of his 12-page single-spaced career. Espin has been funded by Lilly for a few projects of his own. In 1992, he founded the Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology, and has been the journal's editor in chief. In 1996 Espin got a grant for a "national, year-long symposium to 're-invent' Catholic systematic theology from the perspective of U.S. Latino/a culture, reality, and faith experience; held at the University of San Diego." For the academic year 1997­98, Espin took a sabbatical, again funded by Lilly, to research "the relationship between the sensus fidelium, popular Catholicism and the development of doctrine." Today Espin is back on the job at USD, teaching "Latino Popular Catholicism" among other courses, as associate professor of theology and religious studies.

Last winter, I sat in on one of Espin's Latino Catholicism classes. (I was late, and class had started, so I didn't get permission -- as I had intended -- beforehand). Twenty students, several of whom were obviously Latinos, only had eyes for him. For Espin as a teacher is like a fiery Latin lover.

"The only thing he didn't allow was for the King and Queen of Spain to decide matters of doctrine," Espin was saying, the "he" being Pope Alexander VI. Yet, Espin makes clear, when Pope Alexander had to thread a compromise regarding the status of the Church in the territories conquered by the world's only superpower at the time, "he reserved doctrinal matters to himself..." -- Espin pauses -- "...thank God."

Spain, however, got the right to micromanage everything else in its colonies (which included Florida, whence Espin came to San Diego seven years ago); the Crown even appointed "every priest in every parish," Espin said. "It is only two centuries later that the Church is able to wrest out of Spanish control the appointments of bishops. Bottom line is that Alexander granted the Crown of Spain total control of the Church except in doctrinal matters."

Then he writes the word "religion" on the board at the front of the class and some terms to go along with it: "institution, beliefs, rituals, tradition, clergy/teachers." He turns to the class. "This is usually today what people mean by 'religion.' Everything comes packaged clerically. And institutionally. If you want to know what Catholicism is, you go to a priest." Espin, himself is a priest on leave from the diocese of Venice, Florida.

"The term 'religion' in this sense is a twentieth century invention. The term religion comes from the Latin verb religare, which simply means, 'to tie together again.' So you want to tie your shoelace again: 'religare.'

"They would use another term for religion," Espin went on, "pietas." He wrote that on the board. "'Pietas' is an attitude of loyalty and responsibility. But loyalty and responsibility to whom? To one's city, to one's city -- and by extension to the city of Rome.

"And how does one express loyalty and responsibility to one's city? One worships the gods of the city. So worship is a patriotic responsibility. "Pa-lease," he said archly, "that's" -- pointing to the word "religion" -- "not this" -- pointing to pietas -- "by any stretch of the imagination.

"By the Middle Ages," Espin said, "religion doesn't mean this either. It means religious life. Go to the sixteenth century and what does the term mean? Denomination. It is only in the twentieth century that you start hearing this definition of religion." The institutional one.

The "bottom line" of his "very quick historical presentation" of the notion of "religion," Espin said, was: don't assume that it means institutional religion. "As a matter of fact, Latino Popular Catholicism would not accept this as being an adequate definition of itself," he said.

In the USD student bookstore, on the shelves with required reading for Espin's classes, you'll find The Faith of the People published by Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York.

The USD bulletin says that Espin is associate professor of theology and religious studies, that he has a bachelor's degree and two master's in theology from St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary, Boynton Beach, Florida and that he got his Ph.D. at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

In The Faith of the People, Espin says that Popular Catholicism relies heavily on intuition "and, therefore, is in need of intense, constant interpretive processes and methods similar to those called for by the written texts of Tradition and scripture." The people speak the people's faith, apparently, but their voice is like a radio station laced with static; Popular Catholicism comes in loud and clear only after theological fine-tuning. "This is where theology and the magisterium must play their indispensable hermeneutic roles," writes Espin, "though, as we shall see, this process is not without its own limitations and problems."

I was explaining all this to Shirley, my waitress at El Coyote restaurant on Route 94 in Jamul. Our conversation began when I noticed the Virgin of Guadalupe medal gracing her neck. Shirley Magda Yi-Cordova, it turns out, grew up in Mexico's Guadalupe Valley. While no expert on Latino Popular Catholicism, she has had experience with Latino Catholic people. Although her father was a Korean immigrant, her mother "came up here as a wetback to clean houses," Shirley said.

Today Shirley no longer considers herself a Catholic, though she believes in God and her guardian angel. Her face glows, however, as she reaches into her chest of childhood memories and recalls processions in honor of the Virgen de Guadalupe. "We had beautiful ones," she said, "where we started by going house to house. Everybody had dresses on...flowers.... And we would sing: 'Mother of all people, Mother of Jesus....'"

I told Shirley that Professor Espin says that popular Latino Catholicism, even in Mexico, has never identified the Virgin of Guadalupe with Mary of Nazareth. He goes further: "Why can't the Virgen be the Holy Spirit?" Espin wonders. "Is the Mary-Guadalupe identification really the people's creation and discovery? Or is it possibly a historically understandable, defensive cover, naively (though sincerely) imposed by theological and ecclesiastical elites on themselves and on the people's symbol system?"

Shirley agrees with Espin about one thing: "None of the people that I know say that it's the Virgin Mary; they say it's Our Lady of Guadalupe." On the other hand, "everybody I know doesn't separate the two."

While the conquering Spaniards, Shirley allows, used the Virgen de Guadalupe "to have more control over the mestizos and Aztecs and they had to have something that was closer [to the indigenous people]...like a black Santa Claus," the miraculous image of the Virgin on Juan Diego's tilma or poncho possesses a crucial difference: "I personally think it's real, and all other Mexicans think it's real. Such as she can appear at Fatima," Shirley smiled, "so she can appear for us too."

"Yes, in fact," said Father Jorge Echegoyen, professor at the Tijuana diocesan seminary, "our Lady of Guadalupe is the same Virgin Mary. She's just not going to appear the same way as other places. The apparition in Mexico -- it had a lot of meaning for the Indians and the Spaniards." It was just as much a teaching moment for the latter as the former, for the Spaniards "were very aware of how the Indians were converted to Christianity thanks to the apparitions," Echegoyen said. "In nine years [between 1531 and 1540] eight million people were baptized."

As to the conscious connection in the mind of most Mexicans between the two Virgins, Echegoyen, who has served as a parish priest in Ensenda, said "it's a very important question; in fact, many people don't put the relation [make the connection] between Our Lady of Guadalupe and Virgin Mary. One time I was visiting some people in my parish; and this was a very incredible experience: The lady told me, come in; I told her, I want to read the Bible with you. She thought I was a Jehovah's Witness. She thought I was an American," he laughed. "I told her I was a Catholic priest: 'Let me talk to you.'

"'No way,'" Echegoyen remembered her reply, "'I'm a Jehovah's Witness and I don't believe in you.'" Then she turned him out of her home, and returned to saying the Rosary!

"She's was praying the Rosary," Echegoyen laughed, "and she was a Jehovah's Witness!" The moral to the story, he said, is that "there's a lot of ignorance, he said, "a lot of people who have only their traditions and don't know what they mean."

Echegoyen, who has studied in Rome, finds "a lot of parallel" between the accounts of the Guadalupe apparitions and the gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke. "First of all," he said, "Jesus is the center of all. Our Lady is only someone who is pointing out who is Christ, and to adore only Christ." For example, that christo-centripetal pull is evidence in the Virgen "because she's pregnant in the Guadalupe image, she's looking down to her womb."

If the image on the tilma can, in a sense, be read like a book, Echegoyen also thinks that "the Bible cannot be understood only as a text." That's where "the tradition of the Church, the magisterium" perform an indispensible service, he said. Since people can continue clasping tradition to their bosom long after miscarrying its objective meaning (like the Jehovah's Witness saying the Rosary), tradition must be maintained by "someone who knows that the Church is not a game," Echegoyen said, "and who knows that you can't change your religion as you would change a shirt."

Magisterium in Latin means "teaching authority." The Church's magisterium, Echegoyen said, since it is teaching by bishops in communion with each other through their union with the bishop of Rome, "is always supported and guided by the Holy Spirit. That's what we can trust."

When one of Espin's theories is rejected by bona fide representative of official Catholicism...well, what would you expect? But what if one of his opinions would have been flatly contradicted by a bona fide representative of Latino people, Cesar Chavez?

Mexican migrant workers found their Moses in Chavez, who founded the United Farm Workers. Like about every other Mexican social and political movement of historical signifigance, the UFW rallied round the standard of the Virgen de Guadalupe. Espin notes this in his book: "The United Farm Workers have proudly and frequently displayed images of the Virgin of Guadalupe and of the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos. Cuban-Americans have been emphasizing the Virgin of Charity as a unifying cultural (and political) symbol since the 1960s. Although most of the time for laudable causes and motives, I suspect that popular Catholicism is, nevertheless, being instrumentalized in most of these cases."

Responded a UFW spokesman, "I think he's a little off there.... I think it's a little simplistic and not very historical to say that the UFW instrumentalizes Catholic imagery."

Marc Grossman was interviewed via phone from the union's headquarters in Sacramento. He confirmed that since the very first march in 1966, the Virgen de Guadalupe has been "at the front of the United Farm Workers marches. Workers carry the image of the Virgin on a staff. But it's as much a Catholic symbol as a symbol of Mexican pride and nationalism," he said.

Grossman maintains this not just from union history but the personality of its founder. "Cesar was a very well-read man: he read everything he could find on Church doctrine," he said. Chavez became a Latino activist in 1952 when he was 25. But years before that, "Cesar's first exposure to activism came from parish priests who exposed him to social justice.... [They] turned him on to encyclicals going back to Leo XIII. This way years before he founded the United Farm Workers," Grossman said.

"Cesar became a migrant worker at about the age of 10. And his family participated in a lot of big strikes and walk-outs in the 30s and 40s. But it wasn't until he read the papal encyclicals that it gave him a theological foundation. And really his own activism sprang from that.

"And his Catholicism was very proactive," Grossman went on, "he practiced his faith every day in his work for the union. It was more than a cynical attempt to use religious imagery.... [That's] a little oversimplifying."

Sitting down in the booth with me after her shift was through, Shirley agreed. "First off," she said, "whoever the guy is who is claiming all these things; my own personal opinion is, he has an inflated ego. Because how can he say, 'nobody understands anything'? Basically, he's looking down on people."