They lit candles, grasped rosaries and passed out poster boards and N-95 masks.
The 50 or so people gathered in front of Resurrection Church in Boyle Heights on Wednesday evening were getting ready to pray and fight for the Eastside once again.
For generations, the 103-year-old Catholic parish has been a beacon of solace and resistance for residents angry about the latest indignity to befall the historic heart of Latino Los Angeles.
The Lineage warehouse fire, which erupted a mile away nearly two months ago, still blankets the church every morning with the fetid stench of millions of pounds of rotting food that have yet to be trucked away.
“We pray because we have suffered for a century due to environmental racism,” said Sofia Quinones from the podium during the vigil. Around her stood people in T-shirts with the same illustration featured on the church’s bulletin that week: a phoenix representing Boyle Heights rising from the flames of a hellish warehouse.
Quinones paused for a few seconds as a loudspeaker crackling from an LAPD helicopter circling a few streets over ordered a shooting suspect to turn themselves in. “We ask that you open the hearts and mind of the powerful,” she continued. “We ask you, Lord, to help us.”
The faithful recited the Lord’s Prayer and a Hail Mary. Then, they marched from the Resurrection entrance to the school’s multipurpose room for a plática, or teach-in, on Lineage, singing in Spanish a song based on the 118th Psalm:
This is the day that the Lord has made Family of happiness Pueblo of happiness and joy Let’s walk to the meeting of the Lord
It was a stirring sight — and yet a sad one. If Resurrection Church is famed in Catholic and activist circles across Southern California, it’s because parishioners over the decades have had to deal with afflictions on the level of Job.
A proposed prison off Olympic Boulevard. Lead-spewing plants. Gang violence. Gentrification. The COVID-19 pandemic. ICE raids. Now, a burnt-out putrid warehouse that has devastated businesses and forced residents to remain inside their homes during a sweltering summer, as flies and giant rats infest the neighborhood.
“It’s kinda crazy what this parish has gone through,” said Father Jorge Moncada, who didn’t know about Resurrection’s history until he arrived last year on his first assignment as a priest. “They’ve been through a lot and carried a lot of burden. But they’ve responded, they have risen to fight against injustice again and again.”
The 29-year-old Moncada is quickly learning the ways of Resurrection under the legendary Monsignor John Moretta, better known as Padre Juan. In the rectory dining room before the vigil, the burly 85-year-old priest said he wasn’t fazed that his working-class parish has weathered so much since arriving in 1983.
“Sin never stops,” Moretta said in his distinctive gruff voice, a Roman collar peeking from his black guayabera. Earlier in the day, he and a busload of parishioners had testified at a South Coast Air Quality Management District hearing about how the Lineage fire had impacted their lives.
“Every time I think the problems are done, they start popping up again,” Moretta said. “But I’m an idealist. I can never live all these years in this parish if I weren’t an idealist.”
I scoffed. You really think things have improved in Boyle Heights despite the nonstop procession of problems, Monsignor?
“No,” he replied, “I know so.”
Resurrection’s battles read like a history of modern-day Latino politics in Los Angeles. The Mothers of East Los Angeles — the legendary women’s group that took on Eastside politicos in the 1980s and 1990s — was born in Resurrection’s pews. Members had fought off plans for toxic waste incinerators and power plants. Politicians from the late L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina to former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to L.A. City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado have sought Moretta’s counsel and helped parishioners in their various crusades.
Former Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo remembers being “wowed” when she held a community forum at Resurrection in 2016 that drew hundreds of people. They were outraged about the lack of government accountability surrounding the closure of the Exide battery recycling plant in nearby Vernon that had contaminated thousands of homes.
“It was both inspiring and surprising to see how quickly [the Resurrection] community organized around this issue,” said Carrillo, whose home parish is another historic Boyle Heights progressive powerhouse, Dolores Mission.
She credited Moretta for allowing Resurrection to flower but also noted that what makes the parish more activist than most of its Eastside sister churches is its proximity to unincorporated East Los Angeles, which is governed by the county.
“You have two groups of people with very different political representation fighting to be seen,” Carrillo said, decrying the game of hot potato that has emerged among Eastside elected officials in the aftermath of the Lineage fiasco. “Community doesn’t see that invisible border, but it feels it. That makes people want to be seen and work for a common goal, and Resurrection lives it.”
Moretta is 10 years past the customary retirement age for Catholic priests. He has no plans to stop.
“It’s easy for me to stay in this nice, air-conditioned room, know what I mean?” he joked. “But you gotta get your hands dirty out there. I think that that’s what’s the call [is] to be from God, you know?”
Moncada agreed.
“We [priests] are in persona Christi,” the Mexico City native said, referring to the Catholic concept of representing God and Christ in actions and words. “And if our people are in need, that’s what we should do — because that’s what Jesus would have done.”
He and Moretta joined their flock at the vigil but couldn’t attend the town hall that followed, led by Alma Marquez, founder of the Protect LA Now coalition that has become one of the most vocal critics of the Lineage response. The Huntington Park native and Monterey Park resident has participated in Resurrection campaigns since she was a teenager and was so inspired by the community’s witness to social justice that her daughter had her First Communion there.
“When this [Lineage fire] started, I called Father John and said we needed to do something,” Marquez said in a phone interview. “He was very clear this is going to be a long fight.”
She and her daughter have not lived in their home since the Lineage fire. The personal struggle and public fight against Lineage has rekindled her Catholicism, the 52-year-old said.
“I’m holding space for people’s pain, but also we’re able to hold on to the hope that our faith gives us, that’s strengthening us,” she said, tearing up. “We have the shared experience of this trauma and the shared experience of our love, and we feel protection from the Virgen de Guadalupe and Jesus.”
A framed image of Guadalupe hung in the Resurrection school multipurpose room along with one of Pope Leo XIII, hovering on each side of Marquez as she addressed questions and concerns from about 90 attendees for the next two hours.
People showed strange boils and rashes that volunteers photographed. People vented. They wept. They took notes. They organized.
They were first-timers and long-timers, old and young, and even non-believers like Dolores Mejia.
“It’s the essence of good here,” the 62-year-old retired teacher’s assistant told me after the session. “It’s everything that would bring me back to the Catholic Church.”
Cynthia Rios is a parishioner at Our Lady of Victory in East Los Angeles who stopped attending her regular 1 p.m. Sunday mass there because the smell from the Lineage warehouse is overwhelming. The 32-year-old is a member of the parish’s Guadalupana committee, which organizes the festivities and prayers around the Virgin of Guadalupe’s feast day every December. Rios drew cheers from Marquez and others when she vowed to connect with other Guadalupanos on the Eastside to organize a march against Lineage.
“We’re able to get a lot of people for Her,” Rios said in Spanish afterward, “and we can do the same for this.”
Nearby, Maria E. Morales — who led the procession from Resurrection’s steps to the multipurpose room — passed out fliers and talked to fellow parishioners who wanted to get more involved. The 69-year-old cancer survivor has attended Mass at Resurrection since she arrived in the U.S. from Mexico in 1982 and even after she moved from Boyle Heights to City Terrace in the 1990s. She listed off all the past actions she has participated in.
“We have awakened so many people, but there’s so many more people to awaken,” Morales said in Spanish. “My dad always said that without God, we’re nothing and not going anywhere.”
I asked how this go-around differed from previous ones. Morales looked around the now-empty room. The gleeful melodies of the church choir practicing next door seeped in.
“It’s small now,” she said, “but I guarantee: we’ll grow.”
The post The Lineage fire stunk up this Catholic church. Members are fighting back — again appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
