Delis Alejandro

If you want a seat at the Sunday-evening mass at St. Monica’s Catholic Church in Santa Monica, you’d better arrive a half-hour early. An hour if you want a parking place. For more than a dozen years, this 90-minute service has been one of the hottest tickets on the Westside. Its combination of relevant sermons, hot music and social opportunities--everything from volleyball to retreats to coffeehouses--has packed the pews.

But what’s most surprising isn’t the numbers, it’s the demographics. While the population of most churches today is widows, retirees and families with young children, St. Monica’s is filled to the rafters with twenty- and thirtysomethings. Unusual? A survey of church attendance in the American Sociological Review shows that among those in their mid-20s, only about one in five attend services regularly. A recent Purdue University study found that a third of young adults attend mass regularly, compared with 64% of older Catholics. But you’d never know it to look at “St. Mo’s.”

Perhaps the person most responsible for creating this young-adult boom is Delis G. Alejandro, 44, a pastoral associate who oversees outreach ministries at St. Monica’s. Alejandro came to St. Monica’s in 1987 to write “young-adult friendly” liturgy, as she calls it. Now Alejandro is a recognized expert in the field--the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops tapped her to co-write their pastoral plan for bringing these young wayward sheep back to the fold. She is also witness to the growth of lay authority within the church.

Alejandro seems to have her finger in all the church’s myriad activities, and her distinctive laugh permeates every meeting. She has an uncanny ability to tap the talents of “YMA-ers” (Young Ministering Adults), inviting young adults to join the hospitality ministry or the peace and justice committee or even the parking ministry. Once invited, folks find themselves hooked, volunteering to run their committee or even a booth at the parish fund-raiser, Octoberfair.

Alejandro was born in Puerto Rico and moved to Seaside, Calif., on the Monterey Peninsula, when she was 10. Her father was a career military man who served in Vietnam. Alejandro started out in social work. She earned her masters degree in social welfare at UCLA and worked for a half-dozen years in the neonatal unit of the UCLA Medical Center before coming to St. Monica’s.

Like many young American Catholics, Alejandro stopped going to church in her 20s. It wasn’t important to her. Or to the Jewish man she was then dating. But as the relationship developed, both discovered the importance of their faiths’ traditions. They parted, and Alejandro stumbled onto the Newman Center, the “parish” for Catholics on college campuses. She is currently working on a masters in pastoral studies at Loyola Marymount University and says her classes are full of people who, like her, hope to lead a youth crusade within the church.

Question: What were the lessons you learned at the Newman Center that you brought with you to St. Monica’s?

Answer: What really struck me was that people my age--college-aged young people, lay men and women--were doing the readings. There was someone who welcomed you at the beginning and said they were the coordinator, and it was a young woman! The lectors, the readers, the people who did Eucharistic ministry, it was all lay people. Except, of course, the priest who presided over the liturgy. It really struck me.

The second thing that struck me there was afterwards they had the old traditional doughnut and bake-sale thing. But people actually went around talking to you, and after a few Sundays, . . . I was shocked to know the priest remembered my name! Suddenly, church began to become a community experience for me. . . . Eventually, I was helping out with the doughnut day. Little by little, I was being--I guess the word was being enraptured by this community. I was being connected to them; I made friends there.

Q: What do people want from a church?

A: People want authentic community.

Q: What does that mean?

A: Authentic community is where other people really think about you, where they care about you, where someone gives a damn whether you’re OK or not.

For many people, you find that in your family. And maybe you find it in a small group of friends. But I also think people have a need . . . for a community of people who care for you.

It’s very easy to live in a city like Los Angeles and do so many things without talking to people, without ever having to connect with other people. . . .

Part of it is geography and the way housing is set up. . . . In Los Angeles, in many cases, you do need a car. Public transportation . . . is not really as accessible as it is in many large cities. You need to have a car to get where you are going. . . . When you do things, you have to consider the car, parking, all those things. In most cases, for those of us who learn to live beyond that, you do it. And you do whatever you need to do. But it definitely is a feat. . . .

There are [other] people--whether they’re lonely or whether they don’t have the hang of it or no one’s reached out to them--it’s easy in Los Angeles to just decide to stay home. And to become more isolated.

I think the Promenade in Santa Monica is so popular because it’s an opportunity for people to walk back and forth and talk with each other and sit on the plaza. In other parts of the world you have plazas, you have courtyards. Los Angeles, geographically and architecturally, is just beginning to do stuff like that. Recently, I was in Culver City and I was amazed how they’ve made different kinds of walkways and put more flowers around the blocks. There are walking areas now in Culver City!

Q: Is there such a thing as a community-building event?

A: An example is coffeehouses. . . . What happens is people come, they share something personal, those who perform. I’m always amazed: All the people who want to share from inside. I think what I was missing was the idea that there’s a need and hunger people have to share what’s deep within them. Especially in L.A., where people don’t have that opportunity all the time. There are glimpses of beauty and vision within people’s souls that they don’t have an opportunity to share. And in many settings, people would probably laugh at them. And then others want to come to hear that sharing, as well as meet others. And so they have turned out to be, in a quirky way, one of our more [successful] community-building events.

Q: Why is that core group of 25-year-olds to fortysomethings traditionally neglected by many church communities?

A: In the traditional church, there was always this sense about young people: You got them through confirmation, got them through high school, and you weren’t really going to see them again until they got married or had children. And then, of course, they would come back for the sacraments.

Now, for many reasons, a lot of that is different. . . . People are staying single longer. The church may have thought that people were going to get married right away after college, or after high school. We all know that’s not happening. And then, of course, they’re going to have all those babies within nine months. That’s not happening either.

This group was hidden because they weren’t around in the same way. . . . When you look at people into their 20s, into their 30s, it’s still a period of exploration and searching about what your identity is. And part of that identity search is, “What is important to you in life? Where do you find and seek meaning?”

And for those seeking meaning from church and from religion, a big part of that identity search is “Who is God?” and “What is God for me?” and “What is God’s will for me?” and “What is the plan for my life?”

A lot of people in charge of the Catholic Church just thought, they’ll eventually come back. Well, they’re not necessarily coming back. They were neglected. A lot of young people in their identity search and discovering and looking into God and stuff now are looking into other faith traditions. And wowee! Some of these faith traditions have been doing the whole job of hospitality and welcoming not only differently from us, but in many cases better than a lot of our parish churches. In that mix, we’ve been losing some of these people. Then those young adults, when it comes time to get married or they have their first child, if they’ve not been connected to a community, if they don’t feel they’ve been invited or welcomed, if they haven’t been able to connect to others like yourself, they might not necessarily go back to [the Catholic] church.

Q: What advice do you have for other church communities trying to welcome back their lost generation?

A: Reassess your whole operation as to hospitality. Because the No. 1 issue that a lot of young people have, as well as any age Catholics have, is that somehow mainline churches are not as welcoming. . . . What you’ll often hear from people is that it’s very hard for them to break into parish structures, to get to meet people, to say hello to people. And then, when you do try to go to some activities, they don’t speak to you.

The next thing I would say is that, somehow, we make Sunday great for people. We have somehow done stuff with our liturgy and music, and the interesting thing here at St. Monica’s is that there’s a different expression of it at different liturgies. People are able to come and they’re able to worship and praise and sing here, and it touches them and they’re able to take something with them back out into the world. They love it. . . .

Q: St. Monica’s has been derided as a home for “yuppie Westside Catholics” or “cafeteria Catholics” who pick and choose their theology. How do you respond?

A: At St. Monica’s, we have all these “outreach ministries” that are reaching out to particular communities and particular needs. These are communities that maybe, traditionally, have been missing from the makeup of the parish community. And the pastor and staff feel we have to bring some of these people back. We need to reconnect to them.

When people see that you’re offering programs for folks that are divorced and separated, for folks who are gay and lesbian, for folks who are young adult, I think people see that as an apology the church is giving. That’s our stance here. I think our stance is “give us another chance.” You still may come and you still may not like it, but take another look at the church and know that we’re going to try to make you feel welcomed. . . . We can’t do everything, but we’ll attempt to do our best. We’re saying, “Listen, the church maybe has done something wrong here, we’ve maybe neglected you too long, but we want you to know that we want you. . . . We want you to be part of us. We apologize, we’re sorry, come back.”

All these people, regardless of what they’ve done, are part of the community. When we say we’re going to welcome people, are we saying we’re only going to welcome people who are perfect? Jesus never did that. When you look through the Gospels, it is full of people who had a lot of other issues going on in their lives. . . . For so long, people’s impression of the Catholic Church is that we’ve kept them away. We have kept them out. What we’re trying to do is to stem some of that tide and say we don’t want to do that anymore. . . .

One personal thing I’ve learned about penance and reconciliation and forgiveness is this, especially now, in my 40s, I can say this: I remember having pleitos, as you say in Spanish, or disagreements and breakups with people when I was younger, and thinking I would never connect with those people again. Never. They will never be in my sphere of life. And I remember, after one particular fight with someone, a very good friend said, “You know, Delis, some of these things will never be completely healed and completely fixed until somehow those people are back in your sphere.”

. . . There are a lot of people carrying stuff about the Catholic Church out there. Maybe some of it’s real. Maybe some of it’s not real. Maybe it did happen. Some forgiveness needs to occur. We have done such a good job of keeping people out. The healing has to begin. And they have to come back to the community to heal. People have to be able to come back. These people who are upset about some of the things we are doing, are they thinking that people are going to be made perfect outside of community? That was never the vision. Jesus wanted us to come into community to have that happen. And as that happens to you personally, it has to happen as a community as well.

I think our vision here is that need to come in here. We need to all be able to reconnect and reconcile and heal together. We can’t say we’re a parish until all these other people are back with us.