Cover
story
A
walk along L.A.’s Claretian Way
By ARTHUR JONES
Los Angeles
If streets had subtitles, there’s a long, winding road in
downtown Los Angeles that could read: César Chàvez
Boulevard/Claretian Way.
César Chávez, who deserves his boulevard,
wouldn’t object. When organizing, he frequently used the top floor of the
Claretians’ House of Studies near the University of San Francisco as a
safe house.
And he radicalized several young Claretians in the process, all of
them with strong Los Angeles connections, including Fr. Richard Estrada and Br.
Modesto Leon, and the late Fr. Luis Olivares.
Olivares rose to national prominence in the 1980s when he declared
the downtown 18th-century adobe plaza church, La Placita (Our Lady Queen of the
Angels), a sanctuary for refugees fleeing the wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua
and Guatemala.
A walk along Claretian Way (Chávez’s boulevard) would
pass Estrada’s base for Jovenes Inc. -- originally an outreach to underage
immigrants, today deep into homelessness issues -- in an angular, wood-fronted
building at Chávez and Broadway.
Next, where the boulevard intersects Main, one block in there is
La Placita itself. Its outdoor ceramic tile shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe,
with its candles that burn through the night, attracts the sorrowful, the
hopeful, lost and penitential at all hours. The area’s homeless -- who get
a coffee and bread breakfast and seven-days-a-week lunch at La Placita -- view
these things with unblinking eyes, then turn their gaze elsewhere.
Our Lady Queen of Angels Church is surely one of the busiest in
the country, with 300 to 400 baptisms every weekend, a dozen
quinceaneras (celebrations of young women reaching age 15), and a
minimum half-dozen weddings.
Farther along Chávez Boulevard, not far from the Twin
Towers -- Los Angeles County’s 11,000-population twin jails -- is
Claretian Fr. Art Gramaje. He is headed inside, a volunteer chaplain who is
also the Claretians’ Western Province vocations director, and prior to
that, one of two priests doing community outreach in a tough section of Long
Beach.
Gramaje, wearing his trademark porkpie hat, dark shirt and white
slacks, poses alongside a bail bondsman’s highly decorated limo -- the
closest thing to an open-air art gallery in this part of town. Beyond, six
women wearing yellow prison jumpsuits work with a concrete mixer to build a
decorative wall to set off the prison’s reception area. It’s a
Tuesday. Gramaje has confessions. Sundays he says two Masses.
Crossing César Chávez Boulevard at almost any time
of day is Br. Modesto Leon. Just back from testifying before the state
legislature in Sacramento, Leon is the energy and inspiration and executive
director behind 18 Los Angeles alternative schools -- including an innovative
all-girls academy -- for gang members or other youths in trouble with the law
or the educational system.
To work with the
Spanish-speaking
The Claretians came to the Southwest 100 years ago to work with
the Spanish-speaking. They’ve taught, they’ve run parishes, but in
the main they’ve stuck like limpets to parishes and tough jobs in gritty
areas from Texas to Washington state.
They’ve got a great track record -- and the same big problem
as all religious orders in the Western world. The jobs are getting more
demanding, and the numbers are getting fewer. The Claretians’ Western
province (which includes Texas, Arizona and California) is down to 81 members,
and half of those are past retirement age; the Eastern province has
about 40 members.
Like most religious, the Claretians operate in two worlds, the
sacred and the profane. Rarely, however, is the divide, even the
inseparability, more obvious than in the Western Province Claretians’
Hancock Park retreat center chapel here.
For those at prayer, the altar is ahead. If they glance to their
right through the huge plate glass windows, the enormous block letters planted
in the not-so-distant hillside spell out “Hollywood.”
These Western Province Claretians marked their centenary last
September. They spend more time in the world than in the chapel. But that
doesn’t mean the “religious” aspect of their religious life is
minimized. (As most religious congregations are quite aware, those preoccupied
as public hell-raisers on behalf of the poor aren’t necessarily the
easiest members of the domestic community.) So the Claretians have a cluster of
little communities, including Annunciation Church in Long Beach and
Casadáliga House (named for the famed Brazilian Bishop Pedro
Casadáliga Plá of São Félix, a Claretian). The
provincial, Fr. Roland Lozano, lives with the La Placita community.
On the cutbacks in parish work, Claretian Fr. John Raab explained
it this way: “We are in tears because we are leaving many important places
and parishes, but leaving with immense satisfaction as well. We know that we
have assisted in a great growth in leadership and sense of community,
especially through the diaconate. We’ve been part of the huge expansion of
our congregation in Nigeria, with 220 members, second only to Castile’s
229. Our challenge now is to transfer First World resources to our Third World
organizations as they send missionaries worldwide and integrate young Third
World Claretians into our older organisms.”
Raab didn’t know how prescient he was when he added,
“Missionaries always have to say goodbye. [St. Anthony] Claret [founder of
the Claretians, officially the Sons of the Heart of Mary, CMF] was always on
the move -- in Catalonia, the Canary Islands, Cuba and even the Court of Queen
Isabella II of Spain.”
Saying farewell
Raab himself was saying farewell, about to leave for ministry to
the unchurched in former East Germany. He hadn’t finished packing his bags
before his orders changed: He’s now in Sri Lanka.
Jovenes’ founder, Estrada, describes founder Claret as
“a five-foot tall dynamo from Spain. Real energetic, an extravert, a
little guy with a big ego. Brilliant mind, way ahead on social issues,
traditional in church teaching.”
Claret’s high energy level is evident in the Claretians’
street-level ministries.
The Jovenes organization came about because the Central American
wars greatly added to the refugee stream of youths and children. They’d
arrive by immigrant osmosis in Los Angeles, lost, hungry and greatly at
risk.
Estrada, part-time chaplain at Central Juvenile Home, started
working with the Mexican consul, a community clinic director, a couple of
concerned attorneys and volunteers, and was soon running temporary shelters --
without a license.
Throughout upheavals and battles that deserve their own history --
not least being run out of the Claretians’ Dominquez former seminary for
filling the empty beds with kids -- permanent shelters were established.
Two decades later the work has shifted to homeless advocacy. But
Jovenes and Estrada haven’t slowed. This year he opens Olivares Pleasant
Avenue Center for services to marginalized youth.
The Boyle Heights site will have a computer lab, education and art
studio instruction. Art has always been a key factor in Estrada’s
programs. The Olivares Project is seen as a stabilizing element in a tough
community.
Jovenes has a women’s self-development project at Casa-Mex
apartment complex, a Mujeres Work Force project, small shelter settings for
low-income women and depends on a constant hunt for funds.
True to his Chávez-influenced roots, when Estrada marked
his 25th anniversary at La Placita with an interfaith prayer service recently,
it included an outspoken protest against U.S. war plans in Iraq, a plea for new
initiatives for peace in the Middle East, and the launching of an institute to
protect the rights of immigrant, homeless and indigenous people.
The worldwide Claretians in 1999 marked their 150th year since
their founding. The Western Province responded with a storefront drop-in prayer
center and community outreach in Long Beach. Great idea, poor location. No
parking.
It was a new venture, perhaps too quickly founded and, inevitably,
too soon closed. The two younger Claretians assigned there were soon needed
elsewhere: Fr. Paul Keller, in his late 30s, in San Antonio; Gramaje, now in
his early 40s, on the provincial council.
César Chávez Boulevard is more than a Los Angeles
artery. More than a living link to a Claretian ministry, it’s sort of
family. In 1927, in Yuma, Ariz., it was a Claretian who baptized the baby
César.
Arthur Jones is NCR editor at large. His e-mail address
is arthurjones@attbi.com
Related Web site
The Soledad Enrichment Action
Charter School
www.seacharter.org
National Catholic Reporter, February 28,
2003
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