From church to battleground
Jose Maria Perea, leader of a group of Penitente brothers, inspects a South Valley church that has become the focus of a legal fight between the Penitentes and the nonprofit Atrisco Heritage Foundation. Behind him is one of several statues located on the church grounds. (Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal)
Linda Ortega chose to buy a house next door to a centuries-old South Valley church that she once considered her spiritual home.
Two syringes and latex gloves litter the base of a wall of San Jose Church. South Valley residents say intruders scale the fences, sometimes leaving graffiti and evidence of drug use.
San Jose Church sprang to life during the Christmas season, on certain feast days, and especially during Lent, when as many as 100 people crowded into the tiny church, Ortega recalled.
But the church at 2100 La Vega SW has remained silent since early 2013 when it was closed by the nonprofit that owns the property.
“They locked the gates and removed everything, including the bell of the church,” she said. “It was quite abrupt. It was shocking.”
Before the church was closed, a group of Penitente brothers say they opened the church regularly for religious services and welcomed the community to attend.
Today, the nonprofit that owns the property bars the Penitentes and plans eventually to reopen the church as a venue for public events other than religious services.
The church’s contents – including pews, life-sized santos carved from cottonwood, and even a wood-burning stove – were removed, people familiar with the church said.
Fences that surround the three-acre property do little to stop trespassers, Ortega said.
“Sadly, the property has been vandalized with graffiti, trash – lots of unsavory things going on behind the church,” she said.
The property recently showed evidence of visits by drug users, who left used syringes and other paraphernalia near a rear wall of the church.
The property today is fenced and locked while the legal dispute simmers between a group of Penitente brothers, who claim the church as their heritage, and the Atrisco Heritage Foundation, which has owned the property since 2006.
San Jose Church, a centuries-old South Valley church, was closed in early 2013, barring Jose Maria Perea and others from performing religious services there. The church’s contents, including carved santos and the church bell, remain in storage.
The Sociedad de Nuestro Padre Jesus, a group of Penitente brothers, filed a lawsuit last year in state District Court against the foundation, challenging the nonprofit’s legal right to bar Penitente brothers from the church.
The Penitente Brotherhood is a lay fraternity of Catholics that provided spiritual leadership for centuries in New Mexico and southern Colorado.
Even San Jose’s name is the subject of dispute. Court records refer to it as San Jose Church, but Penitentes call it the Morada de San Jose – the Spanish word for a Penitente church.
A spokesman for the Atrisco Heritage Foundation called it a Catholic church that for centuries was owned in common by heirs of the Atrisco Land Grant, who settled in the area more than 300 years ago.
Archbishop of Santa Fe Michael Sheehan called it a “chapel,” long used by Catholics as a place of worship. But the Roman Catholic Church does not own the property and has no stake in the outcome of the legal dispute, he said.
Eager to renovate
Peter Sanchez, executive director of the Atrisco Heritage Foundation, said the nonprofit is eager to renovate the church and open it to “the entire community” rather than a small group of Penitente brothers.
Jerome Padilla, president of the town of Atrisco board of trustees, stands in front of San Jose Church. Padilla and others want the church to be reserved for religious purposes.
“Their argument is that five or six people should be able to use this church exclusively,” Sanchez said of the Penitentes, whom he called “tenants” of the church in recent decades.
“Our argument is that the community should be able to use this church. When we say the community, we mean the whole community.”
Sanchez contends that the Penitentes controlled access to the church and largely closed it to the broader community. Sanchez also contends the church is in good condition and that the foundation is maintaining the property.
Ortega and others reject the contention that the church was closed.
“It was open to the community as it was,” she said. “Anybody could come and participate, or just observe, if they didn’t want to participate in the prayers.”
The Atrisco Heritage Foundation was formed in 2006 by the now-defunct Westland Development Corp. to preserve cultural properties, including San Jose Church and three cemeteries. Westland was the successor to the Atrisco Land Grant.
A key issue in the lawsuit is the validity of a 50-year lease that Westland granted to the Penitente brotherhood in 2006, giving it use of the church, according to the lawsuit. The Atrisco Heritage Foundation in its response denied that the Penitentes have a legal lease with Westland.
Sanchez said the nonprofit intends to restore the church and develop the property into an asset the community can use for a wide variety of events.
The foundation is working with a group of University of New Mexico graduate business students “to develop a strategic plan and feasibility study to develop the property in a way that is more beneficial to the community,” Sanchez said.
He said the project is modeled on the Old San Ysidro Church, which is owned by the village of Corrales and leased for events ranging from weddings to performances, but not as a church.
The foundation also wants to register San Jose Church on the National Register of Historic Places, he said. The designation makes owners eligible for investment tax credits to pay for rehabilitation of historic structures.
Religious artifacts removed from the church “are stored safely under our control,” Sanchez said. The foundation would not oppose handing the artifacts over to the Penitentes if a judge determines the rightful owners.
“We simply want the courts to decide,” he said.
Trespassing incident
Tension between the Penitentes and the Atrisco Heritage Foundation led to a confrontation Oct. 4 when foundation board members opened the gate to allow UNM students to view the church and a Penitente leader tried to enter the property, according to a Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office report.
The conflict began when Jose Maria Perea, a spiritual leader of the Penitente group, drove his motorized wheelchair through the open gate when board members ordered him to leave, according to the report. Perea told a deputy that board members grabbed him and his wheelchair in an attempt to force him off the property.
Sanchez said of the incident that Perea was “trespassing onto our property, trying to disrupt a meeting between our organization and UNM. We had to call the police and have him escorted off.”
Neither Perea nor the board members sought criminal charges.
Perea, Ortega and other South Valley residents say they oppose the foundation’s plans to use the church for nonreligious purposes, such as community events.
San Jose is among the oldest churches in the region and should be used exclusively as a church, said Jerome Padilla, president of the board of directors of the town of Atrisco grant, a political jurisdiction composed of Atrisco heirs.
“We want to protect the traditional practices on that land,” he said.
Perea called the church a “cultural sanctuary” that for decades served both the Penitente brothers and the larger community.
Generations of Penitente brothers are buried there, both on the grounds of the church and under the church’s floor boards, Perea said during a recent visit to the church. Many of the graves are unmarked, he said.
“Every inch that you dig under this, there are bones of our ancestors,” he said.
Love notes from around the world
Story by Leslie Linthicum of Journal
We all think we know “South Valley man.” In the newspaper headlines and on TV, he gets stabbed, he gets arrested for drugs and gang fighting, he goes to jail. Sometimes he gets killed.
In a cozy living room off Avenida César Chávez and Goff – in the South Valley – another South Valley man was at work the other day on his own quest to rewrite the story of “South Valley man.”
Lonnie Anderson has been professing his love for Anne Bolger-Witherspoon in creative ways for 19 years now, ever since they marked their first Valentine’s Day as a dating couple by turning his house into a giant board game, handing her two big homemade dice and asking her to play.
Through their years of dating and marriage, and the births of two daughters, he has surprised Anne each Feb. 14 with a big homemade gesture – a private prom, a bouquet of 30-foot flowers, a throne, crown and candy jewels, a poem writ large with 6,440 stones in a dirt lot.
Lonnie Anderson and his wife, Anne Bolger-Witherspoon, married for 13 years, are still two kids in love. Maybe that’s because of Anderson’s annual oversized Valentine Day’s surprises. (Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal)
It has all happened in the South Valley, where Anne grew up and where the couple has made their home. And because Anderson is an advertising man by profession, he has accumulated a nice portfolio of news media attention for his efforts.
He has made it so that on at least one day a year “South Valley man” is credited with sprinkling some love and positivity in a corner of the city that suffers from a negative stereotype – if it’s getting any attention at all.
This year, “South Valley man” is spreading the love worldwide.
Get inspired
It wouldn’t be romantic to copy the South Valley man’s Valentine’s Day ideas, but this list of some of his greatest hits might spark some imagination for Friday’s big event.
Over the years, Lonnie Anderson has:
- Made an oversized box of chocolates; each “piece” was a separate cake.
- Created in their home the bar where he met his wife.
- Rented a lighted carousel and had it set up in their front yard.
- Placed “I LOVE ANNE” signs all over town.
- Made a movie about her and had it shown at The Guild.
- Constructed giant boxes of candy hearts.
- Wrote out her favorite poem in rocks in their backyard.
- Constructed a bouquet of 30-foot flowers out of cardboard boxes.
- Drew candy pieces in chalk on the sidewalk at places around town where milestones of their lives occurred.
- Had “I Love Anne” painted in graffiti in the neighborhood where she grew up.
- Made her a throne and a crown, and a declared her Queen for a day.
Anderson got the idea when he was working in Dubai and missing his family: “I want my wife’s name spread around the world. I want people in every country around the entire world to hold up a sign that says ‘I love Anne’ and take a photograph so she knows she’s the most loved woman in the entire world.”
He put the word out on Facebook and the photos poured in – from Red Square in Russia, the Sydney Opera House in Australia, a lake in Denmark, the pyramids in Guatemala. Ireland. Malaysia. Israel. South Africa. Egypt. France. Cuba. Iran. Algeria. Vietnam.
“I think one thing I was surprised at is how small the world is,” Anderson said. “Some of these are photos from a friend of a friend of a friend.”
There are nearly 200 countries in the world, and Anderson has collected photos from about one-fifth of them.
Why would strangers go to the trouble of making a sign professing love for a woman they’ve never met, have their picture taken and send it to the South Valley?
“I think people are so tired of there not being love spread around the world,” Anderson said. In a world roiled in conflict, and the news focused on international violence and turmoil, “It’s a way to show people it’s not only negative stuff coming out of the world.”
And, he said, “I really truly believe that when you’re sincere about something and you have love as the message, how can people not want to participate?”
That the worldwide love movement would revolve around a South Valley girl was a bonus.
“It’s our responsibility to change the way the media perceives us,” Anderson says. “One of my ideas was, what if I just spread love around the entire world and it started right here in the South Valley? And it spread all the way to Russia and the Kremlin, to the Eiffel Tower in Paris, to China and the Great Wall, to all these amazing places around the world. That just shows that great, beautiful, loving things come out of the valley as much as the tough stuff that we see.”
For 19 years, Valentine’s Day has been a surprise sprung on Anne. This year, the effort was on Facebook and the cat got out of the bag, so no surprise will be ruined by putting this on the front page.
Anne is less in love with marketing than Lonnie is and she told me she wouldn’t mind if some of her Valentine’s Day surprises were shared a deux rather than with a newspaper or television audience. But she hasn’t tired of her husband’s big gestures on Feb. 14.
“I can’t imagine it not happening,” she said. If one year Anderson commemorated the day with something simple like a box of chocolates and a kiss, she said, she would worry that something was wrong with him. “It’s just not in his nature.”
It’s not breaking news, but here’s a headline: “South Valley man loves South Valley woman.”
Wells Blog
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