A New Star for the American Church

BY LORENZO ALBACETE

Consider the following quotes:
“1. All human beings that live and think will necessarily experience this restlessness, this irresistible desire to resolve the problem of problems, the great unknown. Reason is hungry for truth, and truth has such a clear semblance that, once it is recognized, it is loved.

2. This common idea that the “Christian is one who reveres Christ and tries to adjust his or her actions to the moral teachings and examples of Our Lord” is greatly shortchanged; it misses the essential, the indispensable; moreover, in certain circumstances it may be altogether false. What makes one a Christian is nothing other than divine sonship gratuitously given by God through the grace of Baptism. Only the one inserted into Christ by grace is a Christian. It is necessary to be born again, to become a new creature.

This is to be understood in a real sense, even though mysterious; not in a metaphorical, poetical, or psychological way. All the imitation and possible reverence for Jesus will not make us Christians. There has to be an interior transformation brought about by grace; a transformation, a cristification, reached not psychologically by our efforts, but ontologically through grace.”

The two quotes are from letters written in 1946 and 1959, respectively, and are the words of a layman with no ecclesiastical position whatsoever, other than within the study-groups of students that he organized at a secular university to study these things. He died in 1963, before the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council, but, as you can see, his ideas very much anticipated what the Council would say. Like Fr. Giussani, he realized that much of the apparent strength of the pre-conciliar Church was not based on a personal encounter with Christ, was not the result of an event, but of philosophical theology (at best) or a theoretical moralism: Jesus reduced to a teacher of ethics, or values, or the name given to an inspiration that corresponds to our religious needs.
Our author is only the second layman on the entire American continent to be beatified. The first one, Juan Diego, to whom Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared, stands at the beginnings of the “First Evangelization” of the Americas. The second one, stands at the beginnings of what is later to be called the New Evangelization.
He is the first United States citizen lay person to be beatified. No doubt, unless you read my op-ed in The New York Times, you don’t know anything about him. That is because he was from Puerto Rico, and he lived and died there. His name: Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, known as “Charlie” Rodriguez by his family and friends. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II last April 29th.
Think about it. Hispanics in the USA have been in the news these past few weeks because the Census figures reveal they have become the largest minority in the country. Politicians, business leaders, and the entertainment industry have seen the potential for big bucks that this development entails. Has the Catholic Church seen it? The first US citizen lay person to be venerated as Blessed by the Catholic Church is a Hispanic. What might be the contribution of the Hispanic presence in the Catholic Church in the United States (according to the new census, 70% of US Hispanics identified themselves as Catholic)? What about this one, for example, the first lay American Catholic to be beatified?
Of course, he was from Puerto Rico, and Puerto Ricans have not decided about the future of their US citizenship. They are concerned about what total assimilation into the United States could mean. To top it all, the US Navy began bombarding the Puerto Rican island of Vieques as part of military maneuvers opposed by the majority of Puerto Ricans at the very time of Charlie’s beatification, making it impossible for the Governor of Puerto Rico to be in Rome as she had hoped to be. How’s that for cultural sensitivity?
For many Americans, and even around the world, Puerto Rico means the gangs in West Side Story or, these past years, Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez.
But now there is a real Puerto Rican star in the true heavens. He offers different possibilities for Puerto Rico, for the millions of Puerto Ricans in the United States, for the American Church with its soon-to-be Hispanic majority, and–if the Church responds to this blessing–for the life of the American nation as a whole. May Blessed Carlos Manuel Rodriguez pray for us.