Sergio Barrera grew up in Arizona, in what he called a very traditional Mexican-American family. “Catholic piety was in our blood,” he said. “Any time something bad happened, we would talk about ‘I’ll just do a novena for Mary’ or ‘just pray the Hail Mary a few times and Mary will take care of us.’ So, we just sort of breathed this in when I was a child.”
But around the time he started high school, he stopped practicing his faith and tried to more actively fit into mainstream American culture.
Barrera started wondering whether his parents’ Catholicism was superstitious “or something like that,” he said. “And that’s an opinion I no longer hold,” Barrera said. Instead, he values having been raised in a Catholic culture.
Sergio Barrera pauses for a photo on the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis. DAVE HRBACEK | THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT
“But as a teenager, you just kind of want to fit in,” he said.
Barrera, a doctoral candidate in economics at the University of Minnesota and a parishioner of Our Lady of Lourdes in Minneapolis, recently joined “Practicing Catholic” radio show host Patrick Conley to discuss his faith journey and his military service in Afghanistan, where he was deployed in 2011.
Being religious is not so popular in many circles, Barrera said. By the time he joined the military, he said his faith was very weak. “But the seeds were being planted,” he said, starting with attending Mass at boot camp and meeting other Catholics there.
Especially with the recent turn of events in Afghanistan, Barrera said he’s been thinking about his military service there and realizes that Islam was one factor in his returning to the Catholic faith.
A fan of history, Barrera said during the language courses that prepared him to serve as a linguist in Afghanistan, he learned about Afghan history, the people and culture, and was struck by “and almost impressed with” how much religious sentiment was part of the culture in the Middle East, and in Afghanistan. Even phrases his language instructors routinely used — “inshallah” (“God willing”), and for goodbye, a phrase that translates to “God protects.” Barrera noted a similar translation from the Spanish “adios,” to “go with God.”
“In a sense, there was something familiar about it,” he said. The more he became interested in Islam, the more he felt a hunger to return to his Catholic roots, he said. What he saw in Afghanistan and the way many Afghan soldiers “just naturally” lived their faith, Barrera saw no secular-religious distinction.
“It was all together,” he said.
He recalled Afghan soldiers and Afghan interpreters having no problem talking about how their duty as soldiers — protecting their country and their families — was also their duty toward God, Barrera said.
“And I take that with me, in a sense, of the way that I want to live out my Catholic faith. I don’t want it to be something that I live out separately,” to pull out of a drawer on Sunday when he goes to church.
“I want to be a well-integrated Catholic where the secular and the religious meet, because God is everywhere,” he said.
To hear Barrera’s full interview with Conley, including reflections on his service in Afghanistan, listen to this episode of the “Practicing Catholic” radio show. It airs at 9 p.m. Sept. 24, 1 p.m. Sept 25 and 2 p.m. Sept. 26 on Relevant Radio 1330 AM.
Read a column by Barrera, “Why Afghanistan Matters,” published online or in the Sept. 16 issue of The Catholic Spirit.
Produced by Relevant Radio and the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the latest show also includes interviews with Msgr. Jason Gray from the Diocese of Peoria, who describes the canonization process for sainthood, and Will Jude from Reiser Relief, who gives a firsthand report of the devastating impact of a recent earthquake and tropical storm in Haiti, and what the faithful can do to help.
Listen to all of the interviews after they have aired at:
soundcloud.com/PracticingCatholic
tinyurl.com/PracticingCatholic (Spotify)
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