Sacred Clowns

LeonPoodles, who usually blogs about church child abuse, is more upbeat today:

He visits a Pueblo and watches the Sacred Clowns.

celbrating the feast of ST Jerome.

No, I don't know if Jerome would be pleased, but St Gregory the Great would approve. He instructed St Augustine of Canterbury to allow and encourage what was good about the culture,when teaching the message of Christ, and not to forbid everything.

I found this part of his observation sad, because it is so true:

We went to mass at the pueblo – all pueblo women; the men were in the kivas. The priest gave a good sermon on the gospel “If your hand leads you into sin, cut it off,” by comparing it with the all too familiar surgery the Indians face. Their diabetes leads to gangrene and the amputation of a limb to save their lives.

I don't know that much about the Pueblos (when I lived in New Mexico, I worked with the Apaches and earlier a short time with the Navajo, both of which have very different cultures). But I understand that the clowns and Kachinas are ancestral spirits, not deities, so are compatible with Catholicism.

The original Spanish saw the kachinas and clowns and demons, and there were even rebellions by some Pueblos, but in more recent times, the priests realized they were not. (and most of the priests are now Franciscans, not theological nit pickers).

Which is why you always need someone to understand the culture before you forbid something.

When I worked with the Mescalero Apaches, the puberty ceremony, where the "mountain gods" visited the girls in a ceremony, was also originally forbidden.

Father Braun learned the "gods" were the ancestoral spirits, teaching the girls how to be women, and now Catholic girls, at least in Mescalero, can undergo the ceremony.

Some of my patients told me proudly how their parents helped cut the stones and build the church that you see if you travel up into the mountains from Alamagordo to Ruidoso.

Father Braun was at Bataan and in a local prison camp; so along with the memorials to Gernomino and other Apaches I was startled to see a plaque in memory of the NM National Guard who were in the Bataan Death march...and it wasn't just Father B but two local Mescaleros who were there...