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Option for the Poor and his efforts to implement it in his parish. In the early to mid-1980s the parish suffered severely because of the conflict, with disappearances, tortures, assassinations. Parts of the parish property were used as dumping grounds for political victims. Parishioner fought against parishioner, but the vast majority of parishioners supported the FMLN, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, which is a revolutionary guerilla organization with a socialist and communist history that fought against the Salvadoran government. In 1985 Archbishop Rivera Damas, the successor to Archbishop Oscar Romero, created a refugee camp in the parish community, which led to an increase in population from 5,400 to 22,000 over the next five years. In 1986 a delegation that included students from the Washington Theological Union visited the community; in 1987 the first Carmelite went to the community, Father David Blanchard, O.Carm, and in 1988 the Union established an internship program in conjunction with the Archdiocese. With the signing of the peace accords on January 16, 1992, a parish started to emerge from the refugee population. Under Father David’s guidance and with the help of the Washington Theological Union the parish developed an agenda to follow. They are: 1. It is a church of the laity, with governance attributed to the laity in all areas permitted by Canon Law. 2. Correspondingly, there is a strong commitment to theological formation and spiritual development of the laity. 3. The parish has the explicit commitment to the incorporation of women in all of the decision-making bodies, which include at least 50% participation by women. 4. The parish has a qualified preferential Option for the Poor. This includes a complete program of charity and social services as well as an on-going program of consciousness level-raising and social transformation. 5. The parish religious practices include: Lectio Divina, Liturgy of the Hours (Lauds), and Taizé prayer. There also is an extensive program of popular religiosity, for instance, celebration of the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which complements the formal sacramental life of the parish. 6. Finally, the parish has a written policy against discrimination based on sexual orientation. It is by no means to be tolerated. In fact, the local community views the parish as a safe environment. Today the parish serves a population of 40,000 people, out of which 30,000 are Catholic, and 5,000 are practicing Catholics. As the 2008-2009 series of the Carmelite Forum of New Jersey draws to a close those in attendance spoke of the rich rewards they received from listening to this year’s presenters. The Carmelite Review wishes to thank Robert Jones, outgoing forum president and all the staff who helped make this final series a success. Director of African American Ministry Harry Wiley makes a point to Parish Secretary Ena Duran outside the South-Central Los Angeles church. the wider Catholic Church—blacks have taken a back seat to the exploding Hispanic population. He understands that a lot of this boils down to pure numbers, with estimates of 3 million local Catholic Hispanics compared to only 40,000 African Americans. “The tension is space. The tension is in cultural things like liturgy,” he says. “And the tensions are going to continue until the church begins to address itself to those tensions. Now, are we jealous, are we envious? I don’t know. Do we have a right to be? Should we be insensitive to people who come from other countries and seem to leapfrog over us?” “What I and I think what blacks want is not to seek to be more equal than anyone, just equal. Just fair treatment. Most of us have sought to work within the framework of the church, because we’re not interested in destroying the church.” As the parish secretary for the last seven years, as well as a member of the Latino community, Ena Duran believes she is in a unique spot to see both sides of the black/brown divide at Saint Raphael’s. The single 45-year-old mother readily agrees that Father O’Sullivan has done a good job of reaching out to both communities, bringing them together. She, too, ticks off the bilingual Masses and translation equipment donated by the Carmelites for meetings and workshops. “Now the people know what’s going on,” Duran says. “That way we can have debates, not just angry faces.” The big stumbling blocks to parish unity, however, continue to be language and cultural differences. Some blacks, noting that bilingual liturgies take a lot longer, sometimes complain, “You are in America, so you should speak English,” according to Duran. Regarding culture, she explains, “The parish history here is African American, but now it is Hispanic. And we bring with us our popular religiosity—singing and lighted candles, and we want flowers on the altar and guitar playing. The African Americans don’t. So Father Tracy had to make a decision. He had to say, ‘We have to receive people with what they came with.’ So that’s a little conflict.” Yet even with major and minor battles (even what kind of fish to serve during Lenten fish fries has been a bone of contention), Duran reports that tensions at Saint Raphael’s have lessened. Both blacks and Latinos have come together to protest at city hall the demolition of neighborhood housing stock. More members of both communities attend parish meetings and events, including Day of the Dead Masses and other bilingual liturgies. And both communities appreciate the different shrines in the unity prayer garden. “Today they are understanding our feelings more and we understand how they feel, too,” Duran says. “So things are better.”
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