{"id":42,"date":"2010-07-26T10:01:47","date_gmt":"2010-07-26T10:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/latino-catholics-steering-clear-of-a-politicized-church.html"},"modified":"2010-07-26T10:01:47","modified_gmt":"2010-07-26T10:01:47","slug":"latino-catholics-steering-clear-of-a-politicized-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/latino-catholics-steering-clear-of-a-politicized-church.html","title":{"rendered":"Latino Catholics: Steering clear of a politicized church?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Making his own effort
\nto explain<\/a> Latino Catholic support for same-sex marriage in
\nCalifornia, Joseph M. Palacios <\/em><\/i>offers the following:<\/p>\n

\nIt is important to note that modern Latin Catholicism has a dual
\nnature: it is “conservative” in the sense of family communalism and
\ntradition that the church offers, yet it is classically “liberal” in the
\nsense of not wanting the Catholic Church to have power in political
\nlife– particularly after the long historical experience of the Latin
\nAmerican Church “meddling in politics.” As Mexicans put it: “No meta en
\nla pol\u00edtica.” A sizable majority of U.S. Latino Catholics shares
\nthese attitudes with them. Increasingly they are joining their Latin
\ncounterparts in accepting gays and lesbians as part of the social family
\nthat is both Catholic and liberal. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This makes sense
\nto me–particularly since so large a proportion of Latinos in California
\nhave roots in Mexico, where keeping the church out of public life has
\nbeen a state ideology since the revolution. <\/p>\n

What’s worth
\npondering are the implications of this for Catholicism in America. Over
\nthe past couple of decades, the (mostly non-Latino) hierarchy has become
\nincreasingly inclined to meddle in politics–an inclination most
\nrecently manifested in the USCCB’s effective alliance with the
\nRepublican Party in seeking to block health care reform. <\/p>\n

As the
\nchurch becomes increasingly Latino, it will be interesting to see if the
\nrank and file become “Americanized” into a more assertive political
\nstance, or if they stick to their own inclination, and continue to
\nignore the bishops’ heated rhetoric about how (in this case) same-sex
\nmarriage signals the end of civilization as we know it. It’s even
\npossible, I suppose, that the bishops will take a deep breath and
\nconsider the virtues of keeping a respectful distance between the
\nchurch’s norms and the norms of a pluralistic civil society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Making his own effort to explain Latino Catholic support for same-sex marriage in California, Joseph M. Palacios offers the following: It is important to note that modern Latin Catholicism has a dual nature: it is “conservative” in the sense of family communalism and tradition that the church offers, yet it is classically “liberal” in the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nLatino Catholics: Steering clear of a politicized church? - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/latino-catholics-steering-clear-of-a-politicized-church.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Latino Catholics: Steering clear of a politicized church? - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Making his own effort to explain Latino Catholic support for same-sex marriage in California, Joseph M. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}