Pamela Hosey Long’s life and career have been steeped in biculturalism and multiculturalism, starting when she was an “Army brat,” as she puts it, living around the United Kingdom and the United States.
In addition to this “marriage” of cultures in her background, the priest, who was called in late summer 2022 by Bishop Ricardo Gomez and lay leaders to head St. Mark’s Anglican Church in Guadalajara, likewise sees marriage as an apt symbol for the relationship between the two groups—Mexican Spanish speakers and foreign-born English speakers—making up the worshippers at St. Mark’s.
But this is nothing new for Hosey Long, a retired university Spanish professor. Before St. Mark’s, she had led the “marriage” of cultures and languages in her parish in Montgomery, Alabama, which consisted of English-speaking African-Americans from Jamaica (lifetime Anglicans) and Spanish-speaking Mexicans.
It is about “balancing, integrating, knitting together two groups into one,” she explained, adding that even actual weddings at St. Mark’s support the metaphor.
In Guadalajara, “marriages between Roman Catholics and non-Catholics” seem natural, since Anglicanism provides a “middle way between Roman Catholic liturgy and a Protestant theology—what we believe about God and Jesus. A Roman Catholic understands what’s going on—the colors, incense, banners, stained glass, some use of images—and people with a Protestant background like that Bible reading and study and preaching are central.”
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