"Church wall hiding Our Lady of Guadalupe mural brings protest
By Tina Griego 07/03/2010
The Sunday protests outside Our Lady of Guadalupe church are respectful affairs, as protests go. A couple-, three-dozen people, most of them women wearing white, sing and pray and chant: "Tear down the wall."
Church leaders built the wall along the center back wall of the altar about six months ago to cover a large mural of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Local artist Carlota EspinoZa painted it in 1976. As she tells it, a few years earlier she had a vision of Our Lady. It was accompanied by a large boom, which awakened her just as she was nodding off behind the wheel on a dangerous mountain road. "I opened my eyes and there was a huge bright light and there she was."
EspinoZa later approached Jose Lara, then pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe church, and offered to paint a small image. He had something larger in mind.
"You don't have to have a picture of a perfect Lady of Guadalupe like in Mexico," he remembers telling her. "Please paint a beautiful Chicana from north Denver."
La Virgen de Guadalupe stood as backdrop to three decades of Masses, baptisms, First Communions and funerals. It was witness to United Farm Workers meetings, to the fevered days of the Chicano movement, to visits by civil rights leaders. The church was a symbol of a fight for equality, and the mural was its emblem.
But times change, and so, too, do congregations. Spanish-speaking immigrants, more socially conservative, now fill the church. The current pastor and parish council decided to return the altar to its original appearance, to build a wall to hide the mural and center upon that wall a crucifix. This is in accordance with church norms calling for Christ to be at center altar, says Monsignor Jorge de los Santos, the archdiocese's vicar of Hispanic ministry.
It took a while for word of the wall to get out. It took a while longer for the women and men, most still practicing Catholics, several well-known in the archdiocese for their devotion, to challenge a priest.
It would be easy to oversimplify this. It could be said this is a story of the friction that arises between the Latino who has been here for generations and the Latino who is newly arrived.
It could be said that it is the story of how a parish has moved from the liberal-minded social activism that defined it for decades to an orthodoxy that focuses on cultural issues — abortion, gay marriage, contraception.
I have heard this framed by gender politics — the woman outside protesting the decision of a male hierarchy to hide Catholicism's most revered woman. Meanwhile, in the cathedral itself, a protester points out, the most dominant figure of the altarpiece is the Virgin Mary.
But the disagreement cannot be tidily compartmentalized. Three thousand people attend one of seven Masses at Our Lady of Guadalupe each Sunday. Five in Spanish. One in English. One bilingual.
It is true many longtime members left for other parishes, and some did so because they no longer felt part of the Guadalupe family.
But it is also true that the people outside protesting with their songs and their prayers are the same people who have worked on behalf of immigrants for years. It is true that some multigenerational Latinos in the congregation have no problem with the new wall and that some Mexican immigrants do. And it is also true that the archdiocese that supported a Boulder priest's decision to deny continued enrollment to a Catholic school student whose parents are gay is the same archdiocese that has drawn fire for championing immigration reform.
Father de los Santos tells me the people protesting are attached to the mural because of cultural issues and "the religion does not reside in the culture, but in the faith." Anyone who wants to see the mural can go behind the wall, he says.
He asks: How can controversy exist when 20 to 30 people, many former parishioners, protest, while the thousands who now fill its pews are fine with the decision?
"They don't have a problem with it because that's not part of their history," says Luisa Vigil, a longtime church member who wants the wall removed. "But the church belongs to the people, whether it's the new immigrant or the old Chicano, and it's important to recognize both are part of its history. The mural is part of that past."
The women do not plan to continue their Sunday protests. That first Sunday, they lined both sides of the sidewalk leading to the church and prayed the rosary in English. As Mass let out, a group of parishioners stood at the top of the stairs and took up their own rosary recital in Spanish. "A cacophony," is how this strange, sad confrontation is described to me.
The church that was, no longer is. One can find validity in each position here, but this is what stays with me:
The priest standing outside the church, blessing a family with holy water while the women in white sing and Ramon del Castillo, a supporter, watches. He had hoped for a public meeting, a chance for everyone to talk. He repeats something he said he told the parish council: "We should not be building walls. We should be building bridges. We are flowers from the same garden." (from (
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"Our Lady of Guadalupe was originally established in 1936 as a mission church under the leadership of the Theatine Fathers, a Religious Order founded by Saint Cajetan in 1542. Fr. Andres Burguera, C.R. founded the mission for Spanish speaking immigrants. On August 12, 1948 the church was dedicated as "Our Lady of Guadalupe" by Bishop Vehr. Today the church maintains the same special mission toward Latino immigrants, and remains under the leadership of the Theatine Fathers, whose arrival to the United States in 1906 has been entirely committed to the mission as well.
La iglesia de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe se estableció en 1936 como una misión bajo el liderazgo de los Padres Teatinos, Orden Religiosa fundada por San Cayetano en 1524. El P. Andrés Burguera, C.R. fue quien fundó esta misión para los inmigrantes de habla hispana. El 12 de agosto de 1948 se hizo la consagración de la iglesia como la conocemos ahora, por el Arzobispo Vehr. Hoy esta iglesia sigue teniendo esta especial misión con los Latinos y sigue bajo el liderazgo de los Padres Teatinos, quienes llegaron a Estados Unidos desde 1906 y desde entonces se han consagrado enteramente a esta misión con los inmigrantes Latinos." (from (
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den.org/ )