Introduction
On December 8, 1965, the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church was closed by Pope Paul VI. The Council had opened in October of 1962 and as the bishops met in Rome, writing, discussing, and voting on each document, the world of the 1960s outside the walls of the aulas raged on. The final documents, in some important cases, were shaped by the political and social contexts of the time.[1] The walls between the Church and the world became acknowledged for their porousness. Karl Rahner, whose theological works are unparalleled in their distinct influence on Catholic Theology in the 20th century, famously declared Vatican II as a recognition by the Church itself of its status as a “World Church.”[2]
Vatican II Studies, a discipline consisting mostly of historian-theologians, has used the language of post-conciliar French theologian Yves Congar in using the word “reception” to describe the way the Council was appropriated by local churches. For Congar, the possibility to study this reception “derives from a theology of communion, itself associated with a theology of local churches, a pneumatology and a theology of tradition and a sense of the profound conciliarity of the Church.”[3] Reception of every Council, including Vatican II is synonymous with its efficacy because the true impact of the Council does not depend solely on its promulgations, but rather on how those promulgations are lived out by local churches. Without a reception, the final documents are ineffective, and the experiences of the bishops are not overly or particularly interesting to either the historian or the theologian. Reception, then, is a key hermeneutic for understanding the Council. Joe Komonchak says something similar when he says that the Council can be viewed as an “event” or “episode in a series.” The Council did not happen in a vacuum and what happened before and after the Council tells the story of that series to make sense of that episode.[4] The Council only makes sense within the context of the one Church that exists at both the local and the universal level. It brings novelty to the Church, but it does not break the Church apart or shatter its existence. The Encuentros, as receptions of the Council, are carried out in the wake of this Church event and are thus here understood within that context.
Pope Francis’ pontificate has represented a new stage in the reception of Vatican II. His pontificate, it can be said, is another episode in the series on the Council. His concept of “synodality” flows from this new reception and comprehensive understanding of the Council. In 2020, he called for the Synod on Synodality and has thus triggered processes of writing, thinking, and living out synodality in the life of the Church. In many of the official documents of the synod, Lumen Gentium plays a prominent role. Synodality, in the document released by the International Theological Commission, was defined as, “the specific modus vivendi et operandi of the Church, the People of God, which reveals and gives substance to her being as communion when all her members journey together, gather in assembly and take an active part in her evangelizing mission.”[5] The Holy Spirit moving through the People of God takes on the role of protagonist in a synodal Church.
The Argentine theologian Rafael Tello explains that we cannot view this Spirit-led work and discernment of the People of God in the abstract. Instead, he adds, we must understand it as the concrete and particular way in which the Holy Spirit communicates. It is in the problems, concerns, and culture of the People of God where and how the Spirit manifests. In calling the Synod on Synodality, Pope Francis is taking synodality not as a thought experiment, but as a lived way of being Church. It will require conversion, creativity, and a broadening of our imagination, certainly, and might lead to the creation of new structures and entirely novel ways of being Church. It also, though, requires us to look at the history of our Church and ask ourselves what structures or events have served as synodal or proto-synodal examples for us within the Roman Catholic Church as it is. In the United States of America (the US), there is no better example of this than the first three National Encuentros of Hispanic Ministry.
In this article, I will argue that the first three National Encuentros for Hispanic Ministry[6], were ecclesial receptions of Vatican II that were embedded in the simultaneous Chicano Movement of the time. To study the Encuentros is therefore to study the Council and the Chicano Movement simultaneously, which means that this study falls at the intersection of Chicanx studies and Latine Catholic Theology.[7] My interest in the Encuentros as processes of synodality falls into this latter category. This claim is made not to be anachronistic, but instead to discern how the Encuentros act as sources for theological reflection for the contemporary Church. The conferences were processes of synodality, and with each one, new pathways formed for the Church in the US to invite more voices to the table and create a culture in which “the whole Church is a subject and everyone in the Church is a subject.”[8] The most important thing that these historical moments show us about synodality is that it is a process that requires the Church to open itself up to social movements. The Encuentros were receptions of the Council instigated not only by the event of the Council, but also the ongoing Chicano Movement. Therefore, the structure of the argument here attempts to isolate two (of the surely many) conflating factors, to bring them back together under a final understanding of how they relate to synodality. This last part is important in understanding how studying these gatherings is important for our contemporary Church. First, I will explain them in the context of the Chicano Movement, then in the context of the Council, to ultimately conclude that both contexts, and not just one or the other, make the Encuentros models of synodality.
The Encuentros in the Context of the Chicano Movement
The Civil Rights Movement and the now-called “second-wave” feminist movement were in full swing simultaneously in the 1960s and 70s. Social movements in the United States were causing great change in society. The Chicano Movement was part of these social movements and was growing as a national movement when the Second Vatican Council closed in 1965. Dolores Huerta and César Chávez were leading a movement that began with the migrant farmworkers in California and it was having ripple effects throughout many different sectors and communities. The Church was no exception. Of course, the Church had a presence in the movement through Catholic rituals, symbols, and through the embodied lives of the people in the movement. The Church hierarchy, as well, eventually supported the boycotts and unions (although it is still left to be debated if it was enough.) The history of the Encuentros, though, indicates that it was not only the Church present in the movement, but that the movement was also present in the Church. Timothy Matovina, a historian of the Hispanic/Latine Catholic Church in the United States, in his book Latino Catholicism: Transformation in America’s Largest Church writes, “[t]he growing ferment for social change influenced Latino Catholic activism and directed its energies within the church itself.”[9]
By the time the First Encuentro started in 1972, Catholic religious sisters and priests had already been organizing. At the First Encuentro, Sister Clarita Trujillo, the only woman to give a talk, spoke about the group known as Las Hermanas.[10] Couched in a workshop about the role of Spanish-speaking women in the Church, Trujillo explained that Las Hermanas were women interested in forming themselves to be able to serve their own communities but that their congregations were not letting them, and instead were relegating them to work with white upper middle-class children. Las Hermanas was founded a year before the First Encuentro in 1971 in Houston. Many of the group’s members were active in the Chicano Movement, joining the front lines of marches. In the only book-length work on the women so far, Lara Medina (2004) refers to the women as a “religious-political” movement.[11] This hyphenated way of describing them draws attention to the way that Las Hermanas were engaged both in and outside of the Church with struggles of liberation. Hermana Teresita Basso told Medina the story of the way participating in school board sit-ins led to a “lifelong commitment to the advancement of Chicano communities.”[12]
PADRES (Padres Asociados por los Derechos Religiosos, Educativos, Sociales) was the male counterpart to Las Hermanas. The group was founded in 1969, two years before Las Hermanas, and was made up of Spanish-speaking priests. Las Hermanas were admittedly more political,[13] but that tracks well with feminist groups in general, given that feminism, at least in the way Las Hermanas understood it, was not only a religious project, but also a political one (and the reverse is true, not only a political, but also a religious). For PADRES, their main concern was the lack of representation in the hierarchy. Both groups pointed to the fact that only 17 percent of US Catholic population in 1970 were Irish and yet, 56 percent of the Catholic bishops were of Irish descent.[14] The first Hispanic Bishop in the US, Bishop Patricio Flores, was named in 1970 and was a core member of this group. One of the cited reasons for the founding of the group was, “the example set by young Mexican Americans on college campuses and the barrios.”[15] Matovina cited an interview with Virgilio Elizondo, a founding member of the group and a key figure for the story of Latines in the Catholic Church and Latine theology, in which Elizondo said that the movement’s direct reproaches of the Church had forced him and others to take a more critical look at the inner functioning of the Church.[16]
The relationship of actors in the Chicano Movement with the Catholic Church was complicated, found its ebbs and flows, and was not uniform across groups within the movement or within the Church. David Montejano follows in the footsteps of most historians of the Chicano Movement in telling the story of those in the movement who “acknowledged the Catholic Church as an oppressive institution.”[17] He even makes the argument that the Church was hesitant to support the movement in part because there was a worry that the movement was not just for labor rights, but also a racial-ethnic nationalism.[18] However, the narrative of PADRES and Las Hermanas tells us something true about most histories: it is more complicated. In fact, PADRES, frustrated at the slow movement of the Bishops conference, announced the possibility of a national Chicano church.[19] At the First Encuentro, Bishop Flores gave a moving speech where he compared the Hispanic experience of being in the Church with that of a mother who has abandoned her children. He framed these remarks as “constructive criticism” that came from an undying love for the Church, not as a rejection to the Church all together.[20] Whether the term “nationalism” can be attached to Flores and those at the First Encuentro is debatable, but it is clear that the fight went beyond labor rights and was certainly intertwined with their own growing racial-ethnic identity as distinct from that of other Catholic ethnic or cultural groups. Their great love of the Church was intertwined with this growing identity. This reality did not take away from the radicality of their activism.
PADRES and Las Hermanas, with their rising social consciousness attained through the Chicano Movement had clear goals and used the Encuentros to achieve them. It is not surprising, given their presence and organization, that the conclusions of the First Encuentro make their support of the Chicano Movement clear, stating the following:
All members of the Church should lend their full support to the obtaining of justice by all oppressed persons. In particular, all members of the Church and all ecclesiastical institutions are urged to boycott buying or eating iceberg lettuce — except union labeled — in support of the efforts of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO to obtain living wages for migrant agricultural workers.[21]
The conclusions of the First Encuentro do not mince words. The Church, which includes all its members, should be supporting the boycotts. Additionally, though, not only do the conclusions call for boycott, the delegates also insist that all members of the Church, including bishops and the episcopal conference, must protest and work against unjust immigration laws that result in poor working conditions and the expansion of the Cuban exception laws to members of all Latin American countries.[22] It should be noted that this direct and active call to engage in immigration reform as a top priority is prophetic even for today’s episcopal conference.
The Second and Third Encuentros, although already in the late 70s and early 80s, were products of this first initial push to raise the consciousness of Hispanic/Latine Catholics. Much like the Chicano Movement itself during these years, the movement was beginning to transform. The Second and Third Encuentros, however, did continue to push for more representation and open the pathways to more participation for Hispanic/Latines in the Church. In conversations with people who were either at all three or at least at two of the Encuentros, the phrase “consciousness raising” was used more for the Second Encuentro than any other. While the first was perhaps more explicitly connected to the political movement, because of its weaker showing of the average Hispanic/Latine Catholic, it was the second that truly brought Hispanic/Latine Catholics together in the same room, same place, recognizing themselves as one group. It was here, as Hermana Dominga Zapata recalls it, where many Hispanic/Latine ministers across the country realized that each other existed.[23]
In this Second Encuentro, Hispanic/Latine peoples were asking to be included as full, active members of the Church. One of the lines that sticks out most in the final document is found under the heading “Unity in Plurality and Evangelization.” The planning committee wrote as a proposal, “[t]hat the church at the grassroots, diocesan, regional, and national levels enforce the concept of integration rather than assimilation.”[24] This language of integration over assimilation echoed much of the scholarship of the Chicano Movement, which emphasized the radical move against assimilation. Marc Simon Rodríguez, in his book Rethinking the Chicano Movement, explained that the Chicano Movement, even in its most radical forms, was not a full out rebellion, in so much as it was a move to “reject the outmoded view of early twentieth-century assimilation” and worked for a “maintenance of culture, language, and social practices amongst minorities.”[25] That’s precisely what the Second Encuentro was calling for and did within the Church—demand a recognition of a distinct way of being Hispanic/Latine and Catholic that could not be simply melted into a generic way of being Catholic in the US.
The Chicano Movement was a major splash in the water in the United States. It reached the Catholic Church by way of Hispanic/Latine priests, sisters, and lay people who were recognizing themselves in the movement. They saw resonances in the movement’s goals not only for themselves, but for those whom they served with as ministers of the Church. The Encuentros, however, were not solely a product of their increased attention and identification with the plight of Hispanic/Latine peoples in the United States. The ecclesial gatherings were also the result of the simultaneous reception of the Council in the United States, which opened the door for a more participatory Church where these concerns could be brought to the table. The Encuentros in the context of the Second Vatican Council is where I will turn my attention to next before going into how the confluence of this moment makes them sources for contemporary theological reflection for Pope Francis’s vision of synodality.
The Encuentros in the Context of the Second Vatican Council
The Encuentros were the lived experience of the Second Vatican Council for Hispanic/Latine Catholics in the United States. In this section, I argue that the Encuentros represented one fundamental way Hispanic/Latine Catholics received the Council in their local context. A theology of communion between the universal and local Church is the basis of Congar’s idea that the reception of the Council is what gives the Council meaning. In this way, the Encuentros were separate from the Council (necessarily, or else they could not be receptions, they would only be extensions), and they were and are necessary for the Council.
The Encuentros were carried out within the context of the major historical event of the Council. Komonchak explains that to answer the most basic questions about the Council, we must understand the three levels at which we can study the Council: event, experience, and the final documents.[26] The experience and final documents are studied through archival research of the Council itself through the diaries of those in attendance and redaction histories of the documents. The three are, of course, deeply interconnected. To study the Council as an event, though, is to study its novelty, according to Komonchak, that the Council brought to the Church. The Council’s significance, therefore, is understood through the changes in the local communities that resulted from the appropriation of each local community.
The camp of scholars and ecclesial officials Komonchak calls “reformists” emphasized the Church pre and post Council as one and the same Church. The Council studied as an event, and its reception understood as an integral part of it, highlights the opposite, the rupture, and change. In the United States, the Encuentros were the evidence of this break and an affirmation of a Church that emerged into the modern world. Hispanic/Latine people led the charge to begin thinking about their own roles in this new way of being Church.
In the most comprehensive work written on the Encuentros, Mario Paredes connected the Encuentros (capital ‘e’) with the encuentros (lowercase ‘e’) carried out by the Episcopal Conference of Latin America (CELAM). Edgard Beltrán, who had worked at CELAM and was present in Medellín in 1968, is credited for the inception of the Encuentros when he told Fr. Robert Stern about his idea to hold a conference for Hispanic/Latine peoples in the United States so that they too might be able to discuss the implications of Vatican II in their communities.[27] In this gathering Hispanic/Latine Catholics in the United States became aware of their role in the Church as protagonists in its mission. The conclusions of the First Encuentro state, “Spanish speaking American Catholics, convinced of the unity of the American Church and of the values of our proper heritage, are impelled by the Spirit to share responsibility for the growth of the kingdom among our people and all peoples of our country.”[28] Hispanic/Latine people became aware that not only did they deserve to be seen or listened to and represented in the hierarchy, but the Church also prevented them from fulfilling their baptismal responsibilities. In all three Encuentros, the formation of Hispanic/Latine pastoral leaders was a key consideration, including priests, religious, and lay people. Las Hermanas took formation seriously, and sent many of their members to the Instituto Pastoral Latino Americano in Quito, Ecuador.[29]
The Church’s Dogmatic Constitution in the Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium, stressed the importance of all people of God as full members of the Church, with both rights and responsibilities, meaning the whole Church and not just the Bishops. The document states the “faithful are by baptism made one body with Christ and are constituted among the People of God.”[30] By baptism, and more perfectly unified to the Church through Confirmation and the Eucharist, all members of the People of God “are in their own way made sharers in the priestly, prophetical, and kingly functions of Christ.” This document and the document of the conclusions of the First Encuentro agree, “[the baptized] carry out for their own part the mission of the whole Christian people in the Church and in the world.”[31] Every member of the People of God, “from the bishops down to the last of the lay faithful”[32] have a role to play in the life and mission of the Church. Lumen Gentium offered the Church the possibility not only of laity in the so-called “secular” world, but also of well-formed laity leading the Church. By stressing representation and formation, Hispanic/Latine Catholics were taking up their roles in the Church as baptized members of the People of God.
The Encuentros embodied what it meant for the Church to be in the world, not apart from or above the world. Grassroots movements like Las Hermanas and PADRES were calling on the Church to be a part of the Chicano Movement, to empower Hispanic/Latine peoples and to hear the cry of the most marginalized. The Encuentros can and should be considered as a part of the Chicano Movement. The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes states “[t]he Church recognizes that worthy elements are found in today’s social movements.”[33] Carlos Shickendantz, an Argentine theologian whose work has focused on the Council, explains that through the document of Gaudium et Spes, the Church was inaugurating a new methodology, a new way of being in the world, a new way of doing theology. The “signs of the times” of which the Church must be attentive to each generation was a call, according to Shickendantz, for an inductive method.[34] The Church was tasked with moving from the particular to the universal, rather than the opposite. Pastoral work, working with people, rather than dogma came to be valued. The Church was therefore being called to listen. Instead, The Council, by changing the culture of the Church to be more pastoral, elevated the status of social and political movements like the Chicano Movement. The Encuentros, however, not only dealt with things that also concerned the Chicano Movement, but pastoral necessities in general, including the organization of pastoral networks. Pastoral en conjunto, pastoral work done in communion with other communities and with multiple members of parish communities, was a dominant theme. In the wake of the Council, the Encuentros represented a Church using this inductive method to understand itself and its own theology. The plight of the Spanish-speaking people were not problems to be solved by an all-knowing Church, but, as the Encuentros showed us, were clamors for justice and cries of the poor, to which the Church as a whole must listen.
The Encuentros were an “episode” in the series of the Council. The Council must be understood more broadly than its final documents or the historical accounts of the experience of attending. The Council was an event that changed the trajectory of the Church, from the local to the universal. By understanding this, we see the Encuentros as not simply products of the Council, a historical reception, a one-to-one or word-for-word reception. Instead, we gain perspective on both the Encuentros and on the Council. The novelty and rupture that the Council produced become more pronounced when we study the way Hispanic/Latine peoples responded to their context and took up their place in the Church in a way they had never before.
The Encuentros as Processes of Synodality
Synodality is a word that, while it has ancient roots, has come to be the novelty that defines the papacy of Pope Francis as the first Latin American pope. His convocation of the Synod on Synodality from 2021-2024 (originally, 2020-2023, but changed because of the pandemic) was not a shock to scholars or followers of Church happenings given the Synod on Young People in 2018 and the Synod of the Pan-Amazon Region in 2019. In both cases, Pope Francis opened the Synod of the Bishops in ways that were consultative, inviting young people, religious sisters, and indigenous leaders to join the bishops. While they were not voting members, the presence of these people remains historic. The Synod on Synodality has as its stated purpose an “exercise of mutual listening, conducted at all levels of the Church and involving the entire People of God.”[35] It is not, therefore, a survey of the Church or ethnography, but a “listening to the Holy Spirit.”[36] There is a belief that, as Lumen Gentium teaches, the People of God have the power to determine issues of faith and that in the act of listening to one another, including the Bishop of Rome and all other bishops, as well as to the signs of the times, the Church learns from this wisdom.
The Synod’s name itself indicates that the task of the bishops here is unique in modern history—the task of the Synod is to determine what synodality is, what it means, and what it looks like in concrete ways for the Church of today’s world. Synodality is not a foreign entity to the Church, but one that must be rethought in a vocabulary contemporaries can understand. By recovering the Encuentros as processes of synodality, then, the hope is that we might add some necessary “flesh on the bones” of synodality. The Encuentros are processes of synodality because of the work they did inside of the Church as processes opening the Church to the voice of Hispanic/Latine people. Because of the work of grassroots movements, the Encuentros also became concrete contact points between the Church and the world around it.
With each of the three Encuentros, the consultation of thousands of people became more effective and systematic. The Encuentros were processes, not moments or isolated events. As processes, they created environments in which, “the whole Church is a subject and everyone in the Church is a subject.”[37] The Encuentros also demonstrated that conflict is inevitable and a growing pain for a transforming Church. However, the aim is not to dwell in conflict but to work together.
The First Encuentro, in 1972, included an open and honest discussion on the need “to analyze the present pastoral situation in the Hispanic American community.”[38] The First Encuentro was essentially a gathering of the Church hierarchy. Clerics made up about 77% of the attendants of the First Encuentro. Of the 251 people present, about 69, or less than 30% were women, less than 17% were lay women.[39] Despite this rather poor representation of the People of God, there were two outcomes that are important to the story we are telling here. After the First Encuentro, Bishop Flores was consequently joined by seven others Spanish-speaking bishops in the episcopate.[40] One significant outcome of the First Encuentro was the elevation of the Division for the Spanish Speaking to a National Secretariat of Hispanic Affairs, headed by laymen Pablo Sedillo.[41] It was this office that paved the way towards the Second Encuentro.
The National Secretariat appointed a Planning Committee that brought the Second Encuentro to life. This Encuentro prioritized broad participation of the bases, and it took on the theme of evangelization, a theme Pope Paul VI praised in his opening message to the participants of the Encuentro.[42] Paredes wrote that the “schema for the process of compilation is: Base—Diocese—Region—National Synthesis (the Working Document)—workshops—plenary sessions—coordinating committee—publication of Final Document—translation.”[43] The USCCB official numbers have about 1,200 people participating as delegates to the actual Encuentro.[44] The organizers themselves boldly exclaimed in the Proceedings of II Encuentro, “[t]his process may well appear in history as the major step taken up to this moment by the Hispanic/Latine sector of the Church in the United States before the country and the world.”[45]
It is in this Second Encuentro where what I call the “rawness of synodality” can be seen most clearly. It is here where we can see the chaos of a Church that was only beginning to recognize the visibility of the Spirit that moved within it. Sr. Yolanda Tarango, who was a leader of Las Hermanas, and whose conversations with me over the past years have been instrumental to this project, described the scene in such vivid detail. She explained the way people came from all over the country on the back of pickup trucks. Dioceses that had signed up twenty-five people showed up with seventy-five.[46] Others described scenes of breakout sessions that erupted into chaos when the crowd overpowered the speaker’s voice. Farmworkers grabbed microphones to tell bishops what they wanted to see in the Church. Often, the farmworkers spoke in Spanish, and the bishops only knew English, so translation was required.[47] This is a beautiful image, indeed, of a universal Church whose members were actively engaged in a culture of encounter, despite real barriers such as language. It put Hispanic/Latine people— farmworkers, lay leaders, priests— squarely in front of the bishops. Moises Sandoval writes, “the encuentro became a vehicle to confront the Church.”[48] Most of those present at the Encuentro did not seem fearful of the chaos. The Encuentro became a place where confrontation happened, conflict bubbled up, and people were allowed to speak.
The most important outcome of the Second Encuentro was the creation of a National Advisory Committee, consisting of priests and laity, that began advising the National Secretariat of Hispanic Affairs.[49] Just as with the First Encuentro, we see that the Second Encuentro created channels for the further participation of Hispanic/Latine people in the Church. It is this committee that ultimately calls for the Third Encuentro.
In December 1983, the bishops published the pastoral letter The Hispanic Presence: Challenge and Commitment. In it, they name some socio-political and economic realities of Hispanic/Latine people, took stock of the Second Encuentro, and called for the Third Encuentro.[50] By explicitly naming the Second Encuentro, there was again a recognition that these three Encuentros were processes building one on the other, not simply isolated events. The Encuentros were episodes in a larger story, hinting back again at the event of the Second Vatican Council.
The participants’ theme was “reflecting on a model of the Church as missionary and participatory.”[51] Those two words—“missionary and participatory”— are two of the three themes the Vatican has chosen for the current Synod on Synodality. The Third Encuentro, revolving around this idea, created structures in which delegates were called to understand themselves within a larger structure of Church. The mission of the Church was in their hands and the participation of those whom they represent is important to that mission. Again, at the Third Encuentro, there was noticeable conflict.
Grassroots organizers criticized the Third Encuentro at the time, and continue to do so now, for its stringent procedures. In contrast to the Second Encuentro, grassroots movements did not get a formal seat at the table and their participation was based on their status as diocesan agents, not as leaders of grassroots movements. Medina wrote of the Third Encuentro, “while institutional validation might appear as advancement in the struggle for recognition and respect, for some it meant closer scrutiny that would diminish the voices of grassroots communities.”[52]
Still, Las Hermanas took on the task of holding their own conference that encouraged more women to become delegates. On a diagram describing the process of the Third Encuentro handed out at a diocesan event, one member of Las Hermanas jotted down some notes, “What will be our role?”[53] indicating that they were not going to shy away from participating, but only took up their role with pastoral sensitivity. Their conference Hacia el Tercer Encuentro (Towards the Third Encuentro) took place in the preceding days of the Third Encuentro in Washington D.C. and allowed women to reflect on what mattered to them most. By the time they got to the conference, the women knew not only what was important to them but had articulated ways to communicate it. Las Hermanas modeled a Church that did not speak for the marginalized, but rather gave the marginalized tools to speak for themselves. That is what a synodal Church invites.
This Encuentro, despite real limitations, was an impressive show of synodality. However, its story is incomplete without the story of the first two. Synodality does not forego tangible change, but it is not exclusively outcomes based. The process of coming together, of engaging and encountering one another, which takes time, in this case more than a decade, is inherently valuable. Conflict is, if not inherently good, entirely inevitable in such a process. The sheer number of people consulted and presented at each Encuentro also grew. While the First Encuentro saw a total of 250 participants and minimal consultation of the bases, the Third Encuentro had a consultation process of about 600,000 people before the conference even began.[54] The Encuentros built up a core leadership of Hispanic/Latine ministers, lay and ordained, with 11% of the delegates of the Third Encuentro having participated in the First, 13 years before. Additionally, 21% participated in both the Second and the Third.[55]
The Encuentros were processes of synodality not only because of their word inside of the Church (ad intra), but also because of the way Hispanic/Latine Catholics worked to make the novelty of the Council dialogue with the world that surrounds the Church (ad extra). Grassroots movements within the Church worked to make this happen in their religious-political activism. It was not as simple as saying that they had one foot in the Church and one foot in the world because they understood that the Church was a part of the world. They understood that to have two feet firmly planted in the Church was to allow yourself to be called towards the cries of the poor and the marginalized. In doing this, they not only “opened up the windows to let in fresh air,” as the Council is often said to have done, but also opened the doors to allow the poor and marginalized to walk in. In this way, they continued the work of the Council as Pope Francis is attempting to do with his concept of synodality.
Conclusion
In a collection of essays that are written to give depth and assessment to the National Pastoral Plan that comes out of the Third Encuentro, Virgilio Elizondo explained the Encuentros as necessary moments in which Hispanics/Latines in the United States became aware of their status as People of God. He wrote, beautifully, “the theological awareness of the Hispanics in the United States begins to spring up: we are a People.”[56] The Encuentros formed a consciousness in Hispanic/Latine peoples that by their own baptism, they were members of the People of God. These gatherings, in 1972, 1977, and 1985 by and for Hispanic/Latine Catholics in the United States gave relevancy and efficacy to the Council and were also products of a new forming identity in Spanish-speaking Catholic priests, sisters, and laypeople of their own Latine identity. This identity continues to be shaped and formed today in the first quarter of the twenty-first century as a legacy of these earlier events. The Encuentros were concerned with the internal structures of the Church and the social movements that surrounded the Church, specifically the Chicano Movement. These two factors and not just one or the other make them particularly attractive candidates for fleshing out what a synodal Church might look like. The Chicano Movement and the Council worked in tandem to organize the priorities of Hispanic/Latine Catholics.
Synodality cannot exist as an ahistorical process void of any understanding of the Church as it exists in the world, a World Church. We must consider the social movements of our time and what the most oppressed are telling us, not only about themselves, but about us, about our Church structures and our theologies. To tell the narrative of the Encuentros is to remember differently than we might if we ignore them. It is to tell the story of a people who discerned the Spirit moving through them, saw the grace before their eyes in the Chicano Movement of their times, and rose to participate more strongly, more fully, in their Church, thus fulfilling their own baptismal vows.