The name, “La Morada,” memorializes the heroic religious peasant culture of Colonial New Spain during the 16th through 19th centuries. Deprived of institutional Catholicism and priests, the faithful Catholic farmers, steeped in devotional Christian Culture, united into brotherhoods of “penitentes” to aid in the adoration of Christ Our God in their daily lives.
These “Brothers of the Light” formed from husbands of families and farms, and celibate penitents, sustained order and piety to God in the rural and sometimes savage areas. Building many “moradas” (oratory chapels and meeting houses), they offered regular prayers to God and charity among neighbors – hosting and praying for wakes and funerals, care of orphans and widows, care of the sick and hungry and exuberantly celebrating Holy week and Easter as our most important duty on earth. It was the charitable community of the Acts of the Apostles brought to life in the Americas.
From the charity and prayer amid isolation there developed unique and iconic art forms seen in retablos and statues, and heard in the haunting music of sung chant and of the reed flutes.
Despite the fact that Our Lord Jesus Christ established a Church with a hierarchy of service, the world of greed and ambition and formalism inevitably produced barnacles of “human traditions” that obscure the pure Gospel of Jesus Christ. The “morada”, the penitent movement, provided an antidote. The piety and practice of these peasants remained active – personal, sacrificial and serious – and avoided a false clericalism.
Every continent has seen the development of these morada-type movements of preservation and piety – one must only look to the chapels and hermitages of Ireland and Syria, of Northern Spain and southern France, of the desert fathers and mothers of Egypt, Palestine and Sinai, even into Eastern Europe and far-flung India and China.
May we admire and follow the fervent example of these followers of Christ and the desert ideal.