Hispanics speak about their spirituality and their relationship to their parents' beliefs.

SAN FRANCISCO (By Aracely Sifuentes, Pacific News Service) April 20, 2005 - The old pope, John Paul II, was lauded in the media as a "Global Pope," a "Pope of the Youth," and an "ambassador for peace." The truth is, he didn't have any real influence on the spiritual lives of young Hispanics like me. Can a new pope, supposedly even more conservative, even come close to reaching us?

In the Bay Area and throughout California, I see young Hispanics abandoning Catholicism, not embracing it.

I grew up in a traditional Mexican Catholic family. I went to Catholic school, attended mass, received my first communion - I was even in the church choir. But five years of college opened my eyes to different ways of thinking. Once I understood that the Catholic Church was a major player in the mental and material colonization of the Americas, I became turned off to the institution altogether.

Though it is assumed that young Hispanics like myself are Christian like our parents, we are a new generation. Most people don't realize that we are creating our own forms of spirituality.

For Adrian Avila, 20, of San Jose, spirituality is a mix of Catholicism and indigenous practices. He was raised Catholic and still attends Catholic mass -- for his mom's sake, he says - but recently he has been participating in sweat lodges. In this indigenous ceremony, hot stones are placed in the center of a tent and water is poured over the stones to create steam. The participants sing, sweat and emerge from the lodge cleansed of physical, mental and spiritual impurities.

This ceremony "seems more relevant to my time," Avila says. "You are learning lessons from the past. They are accumulated and brought to the present."

Unlike Christianity, which places everything in a context of good and evil, indigenous spirituality views the world as multifaceted and complex. It emphasizes maintaining a balance of the elements within ourselves and the world. At one point in college I also embraced indigenous spirituality. But because my family was becoming more and more rooted in Evangelical Christianity, it wasn't easy. If they saw me worshiping the sun and the moon they would have thought I was going to hell for sure.

For Jackie Melendez, 25, of Los Angeles, Sunday mass provided an opportunity to spend quiet time with her grandmother. At church, Jackie's "Nanny" could gather the strength she needed to survive the effects that poverty, violence and drug addiction had on her family and friends. For Jackie, mass was not a spiritual experience, nor did it influence her decision-making. Growing up, she saw how people around her hurt each other, and decided she would live her life differently.

"I saw the raw side of life and I just knew I didn't want to be like that," Jackie says. "God has never shaped my behavior." According to Jackie, people shape lives, not God. "I respect my fellow humanity, so I'm going to be a good person. "

Omar Turcios, 19, was raised attending Catholic mass and other Christian services. But the San Francisco resident has abandoned organized religion completely. Many of the people who sit in church on Sunday go out and do things that God wouldn't approve of during the week, Omar says. Instead of taking part in the "fakeness" of organized religion, he tries to have a direct relationship with God.

"I do what I do and let God be the judge, not the Church," Omar says. Omar lives out his faith not by attending church every Sunday, but by working with incarcerated youths. "Jesus devoted his life to the people. If you devote your life to Jesus, you're devoting your life to the people."

Though his parents are Baptist and Methodist, Jared Rivera, 26, of Los Angeles, is in the process of converting to Catholicism. He was introduced to Catholicism as a teen, but his interest deepened after learning about liberation theology - a controversial brand of Catholicism opposed by the former pope and also by the new Pope Benedict XVI. Emerging within the Latin American Catholic Church during the 1960s and '70s, this movement stressed that it was the duty of the Church to work against the poverty, political repression and violence faced by its faithful. Catholicism has provided a spiritual base for the community organizing work to which Jared had already dedicated himself.

"The work that I'm doing is God's work. Justice comes from God. Becoming Catholic has added a level to my view of social justice that has strengthened my commitment tremendously."

The more I look around and talk to other young people like myself, the more I believe that the future of Hispanic spirituality in the United States will be made up of multiple belief systems. Our families came to this country to give us, their children, the freedoms that they didn't have in their home countries. Here we have the right to an education, to choose our career, to express our views and to believe what we want.

For some those beliefs will be Catholic. For others they will be Muslim, Buddhist, Indigenous or a combination of the many influences we are exposed to. The Catholic Church risks losing its U.S. Hispanic membership base in this generation if the spirituality it promotes continues to be rooted in antiquated orthodoxy, while every other aspect of our lives continues to modernize. Young Hispanics like me will continue to do our own spiritual thing, and move forward.