O is for Outsider

This is the story of a Cuban Catholic priest in the Franciscan order who decided to "laicize." It was during a time of soul searching when many were questioning their vocations. The little priest decided he could make ends meet by teaching. This seemed to fit the call to preach, and certainly he had a wealth of knowledge from which to share. He was a Doctor, after all, of Philosophy. Still Catholic, he taught Latin in a Catholic high school. He hoped that would fulfill the longing in his heart to serve his fellow human beings, whom his previous call as a priest had seemed to keep him from serving. There his call had been to serve "Poverty" -- and yes, God too, but God-in-the-church. And he had severe problems with the church's structures of authority. He was angry about the relatively middle class standard of living the monastery was able to provide in the midst of a poverty stricken neighborhood in the central city, and he had problems with the lethargic conservatism current in the Roman Catholic Church at the time.

He was a Cuban refugee but his attitude toward Castro's economic communism was never really known. He may have admired it. He was a refugee for religious reasons. The issues he was having with authority the entire American public was having during this Vietnam war era.

Psych tech expands speck

He now had his intellectual freedom, and he used it reading the fathers of the Protestant reformation. There he found the writings of another priest who also had problems with authority. He decided Martin Luther was more like him than the current pope was. It occurred to him that his calling might be to the Lutheran pastoral ministry.

It didn't take him long to find what was then the most liberal denominational version of American Lutheranism, with which he thought he needed to affiliate if he were going to be free of problems with authority. You may guess which churchbody that was. He applied, passed all the tests and found himself under the wing of the bishop of one of the southern synods of that denomination.

It happened at about that time that the parish where the synod headquarters were was in need of a Spanish-speaking pastor to head up a nascent mission to the Spanish-speaking community in that part of the city.

This seemed perfect for the little priest. And at first it worked out fine. He developed quite a following of ex-catholic Latinos, many of whom were illegal immigrants from Central America, as well as from his native Cuba. But then suddenly he led those people out of the congregation and started a new one.

I was not privy to the reasons for the walkout, but it was on national television. The little priest, after some personality clash with the senior pastor of the parish, whom he loathed, paraded out of the church building with his Hispanic congregation in tow. This is not what this story is about. It only explains how the mission came to congregate in his house and then expand beyond his house, and the problems which followed.

The little priest was a complex man. While feeling called to minister to the poor, he had come from a fairly wealthy family in Cuba. He had that sense of entitlement that both poverty and wealth are born to. He had a generous nature. The mission operated on a synodical budget, however, which was unable to provide the resources he needed to fund his various charities. For example, he tried to fund a breakfast program for the children in the area. (Not that anybody ever came.) He had an arrangement with a dairy to buy milk in large four-gallon containers with spigots on the end. He rented a large apartment for homeless refugees and illegal immigrants. Finally, the little priest got tired of having the worship services in his house and rented space in a local Episcopal church.

Unfortunately, the little mission could not afford all these extravagances. It struggled to survive, but failed. It was never able to support itself. Besides, there was always the problem that the ex-Catholic contingent didn't know how to give more than a dollar or so in the plate per week. None of the bills got paid and the congregation and its mission collapsed.

For a long time I didn't know what had become of the little priest. But one day, under a totally different set of circumstances I learned that shortly after the collapse of the congregation the priest had left the country with the congregation's liquid assets. The sad part was, nobody knew where he had gone. But sadder still, had anyone asked me, I would have been able to tell them where to look. I was even able to verify my more than educated guess when I asked someone I happened to meet who'd recently been there if they'd met anybody by his name.

(Editor: Notice, so far our storyteller is still focused upon the priest, the "speck." He has not yet begun to "retro-speck" upon his own "log," to "log on," let alone to seek forgiveness. For that he will have to resort to fantasy. Read on.)