Hispanic Customs of the Lazo, Veil and Coins at Wedding Ceremonies Now Go Bilingual

By Norma Montenegro Flynn

The U.S. bishops recently approved translating into English liturgical texts used for the placing of the Lazo and Veil, and the giving of coins or “arras,” customs that are popular at weddings in Latin America and among Hispanics in the United States. This means that those adaptations that are now performed in Spanish upon request will soon be performed also in English if the marrying couple requests it.

Those customs, mainly practiced in Mexico, Central America and some countries in South America, are also part of our cultural Hispanic identification and another way we express our Catholic faith.

If you go to a Hispanic wedding, you will see some or all of these adaptations. The couple will give each other the coins or arras as they express to each other the commitment to care for the home and to provide for the family.

The Lazo symbolizes the new union through the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. It is usually incorporated after the marriage rite. The Maid of Honor and the Best Man or padrinos will place a double looped rosary on the couple’s shoulders. The priest then proceeds to say a prayer inviting the couple to reflect on and to follow the example of the Holy Family. If the veil adaptation is included, then the bottom of the veil is extended to cover the groom’s shoulders and the veil is held by the Lazo. The Veil the bride wears symbolizes chastity, and extending the veil over the groom’s shoulders represents the common call for a chaste and pure marriage.

For my wedding, I needed to include the placing of the Lazo, and explained to the priest

—and to my then future husband— that practicing this tradition was a way to express my Hispanic heritage and my Marian devotion, and I considered it a beautiful visual of the bond that was beginning to form. It also meant a lot to my mother and aunt who grew up embracing these traditions.

Guests who were not Hispanics ­­­­­­­­ —and even my husband and his family— did not know about these traditions, but expressed admiration and wanted to know more about them. They also wished they had understood the prayers, because the rite was performed in Spanish for the most part.

The translation of these cultural traditions will be of great help for couples when one of them is not Hispanic. It also will benefit people of Hispanic heritage who do not speak or are not fluent in Spanish and want to include these customs in their wedding ceremony.

These new translations show that the bishops are paying attention to our needs and embrace our cultural contributions to society.

Five Things To Remember On Dec. 4

1. The Pontifical Council for Social Communications has released information for broadcasters regarding worldwide telecasts of the events presided over by Pope Francis on Christmas and New Year’s Day. All times are UTC/GMT (Coordinated Universal Time/Greenwich Mean Time). Even the Pope's app will be live streaming.

2. Mother Dolores Hart used to be Elvis Presley's leading lady. She gets top billing for another reason now. Read about her journey in our latest guest blog.

3. In this video, Catholic News Service chronicles a "farmer who inspires two other families to join his pursuit to work the land, live out Catholic faith and strengthen family values."

4. Today is the 50th Anniversary of the promulgation of the first of the major constitutions of the Second Vatican Council by Pope Paul VI, Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.

5. God loves you.

From Kissing Elvis to Mother Superior

By Mother Dolores Hart, OSB

Religious life is meant for all who seek God no matter what they believe is their calling or vocation. But we have come to think this term defines a vocation to a particular religious order. I make the distinction because as I look back on my life, as I am doing in relationship to my book, “The Ear of the Heart,” I realize that I was seeking God or a “religious life” during my entire life.

At a very early age, six or seven, I was convinced that what I truly wanted was to be an actress. But now as I understand the depth of that call, I find I was really looking for a way to genuine communication between persons.

I grew up amidst human conflict. My parents divorced three times, marrying twice to try to find an answer to their problem of communication. As an only child I tried to know what the struggle was about. It drew me to listen more intently than my years might expect. And as I grasped the gap I witnessed between persons I learned to call on a greater Father who could intercede for me. It was an instinctive level of religious response, appropriate for my age.

My young life was complex. I was eventually separated from my mother, living with her only during summer vacation, until she remarried into a Jewish family when I was 11. Then I went to live with them in California, separating me from my grandparents whom I had come to love and who had in many ways become “parents” to me for 11 years. Fear of separation, cut deeply. And yet this proved to become a new opening for the call from God to hold deep affections in prayer to unite seeming opposites.

The Lord had His plan in drawing me as a teen to the San Fernando Valley, a few miles from Paramount Studios, MGM, 20th Century Fox and Columbia Studios.

Through an incredible stroke of luck I was chosen among many blue-eyed blonde hopefuls to play opposite Elvis Presley in “Loving You.” Our closing kiss would become a prayer in the hearts of many teenage girls for the next 50 years. It would plunge me into a fantastic film career playing with every major movie star in those naïve and wonderful years as a Hollywood adolescent. Indeed it was a flowering of my vocation to communicate with an adoring public.

It also opened my own heart to encounter the full meaning of the word “vocation.” In the shocking gift of God’s generous flow of grace, I was finally aware of the true meaning and call put before me. The extravagance of my Hollywood career only mirrored the extravagance of God’s creative love expressed through His Son. Truly the Lord was the actor “par excellence” born into the stage of human experience. I knew my own religious vocation had to be lived in the face of this truth. This became incarnate for me as I discovered the Community of Regina Laudis, in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Here I found Jesus Christ.

My vocation was never a matter of leaving Hollywood. Hollywood taught me to be an actress. Regina Laudis helped me to live the part for which I was born, within a monastic vocation.

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Mother Dolores Hart, a Hollywood starlet who became a cloistered nun, is author of The Ear of the Heart: An Actress’ Journey from Hollywood to Holy Vows.

Five Things To Remember On Dec. 3

1. Pope Francis will help launch a global campaign of prayer and action against world hunger.

2. With the National Religious Retirement Collection coming up this weekend, the USCCB Media Blog is featuring a series of blog posts by religious, including Sister Helen Prejean and Mother Dolores Hart, who tell what their religious life has meant to them. Sister Helen, you will remember, was portrayed by Susan Sarandon in "Dead Man Walking."

3. Our "For Your Marriage" website has some great tips for family activities to mark the season of Advent.

4. Our social media followers continue to submit photo entries on how they prepare for Christmas. Check them out on our Facebook.

5. God loves you.

Sneaky Jesus!

By Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ

We Sisters of St. Joseph have this maxim: Never leap ahead of grace. But when grace comes, follow it generously and faithfully. It’s like riding a wave, and I’m trying to stay poised on the tiny surfboard of my life, give or take a few wipe-outs, trying to listen to grace and be true to its call.

I slept through my baptism. But here was the first gift of grace, a loving Catholic Mama and Daddy, who brought me to St. Agnes Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and taught me to pray and to be quiet to listen to the nudges and stirrings of God’s Spirit. The spiritual life is a continual waking up to God, with the question: what? what? what do you want me to do?

That’s risky to ask of God. It brought me to death row, to stand up for some of the poorest, most despised people on earth.

When I joined the convent at 18, I didn’t know what lay in store. That’s how grace works – slowly, imperceptibly, building, steadily rising. It isn’t a smooth canoe ride. When asked to be a pen pal to a death row inmate, I thought all I’d do was write letters. I never dreamed Louisiana was going to electrocute this man – much less that I would be with him in the killing chamber and watch him die. When I wrote the letters we hadn’t had an execution in Louisiana in 20 years. I hadn’t even noticed that the Supreme Court had put the death penalty back. See what I mean? Sneaky Jesus. Of course, grace unfurls inside us as we need it. Not ahead of time. The truth is I didn’t have the grace then to shoulder it all.

Which brings me to my community. The Great Gift of Sisterhood is our prayer together, searching out our Gospel mission together, supporting each other and challenging each other to be generous in service to the poor ones, the despised ones, the elderly castaways, our besieged planet, abused children, battered women, immigrants, trafficked young men and women, and criminals and their traumatized victims.

If I didn’t belong to my congregation, I might have lived my entire life as a nice person, but never one who tackles huge issues of injustice. Without community I wouldn’t have the courage, or even the insight, in the first place. Through my community I awoke to justice as integral to the Gospel.

We religious expend our lives for people who need us. We entered religious life to serve and will do that until our last breath. New women join us as vowed members; and associates - women and men - share our spiritual life and our ministries. Not in crowds as in the 50’s and 60’s, but that’s okay. It’s a new day, and in God’s grace we are ever new.

With death row prisoners and murder victims’ families, I’ve met the cross. Mary gives me strength. After 25 years in this ministry I wonder how I made it through six executions and gatherings of victims’ families in a room so thick with pain that I could scarcely breathe. At every step, my Sisters have been at my side. When Patrick Sonnier was executed he needed a place to be buried – please, don’t let the prison bury me, they’re the ones killing me, he had pleaded, it was my Sisters who found a mortuary to prepare his body and gave him one of our burial plots, where Patrick rests to this day.

I look back and see God’s good grace that awakened me and carried me – all within my religious community, which may be in my life the greatest grace of all.

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Sister Helen Prejean is a Sister of St. Joseph of Medaille, whose life was featured in the movie Dead Man Walking. Currently she is writing a memoir, River of Fire, about the spiritual journey that led her to death row. Random House will publish it.

Five Things To Remember On Dec. 2

1. Advent began yesterday and the USCCB Advent Calendar is packed with daily action suggestions for people.

2. It began with Pope Francis in one Rome parish.

3. "In particular, I want to express my compassion and assure my prayers to all victims of sexual abuse and their families; I ask you to continue to support them along their painful path of healing, undertaken with courage," Pope Francis said Monday.

4. This week we launch a series of blog posts by religious who tell what their religious life has meant to them. It’s the right time for such posts since the annual National Religious Retirement Collection is slated for Dec. 7-8. Bloggers include: Sister Helen Prejean, Mother Dolores Hart, Brother Michael McGrath and Sister Jeanne Dolores Schmidt.

5. God loves you.

Preparing for annual National Retired Religious Collection

This week we launch a series of blog posts by religious who tell what their religious life has meant to them. It’s the right time for such posts since the annual National Religious Retirement Collection is slated for Dec. 7-8. The collection is taken up in parishes nationwide to help offset the more than four billion dollar retirement deficit faced by men and women religious in the U.S. who for decades poured what little earnings they had into ministries, such as education, social services, and health care.

Bloggers include:

Sister Helen Prejean, a Sister of St. Joseph of Medaille, perhaps best known for her book Dead Man Walking, which was turned into a movie by the same name starring Susan Sarandon, who played Sister Prejean. Sister Prejean speaks of “Sneaky Jesus,” who led her to correspond with a prison inmate and eventually to minister to those facing the death penalty. “I look back and see God’s good grace that awakened me and carried me – all within my religious community, which may be in my life the greatest grace of all,” she writes. Currently she is writing a memoir, River of Fire, about the spiritual journey that led her to death row. Random House will publish it.

Mother Dolores Hart, the Benedictine cloistered nun who stunned Hollywood decades ago when she gave up stardom to enter the monastery of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. She achieved notoriety on the silver screen when she gave teen idol Elvis Presley his first on-screen kiss. “The extravagance of my Hollywood career only mirrored the extravagance of God’s creative love expressed through His Son…,” she says. “My vocation was never a matter of leaving Hollywood. Hollywood taught me to be an actress. Regina Laudis helped me to live the part for which I was born, within a monastic vocation.” Mother Dolores Hart is author of The Ear of the Heart: An Actress’ Journey from Hollywood to Holy Vows.

Brother Michael McGrath, an Oblate of St Francis de Sales, whose unique art charms and inspires at the same time. “When I entered the Oblates, I just wanted to learn how to paint and pray, in that order. I never dreamed that one day I would find myself living and working in Camden, New Jersey, doing what I love more than anything else, surrounded by dear and encouraging confreres. When you open your heart and soul to the workings of the Spirit, when you discover the spirituality that works for you and helps you define your life and set your limits, then it doesn’t get any better than that.” Brother McGrath’s eleventh book, SAVED BY BEAUTY: A Spiritual Journey with Dorothy Day, (World Library Publications) was honored in 2013 with two first place awards: one from the Catholic Press Association and one from the Association of Catholic Publishers.

Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, 94, chaplain of the men’s basketball team at Loyola University, Chicago, speaks of her blessings. “Serving as chaplain to the basketball team is a special gift,” she says. “I never miss a game. I pray and reflect with the team and am always happy to discuss game strategy, scouting, our strengths and our weaknesses. As a team, we keep in mind Ignatius Loyola’s message to do all ‘for the greater glory of God,’ but we also have our own mantra: the 3 W’s: Worship, Work, and Win!”