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Emily Acosta                                                                            Prof Halbert Barton

                                                P2:Barrio Stiffness

          By visiting my cousins raised in Florida I thought I would have a normal time during a family vacation. Little did I realize that it wouldn’t be like visiting my primos in New York. They were also first generation kids but their house did not feel the same. It wasn’t until I spent more time with them there that I realized the major difference. Lack of community. This completely changed the experience. 

          Growing up, not only did my own family listen to salsa and cumbia and speak our native language of spanish, but all of my friends in school did as well. Going over a friend’s house meant that there was a high chance that I would have to speak spanish to the parents that didn’t “speak ingles”. No matter where I went or who I hung out with I always got fed a good meal of sancocho or had arepa as a snack. I got along with my friends and primos so well because we had so much in common to joke or reminisce over. 

          Going to my primo’s house in Florida, I noticed the vast difference in neighborhoods. Almost everyone was a “traditional american”, in the sense that they only knew english, listened strictly to what were the Top 40 and had food that could be found at any American diner. My primos did basically know spanish, but they just didn’t understand anytime I used dichos around them. Their accents were also thicker and sancocho was served about once a year for extra special holidays. They were usually the only Colombians that they knew of in their school at class. Their parents also only had friends that were typically american with no hispanic customs to be seen. 

          My parents were super fun to my primos from Florida. With my dad throwing jokes around and my mother cackling loudly in response, they were a party for them. My brother and I were not timid to reach out to them and their friends and initiate any adventure we could think of, even though it should’ve been my primos leading in showing us new things. They had greater reservations about what seemed to be appropriate or not. To them, the normal was to have a more formal relationship amongst their peers and parents. Their mom and dad never joked with them like my parents, and what they decided to share and talk about amongst the family was equivalent to what we would talk about with people we were just meeting. 

          We could feel the social reserve that my primos adopted from being in a neighborhood in Florida that had a lack of hispanic presence. My culture to me was better understood to be rooted in not only my family but also my barrio ties. My primos are happy in Florida, and if they really needed to they could put that they know spanish on a job resumé. After I left that first long visit to them I realized that the heart of hispanic culture can only truly thrive in a larger communal setting. In contrast to how they felt about the way we lived and our broken down social barriers to everyone we meet, they were used to a neighborhood that was more formal and less forth coming about how personal they were allowed to get to with one another, even amongst family. I came home with a greater appreciation for my barrio than ever before. 

Glossary

Primos: Spanish for cousin

First Generation: Children that are born to immigrant parents. They are the first generation born in the country that their parents immigrated to. 

Salsa/Cumbia: Typical hispanic music heard in many central/south american and caribbean islands 

Barrio: Spanish for neighborhood. 

Sancocho: Typical hispanic soup that usually is full of chunks of oxtail and corn wedges amongst potatos and cilantro and roasted veggies. 

Arepa: Hispanic corn cake that is dry and usually made as a base to another food. Can also be enjoyed alone with butter.

Dichos: Spanish word for “sayings”

[papersand-blog]

Emily Alexa Acosta                                                                                           Prof Halbert Barton

Concluding Remarks: Divine Investment

Through out my writings there is a major concern over spiritual health and riches over the physical cost it takes to attain them. There is a struggle between people choosing whether to invest in physical or spiritual health and wealth. The Susans in Silent Infiltration are interested in the wealth of “experiences” a person feels from the music and productions included in mass. They believe that this stimulation will help the faithful have a healthy emotional state in life since, in theory, happy feelings would result from a “fun, good time” during mass. This has importance over what the Church teaches contributes to the health of the soul and wealth in heaven that awaits them. Their priorities are revealed in how quickly and radically they do with eliminating all Catholic traditions for their goals. The Trads fight to preserve the practices that the Church has proven through its saints and divine revelation that produce the kingdom of God on Earth and gives the best confidence of entering eternal life in heaven.

Heavenly Ordained Kinship followed over three generations in two centuries having continuously chosen the priority of investing in spiritual prosperity above all costs. From cutting ties with her wealthy family to establish her heavenly family with the man she loves, my great great grandmother forsook inheriting monetary wealth and family name status to pass to her children and rooted heavenly love instead. Journeying closer to present day, both my paternal and maternal family always recognized the reality of what was true in the eyes of heaven over what the Earth had genetically determined. They all faithfully rejected anything in their families that were not done with God’s will of marriage in mind. They believed it to preserve their spiritual health and saw it as an investment in the riches of heaven. A stark contrast to the cost of losing potential familial relationships, money and effort to present a case in court and many other sacrifices not felt in writing.

[papersand-blog]

Emily Alexa Acosta             Prof. Halbert Barton

P3/4: Heavenly Ordained Kinship

The culture of the Catholic Church engulfs the world since it is the same exact culture in each of its churches; hence the meaning of the word Catholic is “universal”. Being that it was the reigning church in Colombia for many decades, the country’s culture is based off of what is established by the Church. Sangre becomes secondary to the Church in determining which people belong to what family. A couple ordains themselves into being a family together by the power of God under the vigilance of a priest in an open church ceremony. Not only do those in attendance witness and recognize their union by God to be one family, but it is believed to be witnessed by the Angels and Saints in Heaven along with any parish around the world having access to the documents entailing the ordination of the Godly union. This is the ultimate decree to being in a family in the larger heavenly family of God’s Kingdom.

Sitting down with my abueli she spoke tenderly of her own grandmother and how her life in the Church radically changed the path of her family lineage. She was apart of a spaniard colonist family settled in Colombia and her stature was that of una Amazona. Her heart fell for a well respected Colombian general who would never win her family’s approval for marriage since he was un negro. It was for committing herself to him in Catholic marriage that they disowned her and left her to live the rest of her life in Colombia without hope of reconciling. There was no way to reconcile since the Catholic Church does not allow divorce. With no hope of marrying a spaniard that the family had favor for, she cut off the spaniard branch of the family tree indefinitely and began her new family name from scratch in Colombia.

This would not be the last time that the Church dictated the validity of who belonged or didn’t belong in the family tree. My grandmother married her husband by the Catholic church and bore ten children with him. My grandfather passed away in a car accident 6 months after his most recent child was born, my father. My father was el niñito for his entire life. The shock came to him when he visited Colombia after 30 years living in America. He expected to reconnect with his family still left in Colombia, but what he didn’t expect was to connect with his father’s ilegitimos. He was too young when he left to America to realize everyone in the barrio knew his dad had children with other women. Including a son three months younger than him, contesting his position of niñito to no avail since he was ilegitimo. These publicly known siblings might have been biologically related to my father but they would never be considered to be part of the family. Having come from a woman that was not married by the Church to my grandfather, no one had a passing thought that those children belonged to his Acosta family and they even bore the family name of their mother even though the father was known. To this day they are outside of the family even though all my tios and tias get along great with them.

It is a condition of life that ultimately effects me to this day as well. Being my mother’s ilegitma since I was born out of her second civil marriage after already being married by the church, my maternal family never recognized me. My maternal grandparents swooned over my brother, born of the first Catholic marriage, and my primos from my two tias and their respective marriages. Their branches were healthy and prominent on the family tree while my father and I were an unplanned growth my grandparents would rather ignore. In fact, they weeded us out completely from all social plans or gatherings amongst the family since their distrust of a relationship not planted in the ordination of God and without the blessing of the Church was too large to ever get over. Even when my grandfather who always had the authoritative say over the family came to accept me on his death bed it was not enough to over power the reality of our standing with the Church.

After many years my mother came to a conviction that she needed to make her case to The Tribunal. Divorce may not be an option in the Church, but everyone has the chance to present their argument to their diocesan tribunal in hopes that the church can universally recognize that a valid marriage never took place. She is vying for an annulment. The act of presenting yourself to a tribunal is no longer a private matter. To state that a marriage never took place must be a public act to equal the public act of the marriage ceremony. Along with this comes penance, normally in the form of monetary tribute to the Church which is paid according to the price set by the Church itself. It does not guarantee the granted recognition of an annulment, only the opportunity for the case to be considered. A court is then held to determine whether or not the church can recognize that there is beyond a reasonable doubt that the conditions for the sacrament were not met. A marriage never occurred. Tribunal Lawyers who specialize in Cannon Law can be hired on behalf of the lay to theologically debate with a panel of other cannon law experts, consisting of lay and/or religious, over the validity of the marriage. Documents are pulled from the churches where the sacraments since a person’s birth were held and witnesses are called to give live testimony to whether or not their argument was indeed the conditions the marriage ceremony happened under.

Her pursuit of going through this long and expensive process comes from her desire to have a life that is within the Church’s family and blessings. Living in mortal sin by cohabiting with a man she is not married to under the eyes of God permanently cuts her off from access to the most important sacraments in a Catholic’s life. Though her desire is strong and she ultimately is going through with the process two very important things held her back. Very anxiously she voiced her lamentation that by doing this, she would make her son an ilegitimo. She also heavily had to accept that she was erasing her first husbands family line. He never loved another woman in his life and his days spent in Colombia were illuminated with the understanding that his son and wife were in America even after separating civilly. The civil was not real, what the church decided was what was real in his eyes. Having the church recognize the annulment would erase his family tree from the minds of all the faithful.

In time she accepted that swapping one child as ilegitimo for the other would not effect my brother or I at all in our adult life as we ourselves are establishing our own families. She is also aware that her former husband has been living his own life in Colombia for the last 35 years with close to no connection to America so the shift wouldn’t substantially effect his life at all. For now as the process is currently going she is starting to beam with happiness at the prospect to make the family she has built her entire adult life public and blessed in the Church. This would also mend her relationship as part of the heavenly family of the Church that she and I believe is the most important family to have a healthy and loving relationship with.

Glossary

Catholic: The name of the specific christian church established in 33AD which literally translates to “universal”.

Sangre: Spanish word that means “blood”. Used to acknowledge a biological/genetic connection between people.

Ordain: The act of decreeing that something/someone is elevated to a holy level that is above what is naturally found on earth.

Abueli: A derivative of the Spanish word “abuelita” which can be translated to a very endearing/affectionate form of the word “grandmother”. The derivative is unique to only the Acosta family across our large family tree but is still understandable by outside Spanish speakers.

Amazona: Spanish word literally meaning “amazonian woman”. The word in context is understood to refer to the fictional matriarchal clan of inexplicably large and strong women. Not  actual groups of people that live in the Amazon rainforest. Its intended meaning is understood because it is commonly used to contrast europeans that are typically physically larger than native Colombians.

Negro: Literally translates to the word “black”. That detail becomes the embodying name given to people who are dark skinned. In Colombia and amongst Colombians the word is not connected to the offensive racially charged history that the word has in the US. It is a very commonly heard nickname that is not negative and people happily exchange it. People who are very tan are labeled “trigueño” and light featured people are referred to as “mono/mona” (no relation to the fact that it is the same word used for monkey in Spanish.) Skin color has no connection to a person’s worth or class like it commonly is in the US which is why people in Colombia happily use it as a defining characteristic all the time.

Niñito: An endearing/affectionate version of the Spanish word “niño” which means little boy. Equivalent to calling someone a baby in terms of age and not maturity.

Ilegitimo/a: Spanish word for “illegitimate”. When used to describe a person it establishes that they are a child born to a mother and father that are not married in the Catholic Church which normally leads to an understanding that they don’t belong to a family officially.

Tio/Tia: Spanish words meaning “Uncle” and “Aunt” respectively.

Primos: Spanish word for cousins.

The Tribunal: The title of the judicial court of the Catholic Church that deals with ecclesiastical law, specifically the laws of marriage. Its authority is recognized to come from the Bishop that it works under.

Diocesan Tribunal: The court that is within the parameters of the diocese (district) that a person lives in and is under the authority of. Each Diocese has their own tribunal and their own Bishop from which the authority derives.

Tribunal Lawyers: Members of the Church that study the laws in order to fully evaluate individual cases presented to the panel.

Cannon Law: The title of the collection of laws that the Church has established.

Lay: Anyone who is a Catholic that is not a religious.

Religious: A Catholic that is either a priest, brother or nun.

Sacraments: An initiation rite that is understood by the faithful to be a physical symbol of what spiritual blessings a person’s soul has received from God.

Mortal Sin: One of two types of sin recognized by the Catholic Church. Venial sin hurts a person’s relationship with God while a Mortal sin kills off a person’s relationship with God completely. Hence mortal sins are seen as the worst types of sin.

Cohabiting: To live with a person of the opposite sex in a relationship/lifestyle that presents all of the qualities of a marriage to the couple and/or the public without actually being married by God in the Church.

[papersand-blog]

Emily Alexa Acosta Prof. Halbert Barton

P1: Silent Infiltration

There is a silent war that was initiated in the 1960s in the Catholic Church that is very little known about by a majority of its members, but which camp you fall under is of eternal importance. The bulk of the 1 billion in the church are unfortunately cafeteria catholics who don’t even realize that their guidance is tugged at by Trads and Modernists. Both silently have severe disdain for the other and secretly believe that the other group is ruining the church.

In the 60s the pope held what is known as the second Vatican council or Vatican II. This council was going to revolutionize the church by bringing in an emphasis on having the laity participate in church more and not have so much reliance on just priests and nuns to be the leaders of the faith. It’s the obsession of both Trads and Modernists to this day. The council ended up barely changing anything, it mainly accomplished only making how the church was run dictated in very vague rubrics and guidelines. That’s how the modernists silently infiltrated. Being that there was no longer language upheld by the Vatican as to what is allowed or rejected explicitly, modernists found wiggle room to add new things to parishes and the mass that have changed how the church looks to unrecognizable levels. It was a slow internal disfiguring of the church, done little by little through things like “voting in suggestions” on small things that simply built up for over 50 years.

Modernists are easily spotted if they call themselves “charismatics”, but trads just know them as Susan from the Parish Council. Their number one focus is voting in as many light shows, dancing and guitars to catholic mass to make it feel like the laity are included more. The Susans from the parish council are typically seen as from the boomer generation. They can range from active senior citizens that like running groups at the church to even priests, bishops or the pope. They love going up to priests and ask them things like why they wouldn’t want to be in a suit and tie instead of “those out dated weird clothes that only the mentally disturbed wear.” They also love voting themselves in to take over roles only the priest does, like touching the eucharist or reading aloud from the bible during mass. All in the name of “bigger participation”. No more emphasis on teaching theology to the faithful. What is important to them is that a person FEELS loved, and they accomplish this in only singing and dancing in front of the altar or organizing pot luck parties. Traditions of the old church are boring and don’t connect with the youth and poses a threat to a dying church that is too outdated to attract newcomers in their minds. Trads to them are also the meanest believers by their bold talk and closed mindedness. They point to Trads as the reason why the church doesn’t “catch up” to the world by adopting what is currently popular.

Trads spot each other a mile away. With their personal Latin missals in hand, men in suits and extremely modestly dressed women in their veils, they tend to run in groups and follow their favorite Father YoungTrad. They all learn latin and reject any liturgy that dates after 1962 and only attend Latin Mass. When they happily meet each other one of the first things they do is greet each other with a banter of wits. Who can out “trad” the other? It’s mainly done to gauge just how devout to the cause they are, and then to know how safely intense they can go into conversation about the faith. It starts off light mocking all things Novus Ordo. For something to be described as novus ordo is strictly an insult. The most extreme belief Trads can say to one another is proclaiming the age old motto “Salus extra ecclesiam non est”. The stereotype for trads is that they are majorly in their 20s to 30s and also range from laity to priests, bishops and the pope. These are self taught faithful that hold to the doctrines and dogmas of the church and fight all things “new” from being introduced to the church. They are almost obsessed with philosophy and theology and know their church history straight from original texts and sources. They have a fire that everything modern is ruining the faith because it abandons the beauty of the intelligence of Catholic theology for fleeting emotions.

Realizing a modern or traditional parish is as obvious as the building they’re in. Trad parishes indulge in the beauty of gothic style architecture and intricate design. Every detail of the church naturally leads the eye to flow upwards to face the one and only cross present at the front of the church all the way up to the ceilings that depict heaven. Even the altar is facing away from the congregation so that the priest can stand at the front facing God along with the crowd to offer their prayers on their behalf. His back is to the congregation because no one should be looking at him. Every eye looks at what’s most important which is either the Cross or an image of God. Every corner has a saint or an angel smiling back at you, whether in stain glass, statue or painting. To its best ability it reminds the faithful of the reality of the infinite spiritual beings that are always present with them. Trad-popular architecture is hard to distinguish from architecture that designed medieval or renaissance era churches.

In contrast, churches produced by modernist inspirations are hard to argue are churches at all. They’re more so large lecture halls whose design flow lead the eye to focus on the pulpit in which some person is going to speak from. They celebrate almost a cooking show styled “show and tell” performance mass on a table. Walls are bare and usually white or beige in the name of “humility” but that intention is drowned out by the concerts and light shows that frequent their masses. Almost nothing is around to bring to mind a single thought of heaven. They can actually go unattended because the faithful don’t even realize its a church to attend since its so easy to miss their single minimalistic cross that’s the only “holy” indicator in sight.

But silently modern churches close down and traditionalist churches keep rebuilding to expand. Too bad the bulk do not know of the riches of the faith since the modernists successfully infiltrated our catechism curriculum and stripped the altars of relics, statutes and art to make room to guitar equipment and flat beige walls. Cafeteria Catholics have no idea of the teachings of the church because modernists have voted out teachings that do not focus on how “Jesus loves everyone no matter what.” Us trads find ourselves in an engulfing sea of the Nones. But silently we’re infiltrating back. Slowly we are finding ourselves to be the only ones left that uphold the importance of faith discipline. The Boomer Susans are slowly aging out of any capacity to be present in church and seminaries are finding that only trads sign into their programs. Trads are the only ones left keeping up tithes and the only ones left signing up to catechize because we’re the only ones that even know the basics of the faith anymore. We’re careful to not be too open about being trad. If identified many priests and fellow believers know of our burning desire to undo everything from Vatican II and try to suppress our participation. But I am hopeful that the progress of the trad movement is getting our church back to where it produced the amazing saints that have changed world history and are celebrated globally to this day.

Glossary

-Cafeteria Catholics: People that identify as catholic but only like to pick and choose what they personally like that the faith teaches and rejects everything else taught. The notion is that they’re in a lunchroom choosing what to eat from the menu options.

-Trads: The slang name of people who are traditionalists in their view of the faith. They take every doctrine from the beginning of church history as fact that cannot be changed. Alternative slang term for them is RadTrad which is short for Radical Traditionalist emphasizing the extremity of their beliefs.

-Modernists: Believers that want to “modernize” the church to better reflect “world wisdom” and take away any supernatural aspects of the faith and make it more of a metaphorical mindset.

-Laity: Any Catholic that is not apart of a religious order. A catholic that is not a priest, nun, brother or deacon.

-Susan From The Parish Council: A meme character created by trads personifying the majority of the type of person a modernist tends to be. Susan is literally a grandmother that is a part of the parish council that is out of touch with what children/youth like and keeps trying to attract them with felt banners and finger paints but produces only cheesy results. Usually only their grandchildren are seen forced into their church activities and are never older than 7 in the memes. They always turn hostile to trads and exert their parish council authority to suppress tradition.

-Boomers: People born roughly in the mid 1900s (~1945/~1965)

-Latin Missals: A missal in general is essentially a “how to” instructional book on celebrating a mass. It contains the liturgy (explained further down in the glossary), prayers and readings needed for mass. Latin missals specifically give the “how to” hand guide to celebrating mass in the form before Vatican II introduced an “updated modern” version of the mass handbook.

-Father YoungTrad: Another meme character devised by trads to personify the type of person traditionalists tend to be. In stark contrast to Susan, Father YoungTrad is a fit and young priest that is extremely orthodox in his leadership and mainly only celebrates Latin mass. His parish is thriving with young people and young families that are well informed of the faith.

-Latin Mass: The name of the rite of the mass celebrated before the changes of Vatican II. Entire mass is celebrated in the official language of the church which is latin. The order of the mass that was the only way the mass was celebrated for about 1,500 years.

-Liturgy: The specific laws/rubrics on how a mass is celebrated.

-Novus Ordo: Latin for “the new order”. It is the name of the new rite of the mass that Vatican II came up with. In social circles it is used as an adjective to identify any aspect of the church/mass/or faith teaching that is not traditional and just a new invention after the 60s that have no actual church history basis.

-“Salus extra ecclesiam non est”: Latin for “there is no salvation outside of the church” and has been a slogan in catholicism since the 3rd century to signify that the catholic church is the only one true church. It is extreme because it declares that other religions including other christian denominations are not the church of the one true God. Trads say it to reinvigorate themselves to the importance of the duty they have to convert as many as they can.

-Nones: A new term coined by well known Bishop Robert Barren to identify the growing number of people that check off the “none” option whenever surveyed to identify which religion they practice or identify as.

-Seminary: The institution that men attend to become priests. “Priest school” where their graduation is actually their ordination to the priesthood. Lasts about eight years to obtain bachelors and masters degrees and includes apprenticeship at different parishes.  

-Tithes: The practice of the laity to give ten percent of their salary to the church/provide support, whether financial, goods or talents.

[papersand-blog]

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