Working Toward Priesthood and Campaigning for Council

Nicaraguan-born Juana Mojica, now 45, finally decided two years ago to take Episcopal seminary classes in Claremont while working full time here at a social service agency and raising two teens as a single mother.

Then, beginning a five-year trek to priestly ordination, she enrolled in a philosophy course that required reading 17 books.

“My Lord, how am I going to do that?” she recalled asking herself. “Sometimes I’d get to bed at 1 a.m. or 2 a.m., but I found I did have time.”

Knowing that she would be adding an internship at a Santa Clarita parish by the end of 1996, Mojica also was being urged last year to add something else to her schedule--a run for the San Fernando City Council.

“Gosh, no, I can’t do that,” said Mojica when first approached by a city official. But the Hispanic Ministries coordinator for the Los Angeles Episcopal Diocese encouraged her to do it “as another type of ministry.” Her parish priest in San Fernando “said the same thing,” so she accepted the challenge.

Mojica is one of six active candidates for two open seats on the City Council. The others are Jose Hernandez, Silverio Robledo, Robert Villafana, Virginia Mendoza and Donald Mauran. The election is March 4.

Mojica has the backing of her boss, Ester Cadavid-Hannon, executive director of the San Fernando Valley Partnership, a nonprofit agency launched in 1990 with federal funds to organize communities to fight alcohol and drug abuse. Mojica, who has worked there since 1994, heads a new project in North Hills funded by Los Angeles County.

Cadavid-Hannon conceded this week that she thinks of religion and politics as total opposites, “but if anyone can do it, Juana can.”

The part-time priest-in-training drives to classes in Claremont Friday night and Saturday morning every other weekend, often taking her 14-year-old daughter along.

Mojica, who said she rises about 5:30 a.m. daily to exercise, said she learned self-discipline while growing up in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. The daughter of a lieutenant in longtime dictator Anastasio Somoza’s army, she attended high school in the morning, came home for lunch, then attended classes at a business college each afternoon.

“My mom always said you have to be disciplined in life and work hard if you want one day to accomplish something,” Mojica said. “Thank God she did.”

She was sent by her father to live with family friends in Huntington Park at age 17 as a cooling off test of her desire to be married. She returned to Nicaragua after seven months and was married, but after only one month the couple moved to Southern California--spurred in part by Juana’s excitement over the open U.S. society that contrasted with the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, she said.

Unhappy with her family’s Catholic heritage, she became an Episcopalian 14 years ago when the youngest of her three children was only 3 months old.

“I was amazed to see the involvement of the parishioners in church--you weren’t just part of an audience,” she said. “You could assist at the altar and have other opportunities in the liturgy.”

The parish in San Fernando is St. Simon’s, whose rector was and still is the Rev. Canon Jose Carlo. “By my third year, I was on the vestry,” she said, referring to the governing body of the parish. The next year she was appointed senior warden, or chair of the vestry.

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In 1987, she began a three-year stint heading the parish’s immigration program. “We processed close to 7,000 undocumented people and now they are getting their citizenship,” she said.

Later, Mojica went to work part time for the city of San Fernando as coordinator of senior citizen activities, but when she and her husband divorced, she needed full-time work. She got that at a low-income housing agency in North Hollywood and later went to work for the Federal Emergency Management Agency for awhile after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

Running for elected office and aspiring to become a priest through a special Episcopal program for minority community leaders both fall into the category of service, she said.

Seeking ordination to the ministry in mid-life is not unusual today, according to the Assn. of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada. Nearly 30% of the 25,900 Protestant and Catholic seminarians enrolled in a master of divinity degree program were 40 or older in the fall of 1995, the last period tabulated. Fully 60% of the seminarians were 30 or older, a spokeswoman said.

“No matter how old you are or how busy you are, if you really have the desire, you cannot avoid a calling,” Mojica said. “God is going to get you.”