Berkley Center

While I was raised in a devout and, at times, dogmatic Catholic family, my religious identity was a minor reason in my decision to attend Georgetown University and a non-factor in my choice to study abroad in Costa Rica. However, the strong presence of Catholic tradition within Costa Rica, and its occasionally controversial manner, has dominated all aspects of my life here—my classes, my relationship with my host family, and modern Costa Rican politics.

I think I feel the influence of Costa Rican Catholicism particularly strongly in my experience because it is an interesting aberration from the rather liberal brand of Catholicism in which I was raised and from my prior knowledge of Latin American faith. Before studying abroad, I felt that I had a fairly strong grasp of what to expect of religion in a country that is officially Roman Catholic. I had been on a service trip to the Dominican Republic in high school and took a Latino theology class at Georgetown, so I wasn’t expecting to encounter any serious culture shock on that front.

My first Mass with my host family was quite a surprise. While the small parochial church was standing room only, I was taken aback by the number of people who chose not to receive communion. At the church I was raised in, you shuffled your way to the front of the church with your family to receive the Body of Christ if you were older than 7 years old. At Georgetown, there are very few people who stay in their seats as the congregation makes its way through the pews. However, here in Costa Rica, less than a fourth of the service attendants approach the altar to partake in what I was taught was the most important part of Mass.

My previous experience with Latin American faith was one of devotion, intimacy, and intensity. That idea still holds true on the cultural level. Jesus is everywhere, physically, if not spiritually, speaking. His face is all over the public buses that I take to school every day, almost everyone I know here lives within walking distance of a church, and Catholicism is written into the Constitution of 1949.

This powerful sense of religion that I have felt culturally was apparent in my first church experience in Costa Rica, which occurred before I made it to Mass in the chapel near my house. Before I had the chance to accompany my family to their service, I visited the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles, the most famous church in Costa Rica, a week before the national holiday on which Costa Ricans pilgrimage to the site. Even a week before the celebration, the basilica was teeming with people, many of whom were praying on their knees in the aisles, rocking back and forth as they crawled toward the altar, an obvious demonstration of an incredibly passionate faith.

I don’t know what the theological foundation difference is between the attendants of Mass in the small church in my neighborhood and those in the overwhelming basilica, and I surely am not equipped to make judgments about the way anyone chooses to practice his faith. However, the different manifestations of the Catholic faith within the church are also apparent in the issues currently dominating national politics. Arguably the most controversial topics on the national agenda are the curriculum of sexual education for both public and private schools as well as the constitutionality of in vitro fertilization. Both topics have been discussed in more than one of my classes and demonstrate incredible different manners of interpreting of the Catholic faith.

While one opinion maintains that sexual education is the responsibility of the family and in vitro fertilization violates an embryo’s right to life, the other argues that the state should educate children to be responsible adults and that in vitro fertilization is part of an individual’s right to have a family and health. Ultimately, the religious and political debate of the moment shatters a stereotype I wasn’t even aware I had until it was broken—the idea that the Latin American theology I had been taught in the classroom is exactly how Costa Ricans express their faith on a day-to-day basis. Thus far in my experience, I can attest that is surely not true, and that I am curious to see exactly how the Catholic tradition manifests itself in the development of the debate over both sexual education and in vitro fertilization.