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Problems of Hispanic Catholics

In his chapter on "The Struggle for Rights," Moises Sandoval addresses the problems of Hispanic Catholics that grew out of the Church's neglect of the cultural differences between this large minority and the majority of American Catholics. Sandoval charts the slow progress made by Hispanics, from the 1940s through the late 1980s, in attaining influence, and basic rights, within the Church. Throughout the chapter the reader is struck by the incredible shortsightedness of the Church hierarchy's failure to address this problem in any effective way. Resistance to measures that would only encourage Hispanic Catholics, and possibly even add to their numbers, was the status quo for many decades. And, even after some gains were made, the resistance continues. For, despite all their protests to the contrary, what emerges most clearly is that the American Church's attitudes toward Hispanics was founded entirely on ethnic prejudice--coupled, of course, with some strong resistance to ministering to the poor. But, though they made some progress in their difficulties with the Church, the movimiento that emerged during this struggle also began to face significant internal problems. Since there is no monolithic "Hispanic" culture, the initial resistance to Church prejudice--a prejudice all Hispanics faced--gradually lost focus as shared concerns were replaced by conflicting interests among various Hispanic factions. As Sandoval's concluding sections indicate, however, the future of Hispanic influence in the Church is dependent less on the insistence on rights than on the ideas--such as the Cursillo and Basic Christian Communities (BCC) movements--that emerge from specifically Hispanic approaches to religious practice.

Though prejudice is the underlying cause of the problems Sandoval addresses, he is, if anything, too polite about it. For example, when discussing the failure of the Church to produce Spanish-speaking priests, he notes that...

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Problems of Hispanic Catholics. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 03:36, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1704660.html