‘Father Rad’ : Catholicism: The 35-year-old Anglo priest is a religious leader and an accomplished surfer who is still trying to master Spanish. He has created a stir as pastor of a Latino parish.

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 in San Diego County.

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 street-wise 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 Spanish and represented the roots of the local ethnic community.

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 church in North San Diego County to a blue-collar Latino parish just a few miles north of the Mexican border.

A La Mesa native, Bruce Orsborn grew up on the beach, 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 clerical garb.

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

Since he arrived last July--replacing a 72-year-old Latino who retired after years as church pastor--Father Bruce 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.

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 at the 200-seat church as Father Bruce breaks the image 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 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 Diana Vera.

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

It is not only the young who applaud their new pastor’s irreverent style. Older parishioners are impressed with his 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.”

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 Father Bruce 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 that day that she called the bishop’s office.

Not long afterward, La Prensa, a Latino newspaper in San Diego, carried several stories criticizing the appointment, claiming that Anglos had no place in Latino parishes.

“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.”

Chancellor Msgr. Daniel Dillabough, the diocese’s second in charge, said, however, that the diocese is chronically short of qualified Latino priests. “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.”

For Father Bruce, the assignment 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, Father Bruce 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 studying for a graduate degree in theology 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 the surfer-style station wagon he once drove.

Despite the travels and all the parishes at which he had worked, Father Bruce was perhaps never more nervous in his life than the first time he addressed his new parish last summer.

First, he talked about the obvious--that he was no Msgr. Luis Balderas, the stately priest who had just retired. 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 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 was surrounded by protective steel bars.

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

In his confessional, he now heard about car thefts, drive-by shootings and children in trouble with the law at extremely young ages.

“Everything at St. Mark’s operated so smoothly,” he said. “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.”

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

This was, after all, a parish 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.

Not long after his arrival, Father Bruce began to shake things up.

He suddenly broke from the altar, 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, he abruptly halted Mass and launched a showdown with the teen-agers standing outside. “At first, they stood their ground. But then they saw that I was standing my ground as well. So they came inside.”

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--which serves about 800 families--but now it is because there is simply no room inside.

Since Father Bruce became pastor, 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.

It is just one way Father Bruce tries to keep alive the surfer youth of his past--that balance of youthful vanity and devotion to his faith.

Father Rad’s bedroom at the rectory is a case in point. There’s a surfboard hanging on a wall over the bed. On a nearby night stand, instead of a Bible, sit bottles of Tropical Blend suntan lotion. Outside, his Jeep bears the vanity license plate “FR RAD.”

But he 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.

But, in time, Father Bruce knows that raising a few eyebrows is one way to get people to open their eyes.