A Mexican-American priest says faith compelled her to march on May Day

CHICAGO- An unassuming small woman, looking younger than her more than 70 years of age, rallied and then marched miles yesterday from Union to Grant Park in Chicago’s May Day parade for immigrant and workers’ rights. The Rev. Sandra Castillo, an activist and a leader in the Diocese of Chicago’s Episcopal Church, was “compelled,” she said, to march because of her faith.

Just before the Great Depression, Castillo’s great-grandmother and grandmother, carrying her mother, who was then an infant, crossed from Mexico to the United States seeking asylum. Her family were religious Catholics and among the many of whom rose up at the time against the injustices of autocratic rulers in Mexico.

“If that were today, they would never, under Trump, have gotten into the country,” she said of her family. “And if they did, they very possibly would have been deported.”

The women, with their baby girl, settled in Chicago, where Castillo herself was born where the baby grew up. In the family’s first years in the city, the network of social services that Trump is now busy tearing down did not yet exist. Her great-grandmother and grandmother got help from Hull House, run by Jane Adams, who was operating what was literally one of the first social service agencies.

Castillo grew up in the Roman Catholic Church in Chicago but eventually became an Episcopalian because that Church gave space to people and ideas often rejected by some of the theology taught by what she felt were too many Catholic leaders at the time.

Castillo said she was familiar, as a youth, with priests who comforted families of the dead by telling them that “God has taken them up to heaven to be with Him.” She said she knew that, regardless of the good intentions of those priests, many of their parishioners who died in the near West Side Chicago neighborhood where she grew up did so from “lack of income, good housing, medical care, good food and other necessities, not because God just took them.”

She decided she wanted to be a priest, and women were ordainable in the Episcopal Church. They could not be ordained in the Roman Catholic Church.

So the Mexican American woman who became a priest is another big part of what makes up the Sandra Castillo of today. “Priests are supposed to spread the gospel,” she said. “That cannot be done from on high or by preaching only about a great afterlife that will come eventually. Jesus always talked about the here and now, not just some paradise in the future. His Gospel, which means good news in Greek, means fighting for the living and all the needs they have, whether those needs be housing, friends, good food, or human and immigrant rights.”

She said that participating in the May Day demonstration in Chicago was something that, as a priest sworn to spreading the gospel, she is “compelled to do.”

Castillo wanted to credit the Illinois Committee for Immigrant Rights for organizing the participation by local religious organizations in the May Day march. She was one among the Episcopalians from all over the city who participated. “They allowed us in the Episcopal Church to network with so many activists,” she said, “and, appropriately on May Day, have helped us all learn that immigrant rights are worker rights.”

She closed the interview by insisting that People’s World readers be told that “what happened here in Chicago, in this sanctuary city, on May Day was history, but it also was “an act of incredible courage by so many people. Half of the thousands out marching were Latinos,” she said, “refusing to let fear stoked by the Trump administration keep them away. All of us have to admire this incredible courage. Also courageous,” she said, “were the thousands of Anglos who came out to support them.”