The Catholic Church Is Losing Its Most Devoted Followers

If the Catholic church survives its latest scandal — the concealment of 300 predator priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses — it will be because of the mestizo and indigenous populations of the United States and Central and South America.


 Indigenous communities are at the heart of the Catholic church; in the U.S., they represent one-third of the approximately 70 million Catholics. For these communities in the Americas, Catholicism is more than just a religion. It’s a culture and way of life, one that respects liberation theology and activism. Many of my happiest memories from childhood take place in Native and Latino churches.

I was raised in the spiritual traditions of the American Southwest; my grandmother attended mass with her fellow members of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo at the Mission San José de Laguna church. She washed laundry for a living and, in an era before government assistance, went without meals when there wasn’t enough to feed her 10 children.

 As a child, I always loved the cool interior of the church’s thick, white-washed walls, the elaborately carved wooden doors, the animal skin adorning the altar and the sanctuary ceiling painted with Laguna symbols. For me, incense meant cedar and sage, and the “communion of saints” referred to my ancestors.

 An Eagle Dance was held outside the Mission before midnight mass on Christmas Eve. I slept on soft bosoms during church and could smell my aunts’ sandalwood oil during the homily. I learned to love the rituals, my ancestral land and my family, which felt deeply interconnected. Then, I grew older and learned the church’s history: that the Missions we worshipped in were built on the backs of American Indian slaves.

That conservative priests had long preached damnation for things like abortion and birth control. For the first time in my life, I felt conflicted about my family’s Catholicism. During my childhood in the 1980s, Mother Teresa of Calcutta visited Gallup, New Mexico.

 To this day, the Missionaries of Charity offer aid Gallup’s oppressed, serving the Native population by running a shelter and soup kitchen. Like Sister Katherine Drexel, a wealthy heiress from Pennsylvania who was canonized in 2000, these nuns have long focused on the racial injustices in America, and their calling is common among women of the church.

 Individuals like the sisters of Gallup kept me (and I’m sure plenty others) in the church even after I started to feel conflicted. Today, they offer an alternative vision of what the Catholic Church could be. And they follow in a long tradition of historical luminaries like Archbishop Óscar Romero, Angela of Foligno and Bartolomé de las Casas who were willing to give their lives and wealth to help the poor and oppressed. Priests with a similar zeal for the apostolic life inspired my great-grandparents to move beyond the loss of their ancestral lands and their traditional ways of life.

 They lured them into adapting and trusting Westerners. They inspired them to find the grace to forgive. Younger generations, too, wanted to forgive. We wanted to follow our grandparents’ Native Catholicism. As did many liberal members of my generation, I once clung to the promises of Vatican II, a three-year assembly of Catholic officials that updated the church’s role in a changing world.

I wanted to attend family weddings and funerals with a clear conscious and go to mass with my parents when I visited home. I told myself it was my job to stay in the church and change what I didn’t like from within. I prayed women would be able to join the priesthood.

Coming from a matrilineal tribe made it easy to imagine women in power. And with Pope Francis, I gained hope. He comes from Latin America, and he knows the history of liberation theology well. He allows mass to be said in indigenous languages and was the first church leader to apologize to Natives for historic wrongs. He softened the church’s stance on LGBTQ or “two-spirit” people (as indigenous people often refer to members of the LGBTQ community).

Prior to becoming pope, he lived in an apartment instead of a cardinal’s opulent residence and refused to ride in limousines, preferring public transportation. Even his name appealed to me, since the Umbrian St. Francis spoke for the earth and was said to tame wolves. However, I stopped going to mass not long after our family moved to the Midwest for work.

 We initially attended Holy Infant church in Ballwin, Missouri, even though the culture there felt different. But when the most charismatic priest there was arrested for reportedly sexually abusing minors, our Sundays swiftly fell apart.

The arrested priest ― the hip, young Father Vatterot ― taught in Catholic communities in Central America before coming to Missouri. I had to ask my children if he’d ever bothered them. I can’t describe my relief when they said no. Another sexually abusive priest emerged in our lives a couple of years later, this time in the Italian hometown of my children’s father, where each had gone to school for one semester in the fifth grade.

Father Pierangelo had been to dinner at my in-laws’ house on numerous occasions. He liked to perform magic tricks for the kids. I chided myself for being unable to recognize him as a child predator.

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