Memory, Faith, and Social Action - Springer Link

3 downloads 0 Views 87KB Size Report
Nov 20, 2008 - (Rodriguez and Fortier 2007) and The Catholic Social Imagination: Activism ... Rodriguez and Fortier also make use of the cases of the Yaqui ...
Int J Polit Cult Soc (2008) 21:87–91 DOI 10.1007/s10767-008-9036-6 BOOK REVIEW

Memory, Faith, and Social Action Marisol Lopez-Menendez

Published online: 20 November 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008

Memory, faith, and social action are frequently visited sociological themes. Following Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, scholars such as M. Halbwachs (1962, 1992) and Stefan Czarnowski (1975), or more recently, Eduardo Hoornaert (1988) and Elizabeth Castelli (2004), have sought to illuminate the links within this triad by exploring the manner in which social conditions influence how memory acquires meaning through religious faith and religious practices. Two recent works in particular, Cultural Memory: Resistance, Faith and Identity (Rodriguez and Fortier 2007) and The Catholic Social Imagination: Activism and the Just Society in Mexico and the United States (Palacios 2007), follow the main tenets of previous inquiries, while adding anthropological insights to further shed light on the memory–faith– social action ensemble. Both works revisit Roman Catholicism as practiced in Mexico. Rodriguez and Fortier also make use of the cases of the Yaqui people in Arizona and Salvadoran Bishop Oscar Romero, assassinated in 1982 in San Salvador after openly opposing repressive governmental actions in that country. Palacios compares the Catholic communities of Guadalajara City and Los Angeles. Both works use Latin Catholicism to illustrate the different ways that faith has informed social practices, highlighting the efficacy of remembrance as a catalyst for social action. Palacios’ study suggests that Catholicism after the Second Ecumenical Vatican Council (Vatican II 1962–1965) became completely focused on social issues and its theology became relevant to understand justice and solidarity as the basic tenets of the Catholic faith. Palacios accurately notes that even if the social teachings of the Church started over half a century earlier, its efforts to impact the secular world can be traced back to the birth of the mendicant orders.1 Nonetheless, it was only after the Second Vatican that a distinct preference for principles of human rights, peace, solidarity, and options for the poor

1 The four original mendicant orders (Dominicans, Carmelites, Augustinians, and Franciscans) were recognized in the Second Council of Lyon in 1274.

M. Lopez-Menendez (*) Sociology Department, The New School for Social Research, New York, NY 10003, USA e-mail: [email protected]

88

Lopez-Menendez

appeared. Also, and more importantly, the “signs of the times” started being considered as basis of social analysis at the core of Catholic action. In his comparative reading, Palacios aims at understanding the different ways that Mexican and American Catholics have approached issues of social justice during the last three decades. He does this without considering the most obvious explanation: they have different histories. Instead, he reviews the ways in which the principle of solidarity has been understood since the late 1800s and provides the reader with an overview of the expansion of social Catholicism. Palacios’ analysis starts with a theoretical approach that references classical sociology—from Durkheim’s concept of solidarity to Weber’s ideal types and Bourdieu’s notion of habitus—however, most of the book is based on ethnographic research conducted between the early 1970s and the early 2000s in Oakland, CA, and Guadalajara, Mexico. His research attempts to show that political culture, as it has been historically developed by nation-states, provides social groups with different understandings, articulations, and modes of exercising doctrinal tenets. Thus, at the center of his comparison between the two Catholic “social imaginations” is the assumption that the existence of freedom of religion in the USA has allowed Catholics to organize and put forward a clearly defined social agenda. Meanwhile, their Mexican coreligionists have been mostly constrained in their public activities both by Mexican laws and historical conflict with the Catholic Church.2 Palacios emphasizes dissimilarity between US Catholic “social teachings” and a Mexican Catholic “social doctrine.” By doing so, he sets two points of departure. First, US Catholics have a more pragmatic and contextual sense of what social justice means, excluding it from their “doctrinal responsibility” (Palacios 2007, 76). According to him, US Catholics tend to get involved in projustice organizations without necessarily conceiving their activism as part of a specifically Catholic doctrinal responsibility. Palacios identifies the Catholic Worker movement, the United Farm Workers Union, the anti-death penalty movement, and the School of the Americas Watch as cultural sites in which Catholic social justice has expressed itself while forming a distinctively American Catholic openness to the secular world. Secondly, he distinguishes the complex political entanglements between the official Catholic Church and the Mexican government and the culturally loaded meanings they have had for socially active Catholics in the country. Given the fact that Catholic initiatives in Mexico cannot openly address political issues, Catholic activism there has taken a more principled approach and focused on the option for the poor. Moreover, Mexican Catholics consider a “doctrine” what their US counterparts regard as a “teaching.” There are stunning absences, however. While Palacios clearly depicts the US Catholic social imagination and the several ways in which it is practiced by activists, he fails to provide a similar basis of comparison for Mexico. His study is centered on Instituto Mexicano de Doctrina Social Cristiana, (Instituto Mexicano de Desarrollo Comunitario, 2

The story of the conflictive Church/State relations in Mexico is old. The Real Patronato de Indias, a board appointed by the Spanish Crown, was created in 1493 to oversee decisions and petitions made by bishops to the Vatican in regards to the New Spain. The Catholic Church conceded privileges to the Kings of Spain and Portugal in exchange for their commitment to evangelize the recently “found” souls and to incorporate those territories to the Roman Catholic religion. The Independence War of 1810–1821 vindicated the Catholic Church and aimed—among many other issues—at lessening its submission to the State. This was also at issue during the nineteenth-century conflict between liberals and conservatives. Finally, after the Constitution of 1857, the Church lost most of its privileges but was granted a certain independence from the secular powers. The conflict took catastrophic proportions after the 1910 Revolution and gave way to the Cristero war (1926–1929), subsiding only after long and complex negotiations between the Vatican and Mexican government, which curtailed many Church privileges. A 1991 Constitutional reform opened the way to a more relaxed relation.

Memory, Faith, and Social Action

89

and the diocesan office Pastoral Social. Undoubtedly, these three institutions have promoted social organization in one way or another, mainly through teaching and training. Although Palacios’ research did find civil society groups that emerged from Catholic settings, he did not consider the one area where Catholic activism has made a clear impact on Mexican public life: human rights organizations. Most of these national, regional, or local nongovernment organizations have a strong Catholic component, are frequently lead by priests, and were founded by dioceses (like Fray Bartolome de las Casas Human Rights Center, in Chiapas) or by religious orders (like the Jesuit Miguel Agustin Pro Human Rights Center or the Dominican Fray Francisco de Vitoria Human Rights Center, both in Mexico City). It is not unfair to say that human rights have been the only Catholic social justice initiative in which natural law and positive law discourses have intertwined, and the only one that has been available well beyond local initiatives by appealing to the natural rights of the moral person while acting as attorneys for victims of human rights abuses. Moreover, human rights organizations have successfully organized to put pressure on the Mexican government and have been able to create the kind of cultural sites which Palacios identifies in the USA.3 Rodriguez and Fortier have taken a slightly different path. Although, like Palacios, their book is the product of ethnographic research, they have made use of the concept of cultural memory to understand the ways in which religious affiliation, its practices, and its most cherished beliefs have had an impact on modes of social organization and remembrance. The authors explain the production of cultural memory as “…the process by which a society ensures cultural continuity by preserving, with the help of cultural mnemonics, its collective knowledge from one generation to the next, rendering it possible for latter generation to reconstruct their cultural identity” (Rodriguez and Fortier, 1). They highlight four settings in which mnemonics interplay with social action (image, secrecy and ceremony, narrative, and inculturation) with the purpose of illustrating the different modes through which cultural memory operates within the Catholic faith. They use the story of Juan Diego and the Virgin of Guadalupe4 to account for the popularity of this title for the Virgin Mary. According to them, Guadalupe is embedded in Mexican consciousness due to the mythical reference to the oppressed and the poor. Juan Diego, an Indian, was chosen by Mary to transmit her wishes and still brings forth significance, four centuries after the image of the Virgin was first seen. The way in which the image of Guadalupe came to be acknowledged and revered by Catholics shows “solidarity with the conquered” and keeps eliciting meaning for the vanquished and those who are still seeking recognition of their human dignity (the Indian, the immigrants, the poor). This idea is not new. It was explored by Sergei Gruzinski in Images at War (2001) and has also been part of the Theology of Liberation repertoire for several years (Gutierrez 1987; Elizondo 1997; Brading 2001). However, Rodriguez and Fortier provide anthropological data taken from research among Mexican immigrants in the USA and Canada in 3 For example, the National Network “All human rights for all,” created in 1990, groups 55 civil organizations devoted to the defense of human rights. It is not explicitly Catholic, but more than half of its members are related to either Catholic Orders (Dominicans, Jesuits and Franciscans) or dioceses. 4

Legend has it that Juan Diego was a Nahua Indian to whom the Virgin Mary appeared in Tepeyac hill, near Mexico City. It was 1531, just 10 years after the Spanish Conquest. She commanded the astonished farmer to transmit her wishes that a church be built at the site. In order to convince the Bishop of the truth of Juan Diego’s words, Mary imprinted her image in his cloak. The “Guadalupe event” has been considered as the beginning of evangelization. Juan Diego was canonized in 2002.

90

Lopez-Menendez

order to demonstrate “cultural memory” at work. Nonetheless, the book does not make clear the way in which this research was done or how they arrived at conclusions such as the significance of the Guadalupe message in 2005. A second site for the development of cultural memory is exemplified by the ceremonial practices of the Yaqui people of Guadalupe, Arizona. Rodriguez and Fortier visited this little village a number of times to observe several festivities (Our Lady of Guadalupe feast, Easter) and describe the ways in which commemoration and ceremonial roles are linked to the past. Also, they dwell in the manners in which indigenous identity has been intertwined with Christian meanings. This chapter makes apparent some of the most common methodological weaknesses of participant observation. According to the text, the authors were told to “come down, pray and participate” (Rodriguez and Fortier, 46) in some of the Yaqui ceremonies, so their exploration remains at the level of ethnographic description, which takes at face-value informants opinions and neglects structural and situational analyses. The most appealing case made in the book is the one regarding Bishop Oscar Romero’s death5, which bears the title “The Power of Narrative.” The story of Romero’s life is told as a sequence in which obedience to the Church hierarchy was followed by a powerful conversion to the Church of the poor and claims for justice that led to his assassination. It shows in detail how the story has evolved to encompass current problems in Salvadoran society, such as violence and poverty, and manages to bring to light the ways in which memory relates to the present; it is the present that filters and ordains (provides with meaning) what is remembered from the past. Unlike Palacios, Rodriguez and Fortier downplay the importance of the Second Vatican and the new winds blowing in Latin American Catholic Church while attempting to elucidate Romero’s experience. Much like martyrologists, they give a testimony of Romero’s conversion and his sacrifice without considering the dramatic changes brought by the Council and the Latin American Episcopal Conference. They center their attention in Bishop Romero’s figure and build a narrative pattern of martyrdom mostly dependant on the Bishop’s own faith and courage. Moreover, Rodriguez and Fortier show that Romero’s story remains very much alive due to the fact that little had changed in El Salvador in the 10 years between when the Peace Accords were signed and the time in which their research was conducted. They report that, at the time of their writing, and presumably today, land reform remained incomplete and rural social oppression continued. In their rendering of Romero’s narrative, memory is not an ambiguous set of free-floating recollections arbitrarily passed from one generation to another but a composite of facts adapted to infuse the present with meaning. It is this particularity that makes the link between faith and social action possible, as their study of several social initiatives initiated by Romero’s inspiration shows.6 Both books bring into greater relief the strengths and flaws of ethnographic research. They both discuss the ways in which Catholic imagination and Catholic memory have evolved to convey meaning and shape social mobilization. However, since the authors based their approach mainly on interviews and were provided with information that was not

5

Oscar Romero was Archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador, between 1977 and 1980. He repeatedly denounced the repressive actions carried out by the Salvadoran government in the context of the civil war in that country and set in place a human rights office to advocate for the victims. He was assassinated in 1980 by death squads linked to would-be President Roberto D’Aubuisson.

6

The authors discuss the existence of cooperatives inspired by Romero’s ideals (Jicaro and San Sebastian); Equipo Maiz, a training center for Base Communities in San Juan and the gang “Los Romeros,” a group of former violent gang members who have gathered to fight drugs, alcohol, and poverty in San Salvador.

Memory, Faith, and Social Action

91

verified with other sources, historical inaccuracies and omissions are frequent. For example, both Palacios and Rodriguez and Fortier excessively rely on Jesuit sources, thus conveying the false impression of the Company being the only Catholic element promoting social justice, human rights, and Indian Theology. While Jesuit initiatives have been extremely important in that regard, many other projects have emerged from Franciscans, Dominicans, diocesan, and lay groups. Theologians such as Enrique Dussel7, Eleazar Lopez8, Clodomiro Siller9, and Mauricio Beuchot10 are not accurately placed within this tradition. In addition, historical inaccuracies can also be found in what has been reported by sources with no independent verification. For example, Palacios renders the history of Mexican social Catholicism without considering important events like the First National Congress of Catholic Culture (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1953). The Congress did not play a part in the way in which social Catholicism was remembered in the late 1980s and early 1990s, so Palacios’ sources probably did not mention it. Instead, the author chooses to consider a semana pastoral social (pastoral social week) organized in 1999 by one of his interviewees as “…the first public display of Mexican social Catholicism since the early 30s” (Palacios, 145). Although the text does not provide information about why the author had chosen this particular event and omitted others, it is likely that it was introduced by his interviewees. These groups—all social groups—have specific agendas to put forward, so the researcher must be aware of them and make sure his readers are too. Unfortunately, the richness and depth gained by ethnographic insights also carries the risk of uncritically reproducing the activist discourse the authors are bound to analyze.

References Brading, D. A. (2001). Mexican phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and tradition across five centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Castelli, E. (2004). Martyrdom and memory. Early Christian culture making. New York: Columbia University Press. Czarnowski, S. (1975). Le Culte des Héros et ses Conditions Sociales. New York: Arno. Elizondo, V. (1997). Guadalupe: Mother of the new creation. New York: Orbis. Gruzinski, S. (2001). Images at war: Mexico from Columbus to blade runner. Durham: Duke University Press. Gutierrez, G. (1987). On Job: God-talk and the suffering of the innocent. New York: Orbis. Halbwachs, M. (1962). Sources of religious sentiment. New York: Free Press. Halbwachs, M. (1992). On collective memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hoornaert, E. (1988). The memory of the Christian people. New York: Orbis. Palacios, J. M. (2007). The Catholic social imagination. Activism and the just society in Mexico and the United States. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Rodriguez, J., & Fortier, T. (2007). Cultural memory. Resistance, faith, and identity. Austin: The University of Texas Press.

7

A history of the Church in Latin America, Eerdmans 1981; Philosophy of Liberation, Orbis 1985

8

Teologia India: antologia, Verbo Divino, 2000

9

Hacia una evangelizacion inculturada, Lascasiana, 1995; Ministerios Indigenas: Intercambio de Experiencias Mexico, Guatemala y Ecuador, CENAMI, 1993

10

Los fundamentos de los derechos humanos en Bartolomé de las Casas, Anthropos 1994