At 10:05 every Tuesday and Thursday morning, Father Pardo checks his watch, crosses himself and recites an “Our Father” and a “Hail Mary” aloud to our theology class. He simply closes his eyes and begins, unconcerned with offending his students. The prayer is not a rhetorical device, though. He expects the believers in the class to recite the prayers alongside him.
This isn’t Georgetown I’m describing; it’s a course at Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. I’m one of two foreigners in the class. If this were Georgetown, I might cringe; I might be scandalized. I was born a Presbyterian, after all, but I struggle with the Lord’s Prayer even in English.
But, here in Chile, the presence of Catholic Church has been so pervasive in daily life for so long that it goes largely unnoticed. For a while I would ask my fellow students if they found classroom prayer disconcerting, but they were surprised at the question. “It’s a theology class,” they said. “What did you expect?”
Chileans, my program directors told me, love to dissect and analyze their national psyche. Although most describe themselves as Catholic, few attend mass regularly. Not surprisingly, half of my theology class usually sits quietly with me, either ignorant of the words or quietly recusing themselves.
But classroom prayer was the least of it. During Holy week, La Católica decorated its campuses with dozens of wooden crosses—and hung a crown of thorns from each. No matter what I did,—go to class, read on the lawn, buy a Coke—reminders of the passion loomed over my shoulder. The week before, the university authorities even hung a anti-abortion banner on a statue of Christ the Redeemer at the main gates. The design had two halves, one white (“the day before”) and one black (“the day after”).
My Chilean friends told me they had not thought about the decorations as potentially offensive. After all, the university celebrated Holy Week the same way every year, and everyone knew the Church was opposed to abortion.
Looking back, I could not remember Georgetown ever being so candid about its positions on controversial issues. Georgetown, though it’s explicitly Jesuit, usually keeps the opinions of its non-Catholic students in mind. When it forgets them, it stirs up a war of words, as we displayed last week’s drama with the student group H*yas for Choice.
Why weren’t the Chileans vocally supporting their fellow students who didn’t belong to the Catholic Church?
I was wrong, I now realize, to expect an American response to a Chilean question. Who would the students be defending? 95 percent of Chileans claim white or mestizo origin, and only 10 percent are not “Catholic.” Perhaps, I thought, this lack of concern was the very proof of a Chilean identity increasingly independent of the Church.
Chile, in fact, just inducted a socialist, agnostic divorcée into the presidency. Perhaps the forceful imagery of the banner and the crosses was a heavy-handed attempt to remind Chileans of their collective roots—the Church was fighting not to be overlooked.
I began to respect the religious imagery as a part of this university’s culture, ignored or not. But it reminded me how much I miss America’s diversity and the manner in which we as a people constantly reassess our values—vocally, publicly and confrontationally, rather than with quiet indifference.
In many ways, our proud diversity was something I overlooked back home—only occasionally pausing to listen to all of the foreign tongues spoken on the Metro, or to recognize the distinct backgrounds my own friends come from. Chileans, on the other hand, are a much quieter people. And if the Catholic Church is slipping into the past, they will watch it do so quietly.
