FATHER OLIVARES : Amazing Grace

The AIDS virus has by now reached so deeply into so many parts of our community that there is a natural human desire to harden ourselves to its awful depredations and to the irremediable losses it inflicts each day.

But if we are careful, we never will.

Like so many Angelenos, we were particularly moved by the news that Father Luis Olivares, pastor of Our Lady Queen of Angels Church, has been stricken by the disease. Padre Olivares has made his plaza church more than a sanctuary for Central American refugees and undocumented immigrants. He has made it a sanctuary, as well, for those ideals of compassion and justice we all claim, though too seldom practice.

La Placita is a place where truth is spoken unflinchingly to power, whether temporal or ecclesiastic. It is a place where the poor find both the consolation of faith and the open hand of social justice.

Father Olivares’ physicians believe he contracted AIDS from a contaminated needle with which he was treated during one of his frequent visits to El Salvador. Typically, he has made his illness an opportunity for solidarity with those in the shadow of oppression. He decided to make his condition public, he said, “to let people know that anybody can get this disease and not to abandon those who happen to get it, regardless of how they contracted it.”

As he has for so long, Father Olivares continues to preach “freedom to captives and, to those in sorrow, joy.”