Claretians priests first came to the United States in 1902, and their work has continued in selected locales to the present, coinciding with fundamental changes in the structure of US Catholicism. These include responses to shifts in immigration from Latin America, which brought increasing efforts to attract and maintain Mexican Americans in particular. Deborah Kanter’s Pioneers of Latino Ministry examines the trajectory of the Spanish Congregation of Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary – founded in Barcelona in 1849 by Father Antonio Maria Claret, a prolific religious writer and Catholic thinker. The introduction begins with a description of a celebratory acknowledgment of the beatification of Father Claret in 1934 and his canonization in Rome in 1950, and through five focused chapters examines how his followers “pioneered Latino ministry in the United States” (8).
The author adopts a perspective that is a mix of church history and social history, covering Claretian missionary activities that shaped Mexican-American Catholicism in large cities such as San Antonio, Los Angeles, and Chicago – and also a host of smaller communities nationwide. Interestingly, one foreign missionary outreach project was launched in the 1960s for the evangelization of indigenous people in a community in Guatemala. The wide scope of the research effectively presents the outlines of key Claretian actors and their intersection with official Catholic movements and lay organizations before, during, and in the wake of the reforms of Vatican II. The story begins, however, with coverage of the early Claretian parishes that arose following the labor trails of the Mexican diaspora in the Southwest and Midwest with financial help from the Chicago-based Catholic Church Extension Society. Claretians developed missions in outlying districts such as railcar chapels and makeshift churches in rural and urban South Central Texas, near Arizona mining centers, among track workers in Kansas, as well as in Chicago’s historic working class neighborhoods.
The narrative is smoothly written and informative, illuminating many features of the work of parish development by Spanish-born priest Jaime Tort in South Chicago in his efforts to promote the national shrine to St. Jude, and later a Claretian Seminary in Momence, Illinois. The synthesis of much important archival material expands workable scholarly knowledge on how Claretians formed networks with other religious and secular figures throughout the twentieth century, including the intensely anticlerical period of the Mexican Revolution. The coverage is generally productive, though it called out for further elaboration on the dynamics of anticlericalism in the homeland, which led to outright exclusion of clergy from power in revolutionary Mexico – first during the ascendancy of Victoriano Huerta and later during the “Cristero diaspora” of 1926–1929. During that time, tens of thousands of devout lay Catholics, centered in the ultra-religious central plateau region of Mexico, fled civil war and the harsh conditions that ostracized priests, nuns, and the higher echelons of Catholic religious leadership.
The 1960s brought new urban challenges in Chicago and Los Angeles, as interstate highway construction and urban renewal programs disrupted stable neighborhood patterns, and Claretians took a wide variety of approaches, depending on local conditions. Father Peter Rodriguez, who arrived in St. Francis of Assisi Church on Chicago’s Near West Side in 1961, spent almost two decades dedicated to Spanish-speaking ministry in Chicago, taking on “social justice causes,” such as accompanying striking workers on picket lines, assisting undocumented migrants, and eventually serving as director of the Chicago Archdiocese’s Hispanic Ministry from 1979 to 1982. Meanwhile, Father Luis Olivares assumed his first parish ministry at Our Lady of Solitude in East Los Angeles in 1974 and became a visible figure in the sanctuary movement of southern California. Claretians, however, remained somewhat more conservative than many of the secular clergy who actively participated in the farmworkers’ struggle and the Chicano movement; many members became at least somewhat attuned to the goals of the Latino Catholic group PADRES. But they tended not to engage in protests, preferring instead to devote full attention to serving parishioners and maintaining a clerical pipeline. US Claretian-run parishes tended to be less active in liberationist activities than in the Guatemalan missionary field, where they worked alongside other clergy “to experiment with the possibilities of Catholic life and to foreground social justice” (119).
While the author makes excellent points on specific individuals and parish communities, some generalizations needed to be more fully elaborated with more precise historical context. For example, in the chapter suggesting the emergence of a wider “pan-Latino ministry” in New Jersey at Our Lady of Fatima Church in the 1940s, Kanter traces the work of Father Tort (formerly of Our Lady of Guadalupe in South Chicago) among Puerto Rican migrants in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. While this is an interesting turn for the Claretians, it was nothing new for Puerto Rican Catholics. Redemptorist priests under the aegis of the Catholic Church Extension Society had initiated outreach with both rural and urban parish-building efforts throughout the island shortly after US annexation in 1898 and later completed the circle by serving migrants in several New York City barrio parishes in the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, Puerto Ricans continued to benefit from extensive Spanish-language training programs for priests serving mainland parishes, which were conducted at the Catholic University of Puerto Rico. In addition, New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman and individual clergy such as Jesuit priest and sociologist Joseph Fitzpatrick pioneered wide-ranging outreach programs for the Puerto Rican ministry beginning in the 1950s. Certainly, many of the big-city parishes included non-Mexican parishioners of all backgrounds (including Puerto Ricans and Salvadorans), but it should also have been demonstrated that many other religious orders – including the Oblates, among others – had long targeted both US- and foreign-born Latinos. Providing a broader historical context for Claretian missionary work, therefore, especially among Mexican Americans, would have been a valuable analytical endeavor. Nonetheless, the author does a solid job of isolating and identifying Claretian contributions, and this book merits attention from scholars and students of the modern United States immigrant church.
