Ethnic Catholicism

 

 

Conservative commentator Ross Douthat, who writes opinion pieces for the New York Times largely about Catholicism, once saw fit to tell us in print, in an op-ed I have not succeeded in finding, that his loyalty lies firstly with the Church. Loyalty to the United States comes second. I am mystified as to a) why he seems to think Catholic issues are somehow important to the news-reading public and b) how a person whose confessed loyalty is only secondarily to our polity should have any role at all in the opinion forming media, but I am willing to let those concerns go for now. Here's the thing: such talk hurts Catholics.

I carry no torch for the Church. I can candidly state my views towards it in pithy, Anglo-Saxon terms that you, the reader, really don't need to hear. Fact is, I am the descendant of Italian and Irish immigrants for whom the Catholic faith was a part of their ethnos. Anyone who knew me in the rash days of college would be amazed to hear it, but I am an ethnic Christian, descended from one quarter Catholic “stock”. At any rate, biblical stories about weird-beard folks in djellabas with names like Absalom and Uriah are not something I can identify with. I don't follow any of their fairy tales: it is a matter of identity.

It is this identity that Mr. Douthat puts in jeopardy when placing his Catholicism anywhere near the level of his patriotism. Catholics, like Jews, have been subject to a spectrum of discrimination ranging from insults to violence based on the perception of their split loyalty. In the case of Catholicism, this appears in part based on the very state-like structure of the Church-- a church that does in fact originate in its very own micro-state, the Vatican.

In the basic Know-Nothing scheme of 19^th century American xenophobia, Romanism-- an epithet for Catholicism-- was used similarly to how Communism is used today by the American extreme right. As Republicans today sometimes identify basic capital-D Democratic ideas as Communist if ever so slightly left of center, so too did old-time American nativists tar more liberal politicians as “Romanist” if their views did not sufficiently serve to oppress American Catholics.

The Ku Klux Klan also grouped Catholics with Jews. I'll choose this moment to mention that the United States' only Catholic president before Joe Biden was shot to death in a Southern city.

My Catholic ancestors are not hard to find. They rest in the (self-?)segregated Catholic cemetery of Oakland, California, a burial ground dwarfed by the nearby Mountain View Cemetery. A ten-foot tall obelisk announces the surname of one of the first people buried there, Cerini, a name recycled as my mother's given name.

As they lie separated from the "general population" in death, their grave mirrors another kind of social disadvantage they would have experienced in life. There are eleven bodies buried there, just as poor Catholics lived in overcrowded residential conditions, bearing at least 3 different surnames, both Italian and Irish, 2 of them are misspelled in cemetery records, reflecting a kind of bureaucratic apathy.

They are all dead. My connection with them is not. This connects me, in turn, to living Catholics-- to living Catholicism. Whatever discrimination they might have suffered in life cannot be justified as applying to the millions of Catholics I share the United States with.

I have no social connection to any more than a handful of modern, live Catholics. I have only an inkling of who among my friends “actually believes this stuff”, to quote my friends' most effective line against the Jehovah's Witnesses who plagued their porch for a time. My suspected Catholic friends probably just understand that no advocacy of any kind is asked for. Conversely, perhaps my aforementioned strong anticlerical views that I was not polite enough to keep under wraps as a hotheaded adolescent keep them silent.

The few I know-- and the many I don't-- share the ethnic identity of my grandfather's entire family. I have no desire to see them suffer socially for the expression of an opinion writer's divisive claims.

 

 

 Call me by my Name

 A Guide for Adults in Schools

Piet Bess

School is big and scary. Adults will ask kids to do strange things, and sometimes they will tell them what their name is, even to the point of calling them names they have never heard before. We, as adults, owe it to our students to use their given name, to pronounce it as well as we can with English sounds, and to help the child find their way to using it in writing, and, in very few years, adding their family name to it to make their full name.

 

Notice I did not use the phrases “first name” and “last name”. These common terms lead to confusion for all-- for students, for adults, and for institutions. Here’s what I have found.

Not everywhere do first names come first. The convention in Asian countries including Japan, Korea, and China put family names (so-called last names) first, the way English language conventions list names for easy alphabetization. They do not use a comma as we do. They don’t write Smith, John, but rather just Smith John. I do hear a pause in the Korean dramas I watch: Smith… John, but that may just be me. A failure to heed this convention led the director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, to address Kim Jong Un as “Mr. Un” a few years back. (If you have something clever to say about military intelligence at this point,  I’ll let you say it to yourself. I know I did.) Mr. Mike might have taken heed of the fact that North Korea had been led by 2 previous Kims, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. We have students from Korean families at our school. I assume that all of them, along with our students from Chinese language families, use the Jong Un Kim form dictated by our conventions. Except when entered on forms as Kim, Jong Un.

Asia may seem far away linguistically, though close in immigration terms and neighboring our country across the water. There are at least 2 countries from central or Eastern Europe that might seem closer to us culturally as huge numbers of immigrants came to the USA from that area in the 1800s. I confess they are the linguistically most distant European languages from English: Hungary and Finland. Both these societies use the Smith John form. So we would be talking about Orban Viktor. (I apologize for the use of dictators as examples.) At any rate, here we are with 2 regions where the first name and last name nomenclature breaks down: Eastern Europe and East Asia.

Now, given the fact that German immigrants constituted an immense plurality of immigrants to the USA in the 1800s, their naming conventions should be like ours. Still and all, I have experienced firsthand culture clash between my name and Germans still in Germany. My full name is Piet Culpeper Bess. At the German border, I was asked if Culpeper was Vornamen or Nachnamen-- first name or surname. “Es ist ein Mittlelnamen,” I scoffed. My direct translation of “middle name” into German may not have answered his question. It might have been easier if each of us had used a phrase like “given name”. A miscommunication between us arose, even though we could be said to be coming from very closely connected cultures, with my being a fluent German-speaking descendant of German immigrants long ago.

Let’s come closer to home. Spanish naming conventions should be familiar to us because of the presence of so many Spanish speaking members of our society, but often we struggle with this as an English-dominant  culture. Let me first state that I do not share the opinion of many that there is an English version of a person’s name. I do not think that Dah-VEED should be known as DAY-vəd. I may be less strict on this if it appears that the student does not viably speak Spanish. I try to use the name the student gives me, but in the case of David, he told me his family name was Rouis. I draw the line there. Ruíz is not ROO-iss, but Roo-EECE (This is an oversimplification. It would be more linguistically correct to say RWEECE, but Roo-EECE is good enough for an English speaker’s approximation.)

But back to family names. The basic naming convention in Spanish is personal name, family name of father, family name of mother. (This is such as I understand: I think there is about as much to know about family name conventions in Spanish language conventions as they would have you know about stressed syllable conventions!) So, Eduardo García Hernández’s main family name is the patronym García. This can cause problems. When I asked his subsequent teacher about him they said they had an Eduardo Hernández. (It would be really nice if we would all say Air-NON-dess instead of Her-NAN-dezz!) This reliance on the name-that-comes-last is a source of confusion. If there are 2 family names, you may use only the first one if you wish, without, as far as I understand, any negative connotation, unless there is emotional baggage about the father and the child does not want to use their name. (This is a true story in the case of 2 students I will not name, who appear to be disinterested in their fathers.) Students can also be unclear on the nature of their 2 family names. I had to disabuse one young Miss Gutiérrez Gómez  of the misconception that  Gutiérrez was her  "middle name".

Families may wish to hold on to that second family name. Perhaps that is the reason they hyphenate the 2 family names: Eduardo García-Hernández. With this, they use northern European convention to force both names to be recognized on forms and in use as one name. This is great! As far as I know, both Eduardo García-Hernández and Roxanne Lundin-Crittenden, a friend and former garden teacher in my school district,  can be addressed as Eduardo García and Roxanne Crittenden respectively without insult. In fact, Roxanne, a wonderfully incisive thinker, referred to her moniker as “one of those… annoying hyphenated names”. Roxanne may have been referring to the logistics of a long name, or perhaps to the use of such names among the upper middle class.

Incidentally, 2 online resources used by our students at my school display this kind of error. They list students by the name that comes last, rather than by their main family name, their patronym. This is annoying because, a) it puts them in a different order than our roll sheet, and b) it displays cultural insensitivity or ignorance. The hyphen removes the error! Both names occupy one field. This is an issue with coding as well as with culture.

Here is what usually happens when I ask students what their family name (singular) is. Instead of García, or similar, they write Aurora and Juan, or sometimes “mommy, daddy, Cecilia. They have not heard the phrase “family name” before and instead write all the names (plural) of the people in their family. If more of us would use the phrase, it might be easier for students to understand it.

Some cultures have members who only use one name. This includes, to my limited knowledge, Indonesia, smaller island states in the Pacific from which my school has students, and, Afghanistan. Incidentally, Burmese uses 3 names, usually, but all of them are unique: there is no one of their names that is shared among all or most family members. Our bureaucratic system, including the State Department states, “The visa will be issued as follows: Given Name: FNU; Surname: [John]”. FNU is an abbreviation used by the Federal government and our school system to mean “first name unknown”. Note that they use “given name” and the slightly more accepting “surname”, which, though it does mean the name that comes afterwards, is not so barefaced as “last name”. 

IF YOU HAVE A STUDENT IN YOUR CLASS LISTED AS FNU, PLEASE DO NOT CALL THEM “FNU”.

Here is an example of how alienating it can be. I asked a student what their name was and they said “Bnu”. They were listed as FNU on the roll sheet. I looked up the student’s language and found that their language does not contain an F sound. Here the student thinks that the school has the privilege of naming them--  we do not!!-- and is attempting to say the word the school says is their name. This is sadder than Dayvid Rouis’s case. FNU is not a name. It is a misnomer. In fact the family name is missing: we should say LNU. The child’s name is the other name besides FNU. Please use the student’s name in every case. After all, we would hardly deadname a trans student. That would be just as rude. To “deadname” someone means to use and/or insist on using their often heavily gendered birth-name despite their demonstrated desire to express their self-perceived gender. Henry would hardly want to be addressed as Anabelle. If you doubt this, put on the typical clothing of the opposite gender and go shopping for groceries. You will probably not be comfortable. Neither is Henry comfortable with their deadname.

I noted a method Spanish-speaking families can use to retain their student’s matronym: using an English-convention hyphen. There are 2 other things students can do to hold on to the features of their names. Sadly, bureaucratic systems will continue to obliterate the accented vowels and the Ñ. I ask that students with characters in their names not recognized on computerized forms use them every time in writing. Often, I need to use Wikipedia (wikipedia.es for Spanish-language content about people from Hispanic culture)  to look for famous people. Yanez is just not the same as Yáñez: one would say yon-ESS, the other, correctly, YON-yess. (Again, I am using approximate pronunciation to cater to English speakers, on the model of BBC radio’s effort to say all the sounds of a word in such a way as to approximate its sounds using English sounds.)

The Ñ case is fairly clear. The student may tell you that it is Yáñez, or you may ask their family, or you may use Wikipedia.es. The case of accent marks is a little more complicated. First of all, I have a real example from my friend David Cooper. On the first day of a Spanish 1 class at Shasta College in Redding, he called roll. When he came to a student whose family name was Pérez, she loudly and angrily corrected him: “It’s Per-REZZ”. It would stand to reason that her family had been in the English-dominant culture for long enough not only to assimilate, but also to forget their name’s pronunciation, PED-ess. They are not alone: I was taken aback when Kamala Harris announced that her running mate would be Tim Walls. His name, Walz, clearly should be pronounced Valtz, being as it is spelled in German. Here is what Spanish-speaking students can do to hold on to their accent marks.

First of all there is a matter of nomenclature. In García, the “accent” is on the Í, but in David the accented syllable is the the I. David does not need an accent mark because syllables ending in -D, -L, -Z, or -R do not need one. So, rather than saying the accent is on the I in David, we would have to say that -VEED is the “stressed syllable”.

While García has an accent on the Í, it has both an accent and an accent mark, I find it best to use the phrase “accent mark”. Oddly, this can also confuse students. When I asked a young Ms. García, a second grader, to put an accent mark on the I, she dutifully crossed it out. She heard that I wanted her to “put an X on” the letter. Along with “Bnu”, and Dayvid Rouis, she found it acceptable to comply with the bizarre requests teachers make of students. Her reaction shows that she was not accustomed to writing the Spanish language characters of her name. 

So, to recap: first name and last name are confusing, and should, in my reasoned opinion, be replaced by given name or personal name, and family name. Students should understand that the reason they have a family name is that other members of their families have the same name. Students can retain the orthography of their names by enforcing the orthography of accent marks and the Ñ. And teachers must respect their students’ names as their parents named them.