Читать книгу The Kingdom Began in Puerto Rico - Angel Garcia - Страница 10

1

Puerto Rico

But at the same time, the Church, sent to all peoples of every time and place, is not bound exclusively and indissolubly to any race or nation, any particular way of life or any customary way of life, recent or ancient. Faithful to her own tradition and at the same time conscious of her universal mission, she can enter into communion with the various civilizations, to their enrichment and the enrichment of the Church itself.

—Gaudium et Spes §58, December 7, 1965

Priesthood Accomplished

On May 31, 1958, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, Cornelius A. Connolly, known to others as “Neil,” was ordained a Roman Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of New York by Cardinal Francis Spellman.¹ Reaching priesthood had taken twelve years of study—six years at Cathedral Prep on Manhattan’s West End Avenue, followed by six more at St. Joseph’s Seminary, in the Dunwoodie area of Yonkers, New York. Neil’s graduating class, thirty-two strong, was one of the largest in the history of St. Joseph’s, an institution with a demanding academic program in both the sacred subjects, such as theology and philosophy, and the profane, such as literature and history.²

There were several reasons why Neil Connolly might have wanted to become a priest. Prestige was one: Within the Irish American community, the priesthood was considered elite.³ In the 1940s and 1950s, many of the best and brightest Irish American men became priests.⁴ Popularity was another: Thanks to the widely viewed movie personas of Father O’Malley in Going My Way and Father Flanagan in Boys Town, the larger American public came to believe that being Irish and being Catholic were one and the same, and that priests were admirable human beings.⁵ Power was a third: In Catholic Irish American communities, the Church was the central institution ruling the lives of parishioners, and priests led that institution.

Neil Conolly (left) and classmates at St. Joseph’s Seminary, January 1954. (Photo courtesy of Fr. Robert Stern.)

But Connolly had worked toward this moment in his life with a different motivation. Entering the minor seminary at the age of twelve, he had decided to make a lifetime commitment in order to be just like the Our Lady of Good Counsel parish priests, who had been so good to his family in their time of need.

Good Counsel, after all, had paid for his trips as a boy to summer camp in Port Jervis, which his father, the elder Cornelius Connolly, could not afford. It also gave the Connollys money for necessities during the 1941 New York City bus drivers’ strike, which his father, a shop steward of the young Transport Workers Union, helped lead against Mayor La Guardia.⁶ The elder Cornelius—known as “Con Connolly” to his union brothers, many of whom were his former comrades in the Irish Republican Army⁷—was a committed Catholic, a committed fighter for labor rights, and a committed father and husband, but he couldn’t do it all.

Con Connolly and Frances Connolly, Neil’s parents, on their wedding day. (Neil Connolly’s personal collection.)

The native of Skibbereen, in County Cork, Ireland, part of the last Irish migration wave in the 1920s,⁸ moved to this Yorkville parish from Queens to be closer to work and to the rest of the family because he needed help. Con’s beloved wife, Frances, an educated domestic whom he met and married in New York, was a wonderful and supportive partner who raised and taught Denis, Neil, Anne Marie, Patrick, and Billy. But Frances suffered from depression. Sometimes it was so severe that she was institutionalized for months at a time at the massive Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island.⁹ On several occasions when Con made the long trip to visit Frances, the parish priest would accompany him and then invite him over to dinner with his own family members out on Long Island for a little respite. Neil Connolly later reflected on the generosity of those priests; he wanted to be like them, to be there for other families just as they had been there for his.

With the official title of priest obtained and his seminary learning complete, Connolly thought, all he needed was a parish. But as it turned out, the new Father Neil Connolly’s education was not complete.

Starting Over

On June 15, 1958, Connolly and some classmates from St. Joseph’s boarded a plane and landed in Puerto Rico.

Up to that point in his life, he had only heard of Puerto Rico because of two Puerto Rican students in the entire Good Counsel Elementary School. But on a hot June day, sweating buckets in a black serge suit, Connolly began the next stage of his education by asking the most important question in his young priesthood: “How’s your Spanish?”

Waiting with a bunch of others for an oral language exam, Connolly stood outside a classroom in the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, in Ponce, the island’s second largest city. He and his classmate Marty Dolan, who loved a good laugh just as much as he did, were standing behind two priests, Father Jim Burke of Brooklyn and Father Dan Sullivan of the Bronx. Both had been working with Puerto Ricans in New York City for over ten years, Connolly learned. Burke was very talkative and confident, with a bit of the Irish “blarney” in him, and he was proud of his rank among those gathered in the hallway as an experienced priest in the Puerto Rican community. Connolly asked him, “Oh. How’s your Spanish?”

“Well I can communicate,” replied Burke, “You know, uh, pretty good, yeah … pretty good.”

Burke went in to sit on a chair at the front of the classroom, while Connolly and his friend Dolan were waiting outside. When the oral exam began, things got quiet. Into the room came the examiner, a man known only as Martinez. He took a chair and placed it at the front center of the room, right in front of Burke. To Connolly, it was a scene from one of those World War II–era Fellini movies he had seen in the theater, with a military interrogator seeking a confession. In this case, a priest was confessing to a layperson.

Martinez looked directly and seriously at Burke and asked “¿Cómo está usted?”—a simple “How are you?” Burke did not answer. Martinez proceeded to ask again, with no change in the facial expression, but with a little more volume. “¿Cómo está usted?”

Burke, clueless, repeated the question in a mumble, searching haplessly through his memory for a moment of understanding. “Cómo está usted, cómo está usted.” Exasperated, Martinez asked the question again, this time loudly and sternly: “¡Cómo está usted!” Burke was startled. “Hey, hey!” he pleaded. “Un poco mas despacio, por favor.” (“A little bit slower, please.”)

Connolly and Dolan looked on, and then they looked at each other, incredulous. He couldn’t answer that? They found this interaction so humorous that they began convulsing with laughter. However much they tried, they couldn’t stop laughing, while everyone else stood looking every other way. But everything stopped when Sullivan was called in.

Newly ordained priests (incl. Connolly, stairway, bottom left) before boarding plane to Puerto Rico, June 1958. Cardinal Francis Spellman and Fr. Joseph Fitzpatrick (front). (Photo courtesy of Fr. Robert Stern.)

Martinez faced Sullivan when he came in, and before a “como esta” could be uttered, Sullivan quickly cut off the exam with Martinez by confessing, “I don’t know anything.” Brought back to the sober moment of the interrogation, Connolly and Dolan followed suit when they were called in.

“I don’t know anything,” replied Connolly.

“I don’t know anything either,” said Dolan.

Word got back to the other members of the university program staff after the exams were completed. “Well then, why did you come here?” they asked Connolly and the others.

Saying, “Well, we didn’t know,” Connolly realized that this would be a challenging summer.

Connolly—along with fifty-one others sent by the Archdiocese of New York, the Diocese of Brooklyn, and others—was beginning a language and culture educational program.¹⁰ This summer was the program’s second at Puerto Rico’s Catholic University.¹¹ Participants included half the Dunwoodie graduating class of 1958. But there were other experienced priests besides Sullivan and Burke—priests whom Connolly would get to know that summer and really come to admire for their wisdom. Father Leo Mahon, from Chicago, was developing a new sister parish program for a community in Panama City, Panama. From New York, there was Father Bob Fox, a trained social worker preparing to establish a Catholic Charities program in Montevideo, Uruguay. There was also Father John Ahern, already an active priest in the Catholic Charities system, who worked in the Bronx. From Youngstown, Ohio, there was Father Jim Young, who was learning how to better serve a large migrant Puerto Rican population brought in by government and business forces to help defeat a steelworkers’ union strike. Rounding out the group were other priests, nuns, brothers, and laypersons, creating a large base of future Spanish-speakers and culture experts.

There could not have been too many, nor could they have come too soon, for the Archdiocese of New York.

De-Yankeefication

Beginning in the 1940s, the city of New York saw a continuous influx of thousands of people from Puerto Rico every year. The Great Puerto Rican Migration, or La Gran Migración, would result in five hundred thousand new residents by 1958, and the waves continued.¹² With seven million residents of all nationalities, New York knew how to absorb new immigrant waves, but this one was different. This was not an influx of white Europeans, but of Latin Americans with different skin colors and hair textures. Moreover, this one could not be controlled by federal quotas limiting the number of arrivals from a particular nation, as had been the case with Europeans since 1924. The passengers arriving on Marine Tiger ships¹³ and Trans Caribbean Airways planes were U.S. citizens, free to travel between Puerto Rico and the mainland. No plan or institution was ready for this unlimited migration—not the schools, property owners, and government agencies, and not even the Catholic Church, already experienced in absorbing prior migrations.

After all, the archdiocese of Connolly’s youth was a predominantly Irish institution and community. Street processions were part of the regular public devotions to Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and Saints Patrick and Brigid. These devotions, which sometimes lasted forty hours, were important elements of Catholicism brought over from Ireland, as were beliefs in miracles and the utmost respect for the authority of priests. In the center of each of New York’s Irish neighborhoods was the parish infrastructure, usually a full-block combination of church, school, rectory, convent, and parish hall—physical structures which defined the very strong sense of social and spiritual structure in Irish American life. These institutions were established by successive powerful Irish archbishops and maintained by the dutiful contributions of working-class parishioners and their many societies. This network of structures, devotions, contributions, and beliefs helped strengthen Irish Americans’ way of life. It also gave them legitimacy and comfort in an initially hostile city.¹⁴

The Irish-dominated Archdiocese of New York did have experience with non-Irish Catholic migrations. Each new group established “national parishes,” dedicated in language and staffing to the nationality of the new group. Thus, Italian, German, Polish, and other national parishes sprang up, and eventually 115 of them dotted the Manhattan landscape. But the intensity and volume of the Gran Migración, as well as the lack of Puerto Rican clergy, led Cardinal Spellman to call for a different parish model: an “integrated parish.” In such a parish, at least one priest would be trained in the language of the new migrants, and services and sacraments could be provided to them in that language—at least until they could all speak English and would no longer need the dedicated services.¹⁵

It was not until Spellman’s public announcement in 1952, however, that the archdiocese put the integrated parish model into action. That was the year when a whole program of diocesan services would be provided for the new community, all under a new office at headquarters called the Office of Spanish Catholic Action.¹⁶ All of these services were created under the direction of two men, both of whom were highly educated, highly interested in Puerto Ricans, very hands-on, and, most important, highly respected by the cardinal: Father Ivan Illich and Father Joseph Fitzpatrick.

Illich was a Croatian-born priest who, during an encounter in Rome, so impressed Spellman with his intellect that Spellman persuaded him to work in the United States. Then, serving a newly forming Puerto Rican community in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, Illich learned Spanish doing pastoral work and spent months in Puerto Rico whenever he could, just to learn how people lived.¹⁷ Fitzpatrick, a Jesuit and trained sociologist, dedicated himself, his studies, his teaching, and his service in Puerto Rico and New York to the Puerto Ricans and their experiences in the United States.¹⁸

Spellman gave the two priests the freedom to develop a program of full immersion in the culture and the language of the Puerto Rican people. Illich organized the program called the Institute for Intercultural Communication at the Catholic University of Puerto Rico (La Universidad Católica de Puerto Rico), and he became vice rector of the university in order to oversee it. Illich wanted the participants to give up the cultural norms they had grown up with—the Irish American Catholic way of life. As he put it, the goal for all participants in the Institute was simple: “de-Yankeefication.”¹⁹

Like Illich, Fitzpatrick was present with Connolly during that summer of 1958, actively involved in the program he co-created. While he agreed with Illich that “de-Yankeefication” was the way to prepare the clergy and religious for their future ministry, Fitzpatrick, the teacher, had a different role at La Universidad from Illich, the organizer. On many evenings Fitzpatrick taught Connolly and the other participants about the history and values of the Puerto Rican people.

Puerto Rico and Empires

Connolly learned that, located in a globally strategic point in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico had lived under the domination of two empires at different stages in its five-hundred-year history: Spain and the United States. The Spanish conquered the country and its indigenous Taino population at the turn of the fifteenth century and controlled it for the next four centuries. After decimating much of the Taino population, the Spanish instituted African slavery, a system which brought the two peoples together and led to a large mixed-race segment of the population, as well as a mixture of the two cultures.²⁰ During the nineteenth century, Puerto Rican political organizations, campaigns, and conflicts led to the abolition of slavery in 1873 and to the unsuccessful Grito de Lares, an armed rebellion in 1868 against the Spanish empire.²¹

The end of the century brought the country under a new empire, with the United States annexing Puerto Rico in 1898 as the “spoils” of victory in the Spanish-American War. Puerto Ricans were given a limited U.S. citizenship in 1917, a status enabling its men to serve in both World Wars and the Korean War. In 1952, Puerto Rico became a political entity known as a “Free Associated State,” neither an independent country nor an American state. Its two best known leaders reflected the political tensions on the island over the role of the U.S. empire in the American era: Pedro Albizu Campos, leader of independence struggles under the Nationalist Party, and Luis Muñoz Marín, who converted from independence advocate to the first elected governor and defender of the Free Associated State. When Albizu Campos and the Nationalists organized a successful national sugar cane workers’ strike, counter-actions by the U.S.-controlled government, such as the 1937 Ponce Massacre and the suppression of the 1950 Nationalist uprising, terminated a renewed effort for independence. In the middle of these political conflicts, citizenship status was enhanced several times by the United States, until it eventually gave Puerto Rico’s people a right important to their future: the right to travel and work freely.²²

Under both empires, Puerto Ricans remained largely an agricultural people. Spaniards who settled in Puerto Rico had become self-sufficient farmers, or jíbaros, who learned the ways of the land and grew enough to feed their families. Through land grants issued by successive Spanish governments, immigration to Puerto Rico from Spain and other countries was vigorously encouraged, and settlers were called to grow crops beneficial to the Spanish.²³

Agricultural life persisted after the American takeover: In 1910, 79 percent of the population was described as rural, and in 1940, 70 percent were still considered rural.²⁴ Underscoring Puerto Rico’s agricultural dependence, the hurricane season made its people keenly aware of nature’s awesome power over their lives and well-being. In 1899, Hurricane San Ciriaco came and destroyed the island’s crops, electric power, and telephones; killed more than 3,000; and left 250,000 homeless. It was followed in 1928 by the more devastating San Felipe Segundo, which also destroyed crops and utilities and left 500,000 homeless.²⁵

After the period of royal Spanish rule, another kind of monarch would radically change independent subsistence farming and agriculture in Puerto Rico and accelerate its poverty: King Sugar. By the late 1800s, several large U.S. corporations had already acquired much of the arable land in Puerto Rico. Replacing other crops with sugar cane, the corporations converted many small farms into vast sugar cane fields and mills.²⁶ As a result, once-independent farmers became sugar cane cutters and processors on someone else’s land. Thousands lived as low-wage workers under the libreta (passbook) system, taking work when and where they could find it, earning as little as $0.30 an hour during the 1920s and 1930s. In the tiempo muerto (dead season), when there was no harvest, thousands relied on piecemeal work in the needlework industry.²⁷

As subsistence farms, crop diversity, and farm jobs disappeared from much of Puerto Rico, one thing grew every decade: its population. The American era saw accelerated growth on the island, from one million residents in 1900 to over two million residents by 1950. With the Depression cutting deeply into the economy and many facing starvation, the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA) was established to provide basic food and aid to hundreds of thousands.²⁸ Then, as Puerto Rico grew poorer and more crowded, the government launched a “modernization” program, Operation Bootstrap, in the 1930s and 1940s. The program grew the manufacturing sector, luring U.S. corporations by promising cheap labor and tax benefits.²⁹ Also, to control the population, it subjected about one-third of the country’s women to an involuntary mass sterilization program.³⁰

Finally, seeing that the agricultural and manufacturing sectors still left hundreds of thousands of working-age people without a job, Puerto Rico took a major step. The government systematically encouraged its people to move to the United States to find a job, and a new life, setting in motion the Gran Migración.

In addition to learning all this about their history, Connolly learned about the values of the Puerto Rican people. They had a general fear and distrust of institutions, since government and corporate actions regularly took away their livelihoods and lands. These institutional actions had also taught them to be self-reliant, to find assistance and resources within their own families and among their neighbors. With everyone’s limited chance of surviving to an old age, Puerto Rican families, like those in most agricultural societies, were large enough so that some would extend the family to the next generation. The people Connolly was meeting had a broad definition of “family,” incorporating godchildren, children born outside of a marriage (even if this was actually not formalized, but a common-law relationship), and children whose parents had passed away, or whose parents were too poor to raise them.³¹

Facing health crises such as the tuberculosis epidemic, and the natural crises of hurricanes, and the overwhelming economic crisis of the Great Depression, the people had also developed a fatalism, accepting things as they were because “no hay mas na’” (“What else is there?”), and a religiosity, feeling that things would work out “si Dios quiere y la Virgen” (“if God and the Virgin wish it”).³²

First Immersion: Language

The first Puerto Ricans whom Connolly got to know that summer were his teachers at La Universidad, who were also students there. They implemented the language program directed by Dr. Silva, a Brazilian linguistics professor. Connolly thought they were great teachers, welcoming and responsive to the students. Classes were divided up by initial language capabilities, tested by Martinez’s “interrogation.” And, despite objections by some in the New York hierarchy, who were getting progress reports on the summer’s developments, Connolly and his peers, who had socialized even during their seminary years, accepted the other students’ invitations to attend dances and recreational events at their homes or at the school.

Socializing and recreation provided Connolly, who loved taking in entertainment at jazz clubs in his seminary days, with lessons beyond the classroom. At a dance in one local hall, one of their teachers, a dark-skinned man, was standing in the corner with Connolly and some classmates when a good, lively dance number was starting up. Another teacher, a light-skinned woman, was standing at another corner while some of her friends were out on the dance floor. Seeing this, Connolly and the other priests urged him to take a chance and ask her out on the floor to dance.

He begged off.

A group of Connolly’s summer 1958 classmates taking a stroll on campus of La Universidad Católica.

“Ask her out,” Connolly and the others said again. “Go dance. Don’t be shy.”

After some more friendly lobbying, he finally responded to the priests, with a little hesitation. He explained that he could not ask her out because of the difference between his skin color and hers. It was just an unspoken rule, he said, that different races could not mix together on the dance floor without a negative, and maybe violent, public reaction. The priests and teachers remained a little quiet for a while, and then they continued enjoying themselves. But the moment stayed with Connolly.

Connolly had very limited understanding of racial conflicts and race relations at this point. His Yorkville neighborhood had only known one building with black families in it during his boyhood, before they all moved out of the neighborhood almost overnight. Connolly never knew why they moved, or where.

He learned about the attitude he should personally take toward black people through his family. Connolly’s father, Con, drove the Harlem bus route for the Fifth Avenue Bus Company and got along very well with his passengers, some of whom even gave him gifts at holiday time. Con, whom Neil considered a “respecter of all people,” insisted on that respect among all his family members. Once, when Neil’s brother used the word “nigger” at the dinner table while discussing some black person on the street, Con stopped the dinner, stood up, pointed at the brother, and said, “Get out. Don’t you ever use that word here.” His brother left the table, and everyone resumed the dinner in quiet. The lesson was learned: Every Connolly would be a respecter of all people, or else.

As Connolly grew older, he maintained this attitude during his limited experiences with African Americans. During one of his summers as a camp counselor in Poughkeepsie, he oversaw a mixed-race group of kids and felt they all got along well with each other in camp. Also, his friend Harry Salmon was the only black priest candidate at Dunwoodie he knew, and since Salmon was a kind, soft-spoken man and a basketball player with real talent, Connolly, who was always a sports fan, got along very well with him.

But in Puerto Rico, as he looked at his teacher, he was beginning to realize, race was a real problem.

Back in the classroom, Connolly acquired Spanish through a dynamic method of language learning, focusing on active conversation and repetition. Some other students resisted this approach, calling for more traditional exercises such as learning conjugations and verb tenses, and sentence and grammar structures. Connolly did not resist. He embraced this dynamic approach and, in the process, advanced quickly from the lowest level at the beginning to a couple of levels up by the end of the classroom program.

Dynamic learning just seemed natural to Connolly. When he was socializing and holding conversations with his friends on weekends, visiting jazz clubs on Fifty-Second Street, going bowling and playing cards, he found out how little he knew about matters of the world—current events and social and political issues—compared to his classmates. He barely knew what they were talking about. So he started picking up copies of Time magazine and newspapers, reading everything he could get his hands on just to be up on the latest news developments and issues and to hold his own in those conversations. It had him thinking more about the world, especially during the turbulent postwar, Cold War times.

Connolly was quick to learn when the situation called for it. And the veteran priests—Ahern, Fox, Young, Mahon, and Fitzpatrick and Illich—all had much to share about their own encounters with the Puerto Ricans in the United States. They engaged Connolly and his new classmates in discussions about Puerto Rican history and culture. They were very impressive, Connolly thought, and they seemed to have a willingness to immerse themselves in the Puerto Rican communities they were serving.

But all this learning in the dynamic language lessons and conversations at La Universidad, Illich and Fitzpatrick pointed out, would be incomplete without the weekend lessons. While the week was dedicated to lectures and discussions in the classroom, the weekend lessons took place in the countryside, all over the island.

Second Immersion: Campo

The first “weekend school” was in San Lorenzo, a town where he was greeted by Redemptorist Father Dusty O’Malley. O’Malley greeted Connolly that first Saturday in the town church’s rectory and prepared him for a full schedule of Masses the following day, beginning at six o’clock in the morning. The Masses were to take place up in an area he called the campo.

Connolly took a jeep with O’Malley, all the way up the countryside along paths and dirt roads, and ended up on a hilltop. It was a little cool, and Connolly had an extraordinary view of the countryside there. At six sharp, his worshippers arrived: sugar cane workers, who had already spent part of the morning in the fields. Since it had rained the night before, the ground was muddy, which prompted the workers to all take their mud-soaked shoes off before entering a small chapel. They all walked in barefoot, and Connolly, seeing this, did the same before entering this simple structure. Here on the hilltop, Connolly celebrated his first independent Mass for parishioners as a priest. It was also where he would deliver his first sermon using the Spanish vocabulary he was beginning to build at La Universidad.

Connolly was offering his first Mass at the unlikeliest of places. This was not the seminary chapel. Nor was it the Good Counsel structure built in the early 1900s, much less the grand St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Weeks earlier, he had joined thirty-one other men in a full ceremonial Mass, presided over by the cardinal and several bishops, dressed in full vestments, and joined by a choir as well as several hundred family members and friends of the new priests. Here, there were no altar boys. There was no choir. There were no vestments or architecturally complex church interiors. It was just a few dozen workers and Connolly, praying and reciting in Latin.

Afterward, Connolly wondered about this Mass and place. Was this celebration done well? Did the worshippers come here before? What was this chapel doing here? Where did it come from?

Through more Fitzpatrick presentations at La Universidad, Connolly learned about the Catholic Church and about Catholicism as lived in Puerto Rico. In the Spanish era, Puerto Rico’s churches, hospitals, schools, and orphanages were created and staffed by Spain’s Catholic Church, under agreements with the monarchy called concordats. Community institutions relied on the central Church for funds and staffing, and the Puerto Ricans’ role was merely to worship and be served. In the American era, Puerto Rico’s non-church institutions secularized, and many of the clergy and religious returned to Spain. Eventually, the Redemptorists, a religious order from the United States, took control of the Puerto Rican Catholic Church, with archbishops James Davis and James McManus overseeing the two dioceses of San Juan and Ponce. La Universidad Católica in Ponce was also created by them in 1947. Other religious orders, from both the United States and Europe, were eventually brought in to staff the institutions formerly run by the Spanish.³³

But many local parish communities were still ignored, with only thirty-four of the island’s seventy-eight town parishes staffed by a priest. These parishes, with churches, rectories, and convents in the geographic centers of the town, were far removed from the underdeveloped countryside, the campo. With few access roads to the campos, the clergy and religious were reluctant to visit or celebrate sacraments with the people living in the countryside. Even the American takeover did not change this reluctance, and so the campesinos were left on their own. It was usually only for special occasions, such as a fiesta patronal, that the campesinos came down to the parish centers.³⁴

Just as they were often left to rely on themselves for survival in the world then, Puerto Ricans were also left to rely on themselves for their religion. Once again, Puerto Ricans developed their own solution: a self-sufficient Catholicism, especially in the campos. Much of their religious activity was carried out in the homes of the local families. Many homes, even the poorest, kept a rosary and crucifix, and some even had a santo (a carved wooden status of Jesus, Mary, or a saint) or an “altar”—a wooden table with fruits and plants, pictures of family members, candles, and water, organized and positioned in a corner of the house as sacrificial offerings to God. Without a priest, a community often produced rezadoras (“pray-ers”), women who were recognized in the community as leaders of prayer gatherings for families or networks of families in a community. They most often led prayer gatherings for wakes, funerals, and novenas after the funeral, some for seven consecutive years afterward to commemorate the anniversary of a death. On the rare occasion when a priest would arrive, a sacrament was celebrated.³⁵

At the beginning of the twentieth century, campesinos began to see another kind of religious leader: a lay Catholic preacher. In 1902, José de los Santos Morales of the town of Arecibo spontaneously preached a sermon after a prayer session. A year later, José Rodriguez Medina of Utuado also spontaneously preached, this time after a ceremony on Three Kings Day. Their reception was warm and enthusiastic, and many people and families requested sermons in those communities; then services were organized in hundreds of homes throughout the broader Puerto Rican countryside. When the two Josés learned about each other’s preaching and services and then met, they agreed to form a joint effort to reach people more broadly in the campo. Demand for the two, known affectionately as the “Hermanos Cheo” (“Cheo” being a nickname for José), was so strong that some communities built chapels and even small residences in the hills to accommodate them on their visits and support regular services. The Hermanos Cheo movement grew to include women preachers who were recognized for their gifts and became known as “Hermanas Chea.” This new corps of self-styled preachers encouraged Catholicism in this unique way and was ultimately recognized by the Church hierarchy of Puerto Rico.

The chapel in San Lorenzo was a legacy of that movement. The structure was saved for that Sunday when a priest would make the rare visit to bring the sacrament of the Eucharist. Connolly’s was that rare visit.

Confession was the next important sacrament for Connolly to offer, again for the first time in his priesthood. The setting for this was even more unusual. In the campo town of Jayuya, on another weekend, Connolly was brought to a general store, known in Puerto Rico as a colmado. He was escorted through the store, past the overwhelming smells of bacalao (salted codfish), to the back wall where the makeshift “confessional” was waiting: a wooden wine cask, where he would sit, and a crate on either side of the cask. There were dozens waiting inside and outside the store.

When Connolly sat down on the wine cask, the first penitent came over: a pretty girl, about fifteen years old, who quietly took a seat on one of the crates. She looked at the new Irish American priest and without thought, put her head in his lap. Connolly was startled, thinking, What is going on here? What kind of a confession is this? He quickly pulled her up and had her sit straight, and she began the confession. Connolly heard and responded to her confession with the best Spanish he could muster and then went to the next penitent, and then the next. It was nonstop, one confession after another, for three straight hours.

By the end, Connolly felt, he must have listened to the confession of all the sins of Jayuya.

This was not what he had expected. There were no dividing walls, no velvet curtains or private booths like those he had knelt in at Good Counsel when he was first confessing his sins to a priest whose face he couldn’t see, except through a dark mesh screen. Here, in Jayuya’s confession “box,” he saw the faces of the penitents as they shared their sins. In some cases, two persons sat down at the same time, and one sat and watched while the other shared her venial and cardinal weaknesses with Connolly. He struggled to maintain protocol and privacy by stopping the confession and asking for some order, and for a softer tone: “Por favor, hay alguien aquí quien está escuchando tu pecado.” (Please, be careful. There is someone here who is listening to all your sins.)

Connolly was exhausted and confused after the nonstop “confession by fire,” which left him with a question: With no church building or private confession booth present, was this sacrament of confession he was practicing still genuine? He didn’t have a real answer, but he felt certain that those he had heard were sincere and solemn in seeking God’s mercy through their American priest, and that he was equally sincere and solemn in listening to them and invoking God’s forgiveness. There was no other church available for the moment; this colmado, with its bacalao, groceries, wine casks, and crates, was accordingly the sacramental site. The people committed to the holy act, and so they made it their holy place, their church, on that day. On a prior weekend, the people of San Lorenzo saw him as their priest, and they were his parish for that day. Now in Jayuya, the penitents had seen him as their pastor, and he was for that day.

On another morning in the campo, he completed celebration of a Mass and was expecting to rest before a couple of more Masses. However, a worshipper from the campo extended Connolly an invitation.

“Padre, ven conmigo, porque vamos a pasar una hora y media. Yo he invitado a mis vecinos, a mis hermanos y cuñados, van a venir y todo eso. Usted puede comer algo, tomar un cafecito, un poquito de pan, o si usted quiere algo, jamón.” (Father, please come with me, because we are going to spend about an hour and a half getting together. I’ve invited my neighbors, my brothers, my brothers- and sisters-in-law, and they are all coming. You could eat something, have some coffee, have a little bread, or if you want something else, maybe some ham.)

Connolly accepted the invitation and went over to her house. The hostess sat him down in a chair in the middle of a room, and he was surrounded by several dozen people. They heard him say a few words, and detecting a respectable Spanish accent, they jumped right into full conversation with him. He was answering “si” and “no” to questions he didn’t fully understand, and he had little idea what he was telling them. But they were so warm and delighted that he was with them that it took away some of his worries about what he was doing there. Like the cane workers in the San Lorenzo chapel and the confessants of Jayuya, they were very open and welcoming to him.

Why? He wondered.

Were they curious about him?

Were they just grateful that a priest visited them in the campo?

Were they just welcoming him to join their community and live the way they did?

Why bring their whole family to meet him?

Sacred Acts

By mid-September, the program was completed, but the return to the United States left Connolly thinking about how incomplete he felt. He had learned something about administering the sacraments, but not from another priest. The Puerto Ricans, with their own Catholic ways, had been his teachers. They had created their own spaces and their own approaches to each act, and they had shared them with Connolly.

Connolly had realized some important things:

With their presence, strong faith, and seriousness of purpose, they declared:

This act—this Mass in the bare chapel or this confession in the colmado—is sacred.

We share our faith together with you, Father Connolly, and together we make it sacred.

The church is here, in the campo.

In accepting the unorthodox, mundane settings, they did not see limits to holiness, and in so doing, compelled Connolly to not see them either. He wondered again, Where else could church exist?

Connolly also wondered, What was next for his priesthood? He realized that he was getting prepared to work with Puerto Ricans back in New York, somewhere. This could be a good thing, he thought; he had been welcomed with such openness and warmth by the people of Puerto Rico that he was pleasantly overwhelmed. Going back to New York, he looked forward to seeing these Puerto Rican people again and knowing them better. He again thought about his decision as a twelve-year-old boy to become a priest for people, the way Good Counsel priests had been for him. Now, he would try to become a priest for people—for these people, in their new world.

But there was much more to work on in order to become a true priest, including his Spanish. It was incomplete. But it was getting better.