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A Public Confession of Faith

EL HERALDO EDITOR COMMENTS ON MEXICAN AND AMERICAN CATHOLICISM

By George Neumayr

Ricardo Olvera is an unusual post-Vatican II diocesan editor. Consider his response to the Church's vocation crisis: "We need to promote vocations for consecrated life, first by growing our families. With one child [in Catholic families] it is not going to happen. We need bigger families, more united families."

Nor is it typical for a diocesan editor to run an excerpt from a Cardinal Ratzinger book, as Olvera's El Herlado (the 20-page diocesan monthly for Sacramento and Oakland Hispanic Catholics with a circulation of 23,000) did last month.

What explains Olvera's orthodoxy? Perhaps this: his faith developed not in the timid, shell-shocked world of American Catholicism, but in the more ancient, muscular church of Mexico.

"One of the main differences between the way the Catholic religon is like in Mexico and Latin America [is] we like very much external signs, external events, a public confession of faith with distinctively Catholic ceremonies or externals related to [Catholic] art," said Olvera in an March 4 interview with the Faith.

Olvera, who edited for two and a half years Presencia, Tijuana's diocesan paper, before moving to Sacramento in January 1997, notices that the American Catholic Church has adopted "the Protestant way of living the faith as an internal event, not external. [In Latin America], you have faith transforming culture and art with specific external signs and events. Here it is more an internal, very private faith. That is the Protestant and secularist cultural influence on the church."

But Olvera sees reasons for hope in the Church, both in California, where he thinks "radicalization" is disappearing after the follies of the 1970s and 1980s, and in his native country, where the Mexican cardinals are reasserting orthodoxy in the face of state pressure: "The Mexican church is very fast changing. It is now predominantly dominated by orthodoxy in dogmatic terms. There are only [remnants] of the past--the 70s, 80s...The Mexican church has two new cardinals, the one in Mexico city and the one from Guadalajara, both [of whom] have a very strong orthodox approach to all the main issues....

"[The Cardinal of Mexico City] is heading a real movement in the Church for social justice, but not from a Marxist approach, not from a sociological approach, but from a Christian approach. He is talking about liberation, but he is talking about the kind of liberation Christ brought to us. And that means social liberation. That means consquences for all aspects of human life but it starts from Christ. It doesn't start from changing the economy but from changing the individual....He is not afraid to get involved with [controversy]. He went for the first time in eight years to expose the sacrament to the main plaza. That in Mexico is a revolutionary act. That is the worst, that is the strongest challenge to the system because the system is radically secularist. That was a tradition with the Mexican people for centuries. He recovered that. He recovered that for the Catholic external practices....For the Cardinal to do that he immediately provoked hell....The newspapers and the big politicians of the Mexican government atacked him. He is not afraid....He is very courageous."

"And if you are talking about the Cardinal of Guadalajara, he is a strong personality....He is not afraid of being killed or nothing. He really challenges the government, not in a vulgar political way, but only by dealing with faith."

Has Olvera found the same level of courage among bishops in America? "It is not the same. It has never been the same. Well, first this is a majority Protestant country. Catholics have always [had] some kind of ghetto. In the best cases they have built their own reality....I can't find the equivalent here. I'm sure that there is an equivalent, because the Church is changing..."

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