Book review: “Pioneers of Latino Ministry: Claretians & the Evolving World of Catholic America” by Deborah E. Kanter

As a thirteen-year-old, I left my family’s home on Chicago’s West Side to study for the Roman Catholic priesthood at a high school seminary about fifty miles away in Momence, a small town outside of Kankakee. It was called St. Jude Seminary, and it was run by a religious congregation called the Claretians.

I knew about the congregation, officially called the Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, because my father was a Chicago policeman, and the Catholic chaplain for the department in those years was a Claretian, Father Pat McPolin.  The St. Jude Police League of Chicago was not only instrumental in raising money to build and maintain the seminary but also helped promote the National Shrine of St. Jude at Our Lady of Guadalupe parish in the far southeast neighborhood of South Chicago.

Over time, I learned a bit more about the Claretians, particularly that the congregation published the well-respected U.S. Catholic magazine. I worked there two summers as a writer and assistant editor and envisioned myself someday as its editor.

It wasn’t to be, however. After nine years of study — still four years short of ordination — I gave up my dream of being a priest and started working as a professional writer, a career that’s lasted more than half a century.

Now, full circle, I’m writing this essay about a new book that tells the story of the 123-year history of the Claretians in the United States, Pioneers of Latino Ministry: Claretians & the Evolving World of Catholic America by Deborah E. Kanter. I’m writing a commentary rather than a regular book review because of my long-ago membership in the congregation and because I was one of Kanter’s sources about seminary life in the middle of the twentieth century.

Reading Pioneers in Latino Ministry, I was excited to discover much about the congregation that was admirable and bold and pastoral and that I had never realized or clearly understood.

 

Accompaniment

Her key insight is that the Claretians in the U.S. are distinguished by their “accompaniment of Hispanic Catholics.”

The idea of accompaniment was a favorite of Pope Francis. It’s the antithesis of someone in power giving orders or instructions to those who are weaker. Instead, it’s a partnership, a walking together, in which the two people — or, in this case, clergy and lay people — are moving together toward a better life.

Kanter writes that the commitment of the Claretians over more than a century to accompany Latino Catholics “makes them distinct in American Catholic history.”  She writes:

The Claretians followed the migrations of misunderstood, vulnerable, and often maligned Spanish-speaking people. When the rest of America barely recognized the Latino people who worked the lowest paid jobs in the fields, mines, or steel mills and raised families in shacks and boxcars, the Claretians maintained a steady, supportive presence…When many dioceses ignored the catolicos in their midst, Claretians accompanied them wherever possible.

 

The United States as a mission field

In 2020, Kanter published Chicago Catolico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican, the story of the sometimes bumpy road that Spanish-speakers had to face seeking a Catholic home in their new city. It highlighted the major role the Claretians played in welcoming and ministering to them.

In her new book, Kanter explains that, during the Claretians’ first decades in the United States, when the U.S. was still considered a mission field, the priests and brothers who ministered to Spanish speakers were themselves immigrants, originally from Spain and later from Mexico. The congregation had been founded in Spain in 1849 by Anthony Mary Claret, later canonized by the church.

In parishes and missions from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to San Antonio, Texas, from Nashville, Tennessee, to Dodge City, Kansas, from Los Angeles to Chicago, the congregation served immigrants who, for the most part, had been born in Mexico and their families.

 

A second home

And, Kanter writes, Claretians and parishioners created new communities within larger urban settings where, initially, Mexicans and other Spanish-speakers had been, at best, ignored or overlooked.

For instance, she notes that Our Lady of Guadalupe, next to the steel mills, “became a second home as people from Mexico made lives anew.” The immigrants came to the church where their home language was spoken for weddings, baptisms, funerals and other important life events.

Most of the engaged couples came from different towns and states in Mexico, meeting only in a boxcar camp, the sugar beet fields, or under the towering steel mills. Together they would birth an emerging Mexican Chicago, with history in different parts of Mexico, but raised in Chicago…The parish, like the Claretians, embraced Mexican and American culture almost seamlessly in the mid-century.

A city like Chicago is a huge organism in which millions of residents as well as millions of suburbanites, to say nothing of tens of thousands of tourists and those passing through, interact to create a human society.

While urban planners often talk about the role that huge projects, such as the highway system, or transit facilities play in bringing this society into existence, the role of religious institutions gets relatively little attention.

 

Cultural glue

Kanter’s history of the American Claretians points up how important a church or a synagogue or a mosque can be to helping newly arrived immigrants create a new home.  Claretian parishes, she writes, “served as refuges for immigrant adults…and as spaces of Catholic Americanization for children…with their scout troops, schools, sports teams, and Halloween parties.” They were “the glue that connected immigrant parents and their US-reared children.”

Not that the congregation wasn’t without its flaws. Kanter notes that some members “held notions of racial difference and hierarchy (for example, white/European/Spaniard versus mixed race/indigenous/Mexican) that fueled a prolonged, fundamental ambivalence about the congregation’s purpose in the United States.”

She quotes from reports in the first decade of the twentieth century in which one Claretian said the indigenous people in Mexico were “naturally religious, but…also lazy and weak.” Another complained that it was nearly impossible to educate “the copper race” in Christian piety.

 

“Necessary to like and understand them”

Over nearly a century and a quarter, the congregation has gone into a range of new ministries, including missionary work in Guatemala, the police chaplaincy in Chicago and publications such as U.S. Catholic magazine. But it has never turned its back on serving low-income, Spanish-speakers, especially in cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles.

While some Claretians may have been racist and elitist, Kanter writes that many more were like Fr. James Tort, a dynamo writer, organizer and minister who wrote:

It is not enough for the Priests in charge of the Mexican people to speak well their language, Spanish, it is also necessary to like them and understand them, which is not so frequently found.

 

God’s work

In Pioneers of Latino Ministry, Kanter gives important insight into how a little known religious congregation did its work and evolved over nearly a century and a quarter in America. She shows how the Claretians and their parishioners worked together to create Mexican America, a community within the broader national society that is rooted in the United States but is enlivened by the cultural traditions and wisdom of the Mexican homeland.

As someone who once thought to spend my life as a Claretian, I’m filled with respect and admiration for the congregation’s priests and brothers, some of whom I’ve known.

Since 1902, they have labored to provide not just a religious home but also a hybrid cultural community to people who often found themselves oppressed and marginalized. And still do.

That surely is God’s work.

 

 

Patrick T. Reardon

10.1.25

 

This commentary first appeared at Third Coast Review on 10.7.25