The Last Fight Of Father Olivares : For Years He Challenged the Catholic Hierarchy and Fought for Immigrants, farm Workers and the Poor. Now His Opponent is AIDS

A FEEBLE, DISHEVELED OLD MAN shuffles into the study of the graceful, Spanish-style religious residence in Hancock Park. The elderly man, a retired priest who lives here, wears a watch cap and several day’s stubble on his face. Clearly senile, he laughs uproariously as he recites, over and over, a nonsensical rhyme about Pancho Villa.

Across the room, Father Luis Olivares watches silently, sitting crossed-legged at a large wooden table that dominates the study. “Si, como no, “ Olivares finally says, kindly humoring the old priest. “Yes, of course.”

But Olivares squirms in his chair. It is an unsettling moment for the controversial social crusader who suddenly--since he was stricken with AIDS last summer--finds himself idled, his world drastically shrunken, confined for the most part to this residential complex where he is convalescing. “Sometimes I say to myself, it would be better if I just went ahead and died,” Olivares says. He is not afraid of death, he adds, but the thought of becoming dependent on others for his every need terrifies him as much as the stigma the disease carries.

Daily, however, a steady stream of friends and admirers try to lessen his burden. Bishops and government leaders write or visit. Hollywood personalities drive up to the religious center in Jaguars and Mercedes-Benzes to take Olivares to lunch at the finest restaurants. Women of humble means from his old downtown church bring him home-cooked meals, and groups of his parishioners awaken him on occasion with morning serenades and cheers. And with loving silence they shelter their fallen leader from the rumors that now surround him.

Olivares and his doctors believe that he, a diabetic, was infected through the use of improperly sterilized needles on one of his many trips to refugee camps in Central America. But inevitably, his vow of celibacy has come into question, and he anguishes over the possibility that innuendo will undermine his life’s work.

Olivares thought that he knew all about being poor and dejected. Hadn’t he opened the doors of his historic downtown church, Our Lady Queen of Angels, to homeless immigrants and Central American refugees? Hadn’t he championed the cause of farm workers and helped shape a poor and powerless East Los Angeles flock into an influential citizens lobby? Hadn’t he clashed with the archbishop himself in pressing these causes?

But suddenly, at 56, the priest who had become the voice of activism in the Los Angeles church finds his role reversed as he faces the cruel prospect of becoming one of the powerless outcasts he has long defended.

The tall, now gaunt Olivares wanders the halls and gardens of the stately residence, sometimes in desperation, he says, “not knowing what to do with myself.” A striking man, he remains elegant in fine tweed coats or guayaberas , but there is a vulnerable, almost brittle quality about him; his confident stride has become tentative, his balance and vision blurred by meningitis, a complication of AIDS.

Yet if his spirits seem dampened, Olivares remains open to the world. He continues to grant interviews. “Everybody wants to know how a priest feels when he gets this,” he says with good-natured sarcasm.

Before his diagnosis, Olivares occasionally appeared at AIDS fund-raisers. In recent months, however, he’s put AIDS at the top of the list of causes to which he devotes his time; last month, he appeared as grand marshal at an AIDS benefit in East Los Angeles. And AIDS patients he has never met call for appointments, hoping for some special insight or wisdom. So far, he has been unable to provide it. “Most of the time, I don’t know what to say. This is all new to me,” he explains. “You try to live out your remaining time doing whatever good you can. That’s what I’m looking for now.”

During interviews this fall, Olivares’ strength ebbed and flowed as he battled the illness that sent him to the hospital for frequent blood transfusions. His speech was slow, and he found it difficult to remember dates and details of his past.

Though he won’t complain, Olivares repeats the words of others who bemoan the unfairness of his predicament. From the hundreds of letters he has received, Olivares quotes a New York Protestant minister he has never met who wrote that when he read that Olivares was ill, he literally screamed. “Why?” the minister demanded to know of God. “Why does He afflict people who are doing good?”

As Olivares faces this, his toughest battle yet, he sees his many triumphs paling. “I’ve been trumpeting this identification with the people in my ministry. Yet, have I really been poor? Undocumented? Homeless?” he asks himself in one of his deepest moments of reflection. “Then the Lord sends this along and here I am.” For the first time in his life, the veteran strategist for social change seems at a loss.

A POOR MEXICAN KID from San Antonio, Luis Olivares rose quickly through the ranks of the church hierarchy to a life of material comfort, even luxury. Then, in the late 1970s, he traded position and rank to minister wholeheartedly to the poor. Though he has always hungered for acceptance, Olivares often has courted rejection, alienating some church and government officials by his strident stances in defense of his marginalized constituency.

“Rejection is his cross,” says Father Richard Estrada, a longtime friend. “He wants badly to be accepted by his (religious) peers. . . . But he won’t back down.”

Olivares is not easy to pigeonhole. He may be devoted to the poor, but he is also known for his expensive taste in clothing. After a week’s hard work among the desperately poor, he heads to fancy shopping malls to browse amid the gaudy opulence. The contrast with his usually stark surroundings provides much needed “comic relief,” he says. And yes, he confesses, there is a “very slight” thrill in seeing part of a world he gave up.

At a benefit in his honor a few months ago, he was lauded by a glittering crowd of celebrities as well as government, labor and church leaders. In an arrangement symbolic of Olivares’ principles, luminaries such as United Farm Workers union President Cesar Chavez, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, state senators and chancery officials sat next to immigrants and ordinary parishioners at tables elegantly set for the outdoor dinner at Olvera Street Plaza. From Our Lady Queen of Angels Church across the street came shouts of “ Que viva el Padre Olivares! “ Scores of homeless Central American refugees and illegal immigrants chanted enthusiastically as they stood in a sidewalk soup line outside the church where Olivares once ministered to them. It was this church that he opened to the homeless, allowing them to sleep in the pews despite protests from some parishioners and church officials. It was this church which, in 1985, he declared a sanctuary for Central American refugees--the first in the Los Angeles archdiocese.

“I’m convinced,” Olivares told the dinner crowd, “that despite the futility that it might seem, our ministry was justified because it was a transparent sign of a better world. . . (an) exaggerated sign of God’s presence in the midst of the poor.”

Many at the benefit praised Olivares as a modern-day prophet, a visionary hero, the conscience of the city. In less cordial settings, however, some of Olivares’ detractors have labeled him a communist, citing his staunch opposition to U.S. policy in Central America. Others have called him a self-serving zealot who bought into his own press.

“I always wondered when I’d see a picture of him and (former Nicaraguan President) Dan Ortega, what side of the issue of democracy he was really on,” says Harold Ezell, former Western region commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization Services. “He was an embarrassment to the church leadership. You’d think he was the archdiocese spokesman, not the archbishop.”

Even some of Olivares’ Claretian brethren, who saw his mid-career transformation from ostentatious church official to charismatic social crusader, have questioned his motives.

“The order knows Louie as he was before,” says Estrada. “They remember him with his big cars. Then they saw him going to El Salvador and being at the forefront of demonstrations, even getting arrested. And they feel he does it for ego. They don’t trust him.”

The once scrawny barrio kid has found himself at the center of some of the region’s most compelling and electric social causes--often to his surprise. Olivares has celebrated union victories with farm workers and officiated at their funeral Masses. He was instrumental in founding the United Neighborhoods Organization of East Los Angeles, which has grown into the largest network of grass-roots organizations in the county. And in recent years, he has railed against U.S. funding of the right-wing government of El Salvador and led Southern California’s immigrant- and refugee-rights movement, addressing thousands from the pulpit of Our Lady Queen of Angels Church--the largest congregation in the sprawling Los Angeles archdiocese and long the focal point for Southern California’s Latino Catholics.

Olivares “fell deeply in love” with the farm workers, with his East Los Angeles parishioners and the poor who flocked to his church, says Father Rosendo Urrabazo, another longtime friend. “There is nothing he wouldn’t do for them. . . . If Louie has made a mistake, it has been the mistake of all of those who fall in love--his love blinded him to other realities.”

AS FAR BACK as Luis Olivares can remember, he thought he was special. In the large matriarchal family of Mexican immigrants, he was his grandmother’s favorite. Olivares’ brothers and sisters were charged with protecting and looking after him, the sickliest and most timid of seven children. Even when he got into mischief, the boy was easily forgiven. “Louie could do no wrong,” his brother Henry and sister Rosario recall.

He was only a toddler when his mother died. While his father worked to support the family, Olivares and his brothers and sisters were raised by an aunt and their grandmother, Inez, a Mexican immigrant widely respected in their San Antonio barrio as a spiritual adviser and folk healer. “Our grandmother gave us a good sense of self,” Olivares says. “She didn’t try to mold us. Rather than someone who protected us, she was an educator.”

In their hometown of Parras in the Mexican state of Coahuila, Inez and her family had been pillars of their church. When an anti-clerical fervor swept Mexico in the wake of the revolution of 1910, family members risked their lives to hide priests from government persecution. Then, fearing for their own safety, the family fled across the border to San Antonio, where they continued to shelter priests in exile.

Priests from the local parish were always in and out of Louie’s home; he considered them family. While other children played school or house, the Olivares youngsters often spent their days celebrating make-believe Mass. They used leftover pieces of unconsecrated Communion wafer bread and old prayer books. Louie, dressed in miniature vestments sewn by his grandmother, always officiated. Whenever they tired of the religious game and began making noise about playing something else, Louie would chastise them from his makeshift pulpit.

Shortly after his grandmother’s death when he was 13, Olivares entered a seminary in Compton, Calif.; his older brother Henry had entered the year before. The seminary was run by the Claretian Missionaries, the same order as their role models back home. This small order traces its roots to Spain and is best known for its ministry to Latinos.

When Olivares joined, he had a vague idea of wanting to “do good.” But it wasn’t pure idealism that lured him to the seminary--it offered one of the few tickets out of the barrio. “Given our economic condition, was it realistic to think I’d go to college or be able to pursue a career?” he says. It would be years before he would “look upon the priesthood as what it’s supposed to be--a means for changing the world, changing minds and hearts.”

Away from the cocoon of home and family, the youngster felt his first sting of racism--white classmates made fun of his Spanish accent. His humble roots, his Mexican culture, even the Spanish language that he grew up with became distant memories as Olivares flourished in the Anglo-dominated seminary. “Louie was never satisfied with just doing what was expected,” recalls Henry, who later left the priesthood to marry. “He was always involved in extracurricular activities, going on field trips, organizing picnics, in charge of committees.”

Olivares was singled out for special treatment by teachers who saw in the boy a strong sense of responsibility and leadership. He was entrusted with straightening out the prefect’s office and polishing the sacred vessels used during Mass. In college at the Claretian seminary in Dominguez Hills, he led the school choir and managed to raise several hundred thousand dollars for the seminary by marketing greeting cards.

In Olivares’ high school yearbook, his classmates predicted that he would be a cardinal someday. The attention helped puff an already well-developed ego, but it also stirred resentment among peers. “There are a lot of strong egos in any religious community, and a lot of jealousy,” Olivares says. “Being young and inexperienced, I didn’t learn my lesson well. I tended to gloat. The notion is you’re supposed to act very humble. . . . I thought that was false humility, and I never yielded to that.”

He earned a master’s degree in business administration from Notre Dame University in 1964. Only three years later, at 33, he was appointed corporate treasurer of the Claretians’ Western province, one of the highest church posts ever held by a Latino in the country. In Los Angeles, Olivares developed a taste for expensive silk suits, big black sedans and business lunches at the finest Beverly Hills restaurants. Shepherding the religious order’s investments took him on regular trips to Europe for conferences at the Vatican, and to Chicago and New York, where he traveled by limousine and was wined and dined by bankers, stockbrokers and wealthy contributors.

When a group of activist nuns lobbying for a “morally responsible” investment policy asked him to help cleanse church portfolios of company stocks tied to the Vietnam War, Olivares demurred. His only concern as trustee of Claretian money, he says, was to “maximize profits.”

During this time, he even turned down an invitation from a national group of priests called Padres to join their campaign to focus more attention on the concerns of Latinos in the church. Being linked to such a radical group, he reasoned, wouldn’t do an up-and-comer much good. (He later regretted his decision and joined the group, eventually becoming its president.)

As he rose through the ranks, Olivares returned to the seminary briefly--this time as an administrator of the Claretian training center, then located on an old estate in Malibu Canyon. Some of the idealistic young men he supervised were scandalized by his well-heeled lifestyle.

“We kidded him a lot about the new big, black LTD he got every year,” says Urrabazo, one of the young seminarians who disdained Olivares’ lifestyle. “He was a sobering statement to a lot of us that the world isn’t the way we think it is.”

Even his family was a bit put off by bureaucrat Louie. Now and then he would breeze into San Antonio for a brief visit. But his brothers and sisters found it difficult to recognize the self-important priest with the designer clothes and businesslike manner. “It wasn’t Louie,” recalls Rosario Olivares, now Sister Victoria. “We weren’t brought up that way.”

OLIVARES’ RETURN to his cultural and spiritual roots began with one in a series of chance events that he came to call “opportunities for conversion.”

In 1974, a seminarian in East Los Angeles asked Olivares for permission to help the United Farm Workers organize their grape boycott. Seminary rules required such outside activity to be supervised by a senior priest. Without much thought, Olivares volunteered. Around the same time, Olivares was assigned to head his first parish, Our Lady of Solitude in East Los Angeles. He figured that experience at the large Latino parish, known as “La Soledad , “ would look good on his resume.

What he hadn’t counted on was the emotional wallop of working among his own “flesh and blood.” For the first time since joining the priesthood, Olivares stepped out of the rarefied atmosphere enjoyed by the church elite and rubbed elbows with the Mexican community and the poor. “Then, (I came) into contact with the farm workers themselves and the spirit that moves them,” Olivares recalls.

He was impressed by Cesar Chavez, the UFW leader, who had managed to unite Latinos in a national movement for the first time. Olivares walked the picket line with them, officiated at weddings and baptisms, and shared their sorrow at funerals when the union struggle sometimes turned violent and deadly. Olivares, who became the unofficial poet of the movement, inspired forces with eloquent homilies, “with words like wings,” says union vice president Dolores Huerta.

Olivares learned a lesson from the farm workers: You are converted by those you serve. “You may initially get involved in a cause for altruistic reasons, because you want to help those ‘poor people,’ ” he says. “But pretty soon you are fighting with them and they are doing more to convert your way of thinking than what you are doing for them. After a while, the enthusiasm comes out of that rather than out of your own convictions.”

In 1976, he responded with similar enthusiasm when Ernie Cortes, a fellow Texan and professional community organizer, enlisted Olivares’ help in organizing a powerful and highly disciplined citizens lobby in East Los Angeles. Members of the Soledad parish still recall how Olivares encouraged them. He set up English classes and brought in professional organizers who taught parishioners how to speak in public and challenge officials to respond to their community needs.

It was the first time an advocacy group had drawn its strength and its structure from a parish organization. Among its victories, the United Neighborhoods Organization lists successful campaigns to reduce auto insurance rates, evaluate the performance of school principals and lobby for tough anti-crime legislation.

At UNO, Maria de la Luz Hernandez was one of Olivares’ “creations,” as she puts it. The mother of nine children, Hernandez was once so timid she never ventured from home without her husband’s permission. But with Olivares’ encouragement, she learned to address large crowds at UNO conventions and lobby city officials for neighborhood improvements. “For 24 years I lived in silence,” she once said. “But Father Olivares dared to come to our home. My husband had too much regard for him to say no.”

Olivares came to believe in including lay and religious church members, without regard to rank, in the building of a community--an uncommon, if not revolutionary, notion in the church’s highly hierarchical structure. His willingness to involve parishioners in church decisions and his team-approach to ministry became his trademarks. “I recognize that those instances in which something significant has happened, it has been because of somebody by my side, rather than out of my own initiative,” he says. “If you trust a person, a lot can happen.”

In 1981, Olivares was assigned to Our Lady Queen of Angels, the 200-year-old church in the heart of Los Angeles’ Mexican birthplace that draws 10,000 worshipers--mostly Latinos--to Sunday Masses. Under Olivares, the church that Latinos affectionately call La Placita , “Little Plaza,” became a haven for refugees and illegal immigrants--a place not only to bed down and get a square meal, but also to find encouragement and someone willing to speak out on their behalf.

For Olivares, the presence of so many desperate people at his church door was clear testimony of the failure of immigration laws as well as U.S. policy in Central America. He felt compelled to see for himself the source of so much misery. That quest took him to Salvadoran refugee camps in Honduras and later to El Salvador. At the camps, he found refugees living in squalid conditions as virtual prisoners. “You cannot be witness to human suffering and not be convinced of the existence of social sin,” he said at the time. “We are all responsible unless we take a stand and speak against it.”

OLIVARES HAD infuriated immigration authorities by declaring his church a sanctuary in 1985. Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony sidestepped the issue, declining to publicly condemn or condone the action. Then, in 1986, Congress passed sweeping changes in immigration laws, including a provision that outlawed the hiring of undocumented workers. And when Olivares announced that he planned to urge employers to continue hiring illegal immigrants, federal officials complained to Mahony and launched an investigation.

Olivares, his associate pastor, Father Michael Kennedy, and Father Gregory Boyle, pastor of nearby Dolores Mission, were summoned to Mahony’s office. The archbishop asked them to sign pledges to respect the hiring ban. They refused, saying they couldn’t comply with a law that they believed was immoral. “What right do you have to set policy for this archdiocese?” one of Mahony’s aides angrily shot back, Olivares says.

By resisting Mahony, Olivares knew he was jeopardizing his future at La Placita. But he calculated that the archbishop would prefer to avoid the public relations stink that would surely ensue from sacking three controversial priests. The gamble paid off. Within days, Mahony retracted his request for their signatures and asked only that the three exercise more discretion in their pronouncements. As a compromise, the priests agreed to tip off Mahony before going public with controversial stances. Since then, Olivares has frequently found himself on the wrong side of the law. Last year, he was arrested several times for blocking the entrance to the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles during mass protests against U.S. policy in El Salvador.

Mahony has been “very effective in providing a sense of vision,” particularly on issues of social justice, Olivares says. “But his methodology for getting things done takes a lot of time. Meanwhile, those of us on the front lines have to deal with the problems at our church door.”

On the immigration issue, for instance, Mahony’s approach has been to lobby for changes in the law. Olivares, however, argues that there are times when “unjust” laws must be broken. Olivares doesn’t expect someone in Mahony’s position to espouse breaking the law. Still, he adds, “I’d prefer he were publicly more supportive of those of us on the front lines.

“Historically, the real radical changes in the church have never come out of the institution,” Olivares explains. “They always come out of the periphery.”

That reasoning as well as his insistence that ministering to the poor holds a higher priority than running a smooth parish operation was rejected by some of Olivares’ Claretian brethren. In their eyes, Olivares allowed La Placita to devolve into a disorderly, even dangerous place overrun not just by homeless men but also petty criminals. An elderly priest had been mugged in the open courtyard, and merchants in the Olvera Street tourist complex had begun complaining that they were losing business. Several of Olivares’ fellow Claretians at La Placita abandoned ship; no volunteers took their places.

“The question is: ‘What is the priority?’ ” Olivares argues. “Do you limit the number of people you are going to serve for the sake of efficiency? Are you going to exclude some people from church services because they look sloppy and the church looks messy with all these homeless people floating around?”

One of the priests who left La Placita, Olivares recalls, accused him of allowing “the myth of Luis Olivares” to go to his head. At a general assembly of the order last spring, which surprised some by its emotional and bitter tone, some members questioned Olivares’ motives and accused him of being “out for his own glory.”

In 1983, Olivares narrowly lost an election among Claretians to become head Provincial for the order’s Western province. A few years earlier, his brethren had refused to reelect him to a third term as their treasurer. Such rejections weighed heavily on Olivares, who found himself outside the circle of power.

“I’m not going to say it hurts, but it does make you angry,” he says. Although he recognizes that the strong reaction he elicits is a sign that he is “making a difference,” it is an uncomfortable position for a man who thrives on acceptance.

Then, last summer, after serving nine years as pastor at La Placita, Olivares was removed from his post by his superior in the order. Technically, Olivares had been allowed to serve well past the usual three-year term for a pastor. So he did not object when he was told that, at the end of his third term, he would be reassigned to a parish in Texas. What he did object to, and strenuously, was the method of selecting his successor.

He pleaded with superiors to choose someone willing to continue his work. But when that failed, Olivares planned to take his objections all the way to Rome. “I just could not see how my (regional) superiors could make changes at Plaza without knowing what the needs there are,” he says. “They never came and asked questions of the pastoral team or of the employees or of the parishioners.”

But Olivares fell ill before he could follow through on the appeal. In early June, after several days in bed with what he thought was the flu, he was taken to the hospital where doctors began tests that would diagnose his illness. From his hospital bed, Olivares received disquieting reports: An interim pastor began scaling back services to the homeless, and the church courtyard was made off limits to them during the day. Meanwhile, police, whom Olivares had barred from church premises, began chasing homeless men away from the street and sidewalks. The new permanent pastor, Albert Vazquez, former vice president of the Mexican American Cultural Center in Los Angeles, has vowed not to throw the men out, but he is trying to assuage authorities, parishioners and nearby merchants.

During Olivares’ tenure, there was no mistaking his priorities. If anyone complained about his favoritism for immigrants and the homeless, he simply asked: “What if that person is Jesus and I turn him away? How can I do that?”

ON A CRISP fall afternoon, Olivares receives a hero’s welcome at an open house at Casa Rutilio Grande, the refugee shelter he helped establish five years ago at a former Hollywood convent. He now works here a few hours almost every day. A handful of young men who run the facility--refugees and immigrants themselves--speak glowingly of the difference that Olivares has made in their lives and in the lives of hundreds of others who have passed through the shelter’s doors.

A middle-aged Salvadoran woman with waist-long black hair runs and buries her face and her tears in Olivares’ chest and won’t let go. The fact that he does not know her does not seem to matter. “I love him like a father,” she says, explaining later that she had not seen him since he had fallen ill. “There’ll never be another to speak for us like he did.”

Olivares’ illness has silenced most of his critics. Ernest Gustafson, a former Los Angeles director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, stopped by to visit, as has Archbishop Mahony. In a public statement released after his first visit, Mahony called Olivares a man of commitment and courage who “aroused the conscience of us all as we try to understand our responsibilities toward newly arrived peoples and those whose lives are not sheltered by laws and protections.”

Gustafson, however, couldn’t resist getting in a jab. When Olivares complimented him for “helping people” in his new role as unpaid adviser to Latino immigrants, Gustafson responded: “But I do it within the law.”

Immigrant advocates say Olivares’ unexpected departure has left a terrible vacuum in the movement’s leadership. “Father Olivares helped shape public attitudes and created a critical mass that finally broke through the indifference of city officials,” says Linda Wong, a leading immigrant-rights activist and director of the California Tomorrow Foundation, a nonprofit research group. “I can’t think of anyone else in Southern California with the kind of stature and moral authority he has. And I haven’t seen many people so willing to commit beliefs to action.”

Supporters among his fellow Claretians have taken to calling him “a living hero.” “He has taught us a concern for the poor, a willingness to take risks, the courage to say what needs to be said, and his concept of being a public presence in the fight for social justice,” Urrabazo says.

Now his battle is with a more personal foe. Doctors at Cedars Sinai Medical Center summoned Olivares’ family and closest friends to his bedside in late June when it looked as if he might not survive. At times, the frail and emaciated Olivares, lying in a fetal position, failed to recognize them. The life-and-death battle continued for weeks, as doctors struggled to control the meningitis so they could begin administering AZT, the AIDS drug.

When doctors told Olivares he had AIDS, he cried. He delayed telling even his family the truth, but doctors convinced him that the best way to head off criticism was to break the news himself.

As in previous battles, the most troubling aspect is the potential personal rejection. “It’s hard for me to say (even to hospital nurses) that I am HIV-positive. People jump to conclusions, judgments. The stigma of AIDS, I believe, is part of the rejection and abandonment Our Lord (went through) when he was put on the cross. That’s very real to me now.” Though he flatly denies having engaged in any sexual activity, Olivares has resigned himself to the fact that “people will continue to speculate, no matter what I say.”

There are small consolations. He still takes refuge in the Arvizu family, former parishioners he has known for years. On his weekly visits to their West Covina tract house, he is so at home that he scavenges the refrigerator for snacks and naps while watching television in the family den. It’s a large, fun-loving family with three children and eight grandchildren. They are among the few allowed to glimpse the guileless, playful and easily hurt man who hides behind the imposing public persona. With them, he shares his childlike enjoyment of Christmas preparations and the good-natured teasing of family members. He likes nothing better, they say, than a raucous family party, where after a few drinks, he can belt out his favorite Mexican country ballads.

What has him stymied is the uncertainty and unpredictability of his illness, and the conflict between his desire to work and the doctor’s vague admonition “not to overdo it.” He hears accounts from other AIDS patients who have returned to normal lives only to be struck down again. He has yet to decide exactly how to live out the time left to him.

He has lost interest in many things he used to care about--especially discussions about the future. Recently, at a meeting to discuss the financial future of the order, Olivares found his only concern was how the changes might affect his medical care.

The uncontrollable self-preoccupation is terrible, he says. But it has led him to put his house in order. He gave most of his clothes and books away as well as dozens of religious statues and medals.

Similarly, he has undertaken a spiritual housecleaning of sorts. “The Lord has given me notice so I have enough time to re-establish my priorities as a religious person.” But he admits that serious reflection is difficult for a man who has lived by the axiom that work is his prayer. The impulse to be involved remains strong; slowly he has resumed making public appearances. And he has begun exploring the possibility of returning to work at a parish. “I would like to be available to people,” he says.

He is not afraid of death, he says again: “Life is worth living. And so, you just hope that you will be able to deal with what comes.”