Mass Appeal : Surfing Gringo Priest Wins Over Latino Parish With Candor

The noon Mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe had drawn to a close for yet another Sunday, and three generations of Latino parishioners filed silently from the colorful little Catholic church near downtown Chula Vista.

Once outside, the sea of brown faces parted around the waiting parish priest, a beaming man who looked almost radiant in his bright yellow vestments as he greeted the gray-haired grandmothers, working-class fathers and streetwise teens with soft words of encouragement.

But the exchanges came in English, a strange sound at the proud barrio parish where a priest has traditionally been a padre--a gentle Latino father-figure who spoke in lilting Spanish and represented the roots of the local ethnic community.

Until now.

Armed with barely two years of high school language training, the new pastor at Our Lady of Guadalupe often makes mistakes in his Spanish pronunciation during Mass, gaffes that are quickly corrected by a congregation who collectively shout out the right word.

This priest is a blue-eyed gringo with shoulder-length blond hair who last summer took on his first assignment as parish pastor--a controversial transfer that brought him from a comfortable North County church in San Marcos to this blue-collar Latino congregation in the South Bay.

A La Mesa native, Bruce Orsborn grew up on the beach--not in any barrio--becoming an accomplished surfer-turned priest who religiously brings his past to church with him each Sunday, sprinkling his sermons with the splashy lexicon of the Southern California coast.

At 35, he still carries his short board atop a sporty white Jeep and feels more comfortable dressed in a T-shirt, sandals and pair of cut-off shorts than he does in any conservative black cleric garb.

He’s the priest they call Father Rad. As in radical. As in dude.

Since he arrived in the Chula Vista parish last July--replacing a 72-year-old Latino who retired after 14 years as church pastor--Orsborn has used a youthful, somewhat unorthodox style to fan new enthusiasm into the staid goings-on at Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Often charging up and down the aisles of the 50-year-old church, he has successfully challenged many of the ways his new parishioners express their faith--including arriving at Mass on time, assuming an active role in hymn-singing, even the frequency of their taking Communion.

Along the way, he has increased church attendance--especially among the congregation’s younger parishioners--lending an experienced ear to teen-agers who never before considered the church for help in coping with the stress and dangers of barrio life.

Now, at most Sunday Masses, there is standing room only as Father Bruce, performing both Spanish and English services, breaks the mystique of the saintly, straight-as-an-arrow priest, sharing colorful tales of his teen-age dating and beach life as well as his five years at the Vatican and Third World travels.

So far, the parishioners at Our Lady of Guadalupe like what they see.

“Culturally, it was a shock to have an Anglo priest in such a traditional Latino parish in a poor barrio--especially one with a sense of humor who first introduced himself to us as a beach bum,” recalls parishioner Diana Vera.

“But we’re learning to love him and accept him for what he is. Father Bruce isn’t a Latino. But he’s blurring the distinction between the nationalities.”

It’s not only the young who applaud their new pastor’s irreverent style. Older parishioners are impressed with Father Bruce’s spunk--the fact that he has tackled church services in Spanish while he works to master the language.

“Sure, he makes mistakes--it’s normal,” said parishioner Margarito Lozoya, who is studying to become a church deacon. “But he tries hard, and that’s what counts. After all, we all make mistakes when we try to speak English, too.”

But controversy has swirled nonetheless since a then-ailing Bishop Leo T. Maher announced last summer that the young priest would be heading south from his assistant pastor’s position at St. Mark’s parish in San Marcos.

A petition was quickly circulated at Our Lady of Guadalupe by churchgoers who preferred that a Latino priest be granted the post. And Orsborn concedes that he did himself little good by first showing up at the church rectory dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, his surfboard propped atop his Jeep.

A woman parishioner who worked at the church office was so shocked by the sight that day that she called the bishop’s office, complaining that no self-respecting priest she knew of dressed like that.

Not long afterward, La Prensa, a Latino newspaper in San Diego, wrote several stories criticizing the appointment, claiming that Anglos had no place in Latino parishes. For the congregation at Our Lady of Guadalupe, the paper said, Orsborn was anything but the Great White Hope.

“It’s just another example of the way that the diocese refuses to listen to its Latino members--which comprise the majority of its congregation in San Diego--and give them a voice in the running of their own church,” Daniel Munoz, editor and publisher of La Prensa, said in an interview.

“Try putting a Mexican priest who speaks only broken English into some of these lofty Anglo parishes and see how far you’d get. All these people who say they are happy with this priest are the faithful, the true believers who are happy to be sheep, to grovel at the feet of the white master.

“They’re very obedient. And that’s how the church wants them to stay.”

Rodrigo Valdivia, an assistant to Bishop Robert Brom--who replaced the late Bishop Maher last July--defended the appointment, saying the diocese is chronically short of qualified Latino priests.

“The needs of the parish are considered in all these decisions but the church can only staff with what it has,” he said. “We just do not have a great number of Hispanic priests we can assign as parish pastors.”

In a statement, Chancellor Msgr. Daniel Dillabough--the diocese’s second-in-charge--echoed that sentiment: “It is the practice of the diocese to assign Hispanic priests to serve in parishes where there is the greatest need. Unfortunately, the need exceeds the supply.

“When this occurs, the diocese places a priest in such parishes who speaks Spanish and who is sensitive to the Hispanic culture.”

Valdivia said there are a handful of local Latino parishes throughout the South Bay with Anglo priests. The diocese, he says, does not consider them to be a liability to their congregations. “We just don’t look at it in those terms,” he said.

Neither does Father Bruce.

“I don’t think any of the critics are coming from within the parish,” he said. “The people at La Prensa--I don’t even know if they go to church. They’re coming from the outside, way out in left field.”

He acknowledges being concerned at first about his acceptance at the parish--qualms that have since been eased by parishioners themselves.

“People have come to me and said, even though they signed the petition, they’re willing to work with me now that they know who I am,” he said. “And that’s all I ask.”

For Father Rad, the assignment at Our Lady of Guadalupe posed one of his biggest challenges in almost a decade as a Catholic priest.

One of five children born to a former La Mesa fire chief, Orsborn decided to enter the priesthood while attending Grossmont College--when his studies in aerospace operations, he says, failed to answer some larger questions with which he began to grapple.

He attended the St. Francis Seminary on the University of San Diego campus and then spent five years at the Vatican in Rome--using summers for travels that included work in a leprosy colony in India.

Once back in San Diego, he served in two local parishes before his two years at St. Mark’s--including time at an East San Diego church where a group of inner-city children first gave him the name Father Rad, thanks to his curly hair and surfer-style station wagon he once drove.

Despite the travels and all the parishes at which he had worked, Father Bruce was perhaps no more nervous in his life than the first time he addressed his new parish on a hot July day last summer.

First, he talked about the obvious--that he was no Msgr. Luis Balderas, the stately priest who had just retired. No, he wasn’t even Latino. He was just a priest who liked to surf and would probably spend much of his free time at the beach.

He was a gringo, he told them. And he knew the impression was that he wouldn’t last. The congregation laughed nervously.

“The answers to the two most often asked questions about me are ‘35’ and ‘Yes,’ ” he continued. “The questions are ‘What’s your age?’ and ‘Is your hair naturally curly?’ ”

The humor was a defense against the cultural whiplash that came with the sudden move from affluent white suburbia to a barrio where even the church itself was surrounded by protective steel bars.

There were young people here observing--excitable boys with jet-black ponytails and rat-tails, Father Bruce recalled. Young girls with their own children in their arms. So many children.

In his confessional, he now heard about car thefts, drive-by shootings and children in trouble with the law at extremely young ages. But he also found a sense of community spirit unmatched in the lily-white suburbs.

Here was a place where the church truly was the heart and center of the community--not just the one-hour obligation on Sunday mornings.

“Everything at St. Marks operated so smoothly,” he recalled. “People were paid to do things--even the gardening. But this was a poor barrio parish. I was the only one who got paid. But people worked together to get things done--from the cleaning of the church to the teaching of Bible classes.”

Immediately, Father Bruce became an authority figure at Our Lady of Guadalupe. Parishioners came to him with questions not only about their faith but also about handling their children, about quarrels with spouses or dealing with the schoolyard bully.

There were elements of the tradition, however, that he soon sought to change.

This was, after all, a parish where some old habits had hardened to brittle redundancy--where families attended the same Sunday Mass, often sitting in the same pew, month after month, while their teen-age sons stood outside the door, their machismo blocking their entry into church.

One Sunday, not long after his arrival, Father Bruce began to shake things up.

He suddenly broke from the altar, curly blond hair rolling off his head like a gnarly wave. He walked up and down the aisles, encouraging young children to follow him to the front of the church--to sit on the floor at the altar for a close-up view of the proceedings.

“He was like the Pied Piper, the way the children followed him,” recalls parishioner Vera. “But now each week they sit on the altar next to Father Bruce. It’s a way he gets them involved in the Mass.”

On another Sunday, Orsborn abruptly halted Mass and, standing at the altar while the congregation watched in silence, launched a showdown with the teen-agers standing outside, inviting them to come in and join the others. “I invited them to participate or leave,” he recalled.

“I told them it couldn’t be just half-way. At first, they stood their ground. But then they saw that I was standing my ground as well. So they came inside.”

Ironically, Masses have become so popular--especially the noon service preferred by teen-agers because Father Bruce’s homilies are often directed at them. Many youths must still stand in the front and side doorways of the church, but now it is because there’s simply no room inside.

“You used to be able to come into church at quarter after 12 and get a seat easy,” said 16-year-old Emilio Lopez. “Now lots of people show up at 11:45 or earlier, and there’s still no guarantee of getting in.”

But children weren’t the only ones seeing changes under Our Lady of Guadalupe’s new pastor. Soon after his arrival, Father Bruce told the entire congregation that arriving late for Mass would no longer be tolerated.

The priest attributes his hard-line stand to his acceptance at the church.

“They saw that I was authentic,” he said. “I told them that there were going to be no games played here. If they came to Mass, they came on time. It was going to be a meaningful experience or nothing at all. It wasn’t just a social obligation, something they could just waltz in on without putting themselves into it.”

He persuaded more people to receive Communion--battling the attitude, especially among older parishioners--that they weren’t worthy of the sacrament.

Other things changed, too. Like singing during Mass.

Father Bruce decided that most of the congregation was merely lip-syncing the hymns played during services. So one day he chastised the parish. “I told him that I was the gringo here, and I was only one singing,” he recalled.

“I said that this was their church, their Mass and that they had to start taking charge of it. After all, they where the ones who had the reputation as singers, and I wanted to start hearing it.”

Despite the rules, parishioners say they support Father Bruce’s free spirit. They like his down-to-earth sermons and the fact that he greets them outside after each Mass instead of hiding in his sacristy.

“We used to go to another church where the father yelled at you,” said parishioner Jesse Gomez, a middle-aged man who left the church with his wife, Isaura, on his arm. “Even before you got into the church, you felt like you did something wrong. But not with Father Bruce. He makes you feel at home. He makes you feel like a brother.”

Added his wife: “Before we came, our friends said, ‘You’re gonna be surprised at what you see.’ And we sure were. He doesn’t look like a priest.”

It is just that boyish impetuosity, friends and family member say, that makes Father Bruce a success--that balance of youthful vanity and devotion to his faith.

Father Rad’s bedroom at the rectory is a case in point--looking more like it belongs to some beach-wise teen-ager than a church pastor.

There’s a surfboard hanging on the wall over the bed with brightly colored sheets showing exotic fish. On a nearby night stand, instead of a Bible, sit bottles of Tropical Blend suntan lotion and Bullfrog sun block. Reprints of several surfer paintings hang on other walls.

Outside, his Jeep bears the vanity license plate “FR RAD.”

When each day starts, however, Father Bruce Orsborn becomes a grass-roots parish priest at work within miles of the neighborhood where he grew up--a strange place nonetheless, where the culture, psychology, and even the language, present him with constant challenges.

But he is trying to make his mark in the community once he steps outside the church.

Since he became paster, Our Lady of Guadalupe has begun weekly youth meetings where teen-agers--including some ex-gang members--talk about sexuality, street violence and how religion fits into their lives.

The new priest on the block knows the cultural static at his parish will continue, that he might unknowingly change the slightest accent of a Spanish word in Mass and give it a completely different--and unsavory--meaning.

And he knows some parishioners, still rooted in the past, might tell him to get a haircut. But, in time, Father Rad knows that raising a few eyebrows is one way to get people to open their eyes.

Just ask Margarito Lozoya. “When a new pastor comes to your church, it’s normal to have doubts, to be like lambs scattering in different directions,” he said.

“That’s what happened to our church. We thought that, with an Anglo priest, we would lose some of our culture, some of our proud heritage. But, you know what? We were wrong.”