A Heavenly Match: Priest Pins Foes to Aid Orphans

There are times when turning the other cheek just isn’t advisable, even for a clergyman, especially when the likes of Black Beard or Cossack Assassin are coming at you with a secret sleeper hold or even a club.

At such a moment, Fray Tormenta (Brother Tempest), professional wrestler and Roman Catholic priest, might use a flying drop kick or step-over toehold to defend himself and turn the tide of battle against a mean and perhaps unscrupulous foe. This is, after all, serious business. Tormenta has dozens of mouths to feed, and he can’t just roll over and play dead, even if the Bible tells him so.

“If I don’t put on a good show, the promoters won’t contract me to fight,” Tormenta says. “The fans expect me to be aggressive.”

Fray Tormenta is the ring name of Father Sergio Gutierrez, a priest since 1973 and a wrestler since 1975. Gutierrez performs to support 86 orphans he shelters at a rundown 16th-Century church in Xometla, a country village just northeast of Mexico City. He gets no help from the local diocese and few donations. Fray Tormenta stands between the orphans and hunger.

The odd combination of vocations and the cause to which Gutierrez puts his money makes him one of Mexico’s most popular wrestlers. His schedule is full; sometimes he wrestles four times a week while keeping up with his priestly duties of presiding at Masses, baptisms, marriages and burials.

“Wrestling fans come to see if I’m for real, to see if I’ll actually fight. Or they come to help, to press money in my hand as I enter the ring,” Gutierrez said.

His following is especially passionate. On those occasions when he finds himself in trouble--flung over the ring ropes and into the audience, for instance--he can almost always count on special fan support. Children inevitably help dust him off and give him a pat on the back. Women, sometimes armed with pots, wave threateningly at his opponents, screaming things like, “How can you treat a man of God like that?”

“I have never hurt anyone, but I have suffered various wounds . . . to the collarbone, fingers, arms, back,” said Gutierrez. “It’s not that my opponents try to hurt me on purpose, but it’s a tough sport. I fight for my orphanage and they for their children and families.”

Gutierrez began to take in young castoffs from the rough-and-tumble docks at Veracruz shortly after his ordination. The inspiration for a way to support his charges came soon afterward: a movie in which the hero, Senor Tormenta, wrestled to support homeless children.

“I decided to make the fantasy come true,” Gutierrez recalled.

At first, he had trouble educating himself in the ways of wrestling. “No one would teach me. They either wouldn’t take me seriously or didn’t want the competition,” Gutierrez said.

Finally, one day, a wrestler named The Leader took him aside and began to teach him holds. They trained for a year; Gutierrez’s first professional match was against The Leader himself.

“I lost,” Gutierrez said, chuckling. “The Leader didn’t teach me everything.”

Through the years, Gutierrez has moved from Veracruz to Puebla, to a town called Toquila and finally to Xometla. All along the way, he picked up orphans.

Old Tires as Toys

Now, he and his orphans are crowded into St. Michael’s Church and parish house. The boys sleep cheek-by-jowl on cots in two musty rooms of the old stone complex. Girls--there are 14 of them--live separately in rooms rented by Gutierrez. The only playground is a dusty courtyard out front where the children roll old tires around for entertainment.

Gutierrez rarely has to wait long before new boarders arrive. Last week, he heard of four children, two brothers and two sisters ages 4 through 10, abandoned in Puebla. He brought them to Xometla. Just before that, an adult left him a 3-month-old infant. The supply seems endless.

In Mexico City alone, the federal government received about 1,100 orphaned or abandoned infants at its child care centers between 1983 and 1986. Another 1,000 children between the ages of 6 and 15 live at temporary orphanages run by the government in the capital. One Catholic orphanage in Cuernavaca has taken in another 1,000.

The number of parentless children on the streets of Mexico City is unknown, although many are said to be among the legions of street hawkers, fire-breathers and jugglers who flock to the city’s main street corners in quest of a few pesos.

Site for Orphanage

Gutierrez hopes to build a full-scale orphanage near Xometla, and he has just paid about $5,000 for a 20-acre alfalfa field where he plans to locate it. Accumulating money, most of which goes for food, is a gradual chore for Gutierrez. For a big match, he can earn 250,000 pesos--almost $200. To save money even on long trips and economize on hotel bills, Gutierrez drives to and from appearances in a camper truck.

“Accepting luxury would be taking food out of the children’s mouths,” he declared.

Gutierrez’s immediate overseers in the Catholic Church seem a bit bemused by his activities. Unconventional as professional wrestling might be, the church is not standing in Tormenta’s way.

Msgr. Magin Torreblanca, the bishop of nearby Texcoco, said: “Officially, I have not given him permission to continue wrestling. But I overlook it, because I consider his skills a gift from God.”

Behind the Mask

To preserve his drawing power, Gutierrez plays his role as wrestler to the hilt. In the ring, he wears a mask adorned with red lightning bolts. The letters “FT” are sewn on the chest of his gold wrestling tights. He refuses to be photographed publicly without his mask. Even in Xometla he is occasionally seen in mask and cassock.

“The mask gives me an air of the unknown. People wonder what I look like beneath it,” he said, adding that he has never been unmasked in the ring.

For the record, the real Tormenta is short, stocky, and wears eyeglasses.

Gutierrez gives away nothing of the showy aspect of wrestling, declining to discuss whether the matches in Mexico are rigged. “Wrestling here is part circus, theater, acrobatics and sport,” he said. “And sometimes, things get out of hand.”

Clean and Legal

As might be expected, Gutierrez is a clean wrestler, part of the group called tecnicos , who use only legal wrestling skills in their matches--as opposed to the rudos , who use everything else.

Wrestling is a popular sport in Mexico. And wrestlers are often the subject of movies and stories in comic books. Popular performers, like the Saint and Chicano Blood, often inspire imitators. Sometimes, several males in a single family take up the sport.

In that tradition, four of Gutierrez’s orphans are in training to follow in their benefactor’s footsteps; they have named themselves Tormenta Jr., Tormenta II, Infernal-Face and Krypton.

“Religious names, every one,” Gutierrez jokes while taking off his mask to prepare for an afternoon Mass.