By: Taemin Ahn
October 6, 2015
On my first Sunday in San Salvador, I broke a longstanding family tradition of total religious indifference, put on a collared shirt, and headed in the direction of San Salvador’s National Cathedral. The directors of my study abroad program had advised us to attend at least a couple of Salvadoran Masses in order to learn more about the country’s culture.
El Salvador, like many other Latin American states, hosts a majority Catholic population. Salvadorans are known for their faith. Unlike in Guatemala and Honduras, brutal repression and the infamous 1932 massacres resulted in the extermination of 99 percent of the indigenous population, leaving behind a faithful congregation of Spanish-speaking mestizo Catholics. The Church exerts tremendous influence on the country’s social and political consciousness. My political science professor jokes, "if you want to take an opinion poll in El Salvador, just reread last week’s homily.”
With that in mind, I started up the steps towards the cathedral. Halfway up, though, a woman pulled me aside and directed me downward. “Only the rich bother with that tripe upstairs,” she said. “The Mass of the people lies in the crypt.” Nonplussed, I stepped into the crypt, where a crush of people filled dingy plastic lawn chairs around a small altar. Why did people choose to take Mass in a musty basement when there was a perfectly good cathedral upstairs, with real pews to boot?
I didn’t have to wait long. The ceremony was unlike anything I’d been forced to attend during six years of Jesuit education. Rather than recite an abstract call to faith, the priest recounted narratives of undocumented border crossings, of Salvadoran migrants suffering injustice and hardship for the chance at new life in the United States. He continued, “These people broke the law to escape violence and poverty in El Salvador, but how could a loving God call them sinners? In a political environment without solutions, what other option did they have?” I would have expected those questions from an immigration policy seminar at Georgetown, not at Sunday Mass.
Such passed my first encounter with liberation theology, a Catholic theological tradition that advocates for a preferential option for the poor. Liberation theologians, many of whom were Jesuits, worked with the oppressed to empower them to organize socially and politically for their rights. In the past five weeks, I’ve visited Christian base communities who, unwilling to accept deep inequality and rampant poverty, used the Gospels to oppose a repressive military junta. The power of faith and Catholicism to drive such a strong desire for social change continues to surprise me. I see Christianity used to upend social structures, give dignity to underserved communities, and, more controversially, call the people to arms against dictatorship.
Upstairs, however, in a beautiful space decked in hardwood and marble, orthodox Catholic priests preach a much tamer Mass. Gone is any mention of worldly suffering; gone, too, are the working-class—replaced by the city’s elite. The mainstream Catholic Church continues to serve those who fill its coffers, with little concern for the country’s socioeconomic reality. The people I’ve met in Antiguo Cuscatlán, one of the city’s richest neighborhoods, express disgust at the Masses in the crypt. “Why would you want to listen to the poor complain about their problems?” asks one of my neighbors. “All they want to do is take our savings and our jobs.” They prefer their Gospels short and sweet, timed to the hour so they can make their lunch meetings after church.
I find it difficult to reconcile the two Churches within the National Cathedral. Both are Catholic, but their messages mirror the country’s sharp class divides. Before I came, I thought that shared faith would create shared culture, but Catholicism, which ironically means "universalism," has served only to institutionalize difference. To me, the physical segregation of rich and poor within Catholic worship spaces represents the brokenness of the entire country. If my professor is right that the Church drives public opinion, I wonder who’s actually in the driver’s seat.
