Two men to be ordained to the Archdiocese in June
Rev. Mr. Juan Lopez is looking forward to making himself at home among the faithful of the Archdiocese of San Francisco. The transitional deacon will be ordained to the priesthood June 7 at St. Mary’s Cathedral by Archbishop George H. Niederauer.
Born in Mexico 39 years ago, Deacon Lopez joined his parents, Benita and the now late Jose, in the United States in the 1990s. His mother continues to make her home in the Bay Area as do his 11 siblings and their families.
Deacon Lopez arrived in the United States with a background in computers from a technical school in Mexico. He began studies at College of San Mateo almost immediately, taking day and night courses while working two jobs.
“I’ve been a plumber, construction worker and washer of trucks,” he said with a smile. “We were all pursuing our degrees, but I found out this would not satisfy what I wanted or was looking for.” His immediate thoughts were not of priesthood but of “doing good.” Prayer, a regular part of his life from childhood, became a pivotal discernment tool.
“My mom and my dad always made sure we got to Mass on Sunday, and we’d often pray a family rosary,” he recalled.
“I was focusing on the material aspects of life,” Deacon Lopez said. His career choice, at that time, was architecture. “I wanted to be a good designer and make beautiful buildings and be famous. But then I realized that would not make me happy.”
“I had a lot of questions about life, about what I wanted and needed,” Deacon Lopez told Catholic San Francisco. Remembering his life in Mexico as among the middle class, he said that on return trips to his home state of Michoacan as an adult, he saw with new eyes the poverty and poor living conditions of many people.
His first thoughts were to prepare himself to help the poor. Initially he planned to secure an architecture degree and earn a living while securing financing for affordable housing.
“I started to pray more,” he said, adding that he also began attending Mass at St. Anthony Parish in North Fair Oaks where Father James Garcia is pastor.
“I knew who Father Garcia was, and I liked him a lot, but I was mostly praying by myself. I started to think that I could do the most good as part of the Church and that’s what started my thinking higher things and reading the Gospels.”
More and more Deacon Lopez became part of St. Anthony’s parish life. “I joined the choir, helped with the youth group.”
It was during a parish gathering that the priesthood called him closer. “At the end of the event I went to eat a taco and Father Garcia was there. He called me over and said if I ever wanted to talk about the seminary, he would be there for me.”
The next step was discernment, but this time with Father Garcia as guide. “He was my mentor,” Deacon Lopez said. Studies at San Francisco State University and completion of his undergraduate work at Mt. Angel Seminary in Oregon preceded his entering St. Patrick’s Seminary and University in Menlo Park.
Deacon Lopez is also grateful to Father Tom Seagrave, pastor, St. John of God Parish in San Francisco, and Father John Jimenez, chaplain, San Francisco General Hospital, for their help along the way.
Father Garcia will help Deacon Lopez vest during the ordination Mass. In the rite, Deacon Lopez removes his deacon vestments – dalmatic and deacon stole – and dons the priestly stole and chasuble. Deacon Lopez’ godfather, Father Primitivo Gonzalez of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, will also assist.
All of Deacon Lopez’ family, numbering as many as 200, will be at the ordination Mass with several serving as ministers of the Mass. Mom, Benita, with Deacon Lopez’ sister, Maria Hirelea, her husband, Javier, and their children, Xavier and Sarah, and the new priest’s nephew, Osbaldo, and his wife, Jenee, will bring up the gifts including Deacon Lopez’ chalice and paten.
Deacon Lopez’ sister, Celia, will proclaim the first Mass reading in English and his brother, Miguel, will proclaim the second in Spanish.
Generally, newly ordained priests have several weeks of free time before going to their first assignment. Deacon Lopez will have the time but nowhere to go. “We had to postpone a trip to Rome I was taking with my mom,” Deacon Lopez said, noting he’ll use the time for rest and refreshment. He and his mother will visit Europe at a later date.
“I first want to be a parish priest and to learn the ins and outs of the parish,” Deacon Lopez said, “and to celebrate the sacraments the best I can. I want to focus, too, on justice and peace and life issues and work with youth. If possible, I ask to be placed in a bi-lingual parish with a school. I want to work hard. I am ready to go where I am needed.”
The new Father Lopez will celebrate his first Mass in Spanish and English at St. Anthony Church on June 8 at 12:45 p.m.
(By Tom Burke)
Seminarian overcomes deafness in seeking vocation to priesthood
Rev. Mr. Ghislain Bazikila, who on June 21 will become the second deaf priest of African descent to be ordained for the Archdiocese of San Francisco in as many years, told Catholic San Francisco he hopes to see more deaf people ordained in the future.
“Deaf people struggle with vocations because of limited access,” Deacon Bazikila said through interpreter and deaf services coordinator Neva Turoff in an interview at St. Patrick’s Seminary and University in Menlo Park.
The seminarian encountered stumbling blocks on his road to ordination himself. Born in Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo, Deacon Bazikila enrolled in the seminary at age 14. In his third year of studies, he began to lose his hearing. He initially did not notice the gradual changes in his hearing.
“It wasn’t until I was 18 or 19, maybe even 20, that I started to be aware of the fact that I must have been losing my hearing,” Deacon Bazikila said. “My mother was the one who detected my hearing loss. We were having a very noisy family gathering at Christmastime. Everything seemed very confusing to me, and my mother noticed that I seemed to be a bit disoriented.”
Deacon Bazikila said the loud, crowded party was a huge contrast to his life at the seminary, where he mostly dealt with quiet classrooms and the voice of one professor. As time went on, he had more trouble hearing even in these ideal situations, especially once he completed his initial philosophy degree and went on to the major seminary.
“The bishop called me into a meeting and said, ‘We’re really at a loss as to how to help you,’” he recalled. “I started to get this fear about what was going to happen.”
The bishop ultimately asked him to step down from the seminary, hoping at a later date to be able to reinstate him. Overwhelmed with the loss of both his hearing and his vocation, Deacon Bazikila despaired.
“I had never met another deaf person,” he said. “I didn’t know sign language. I didn’t know what being deaf meant. When I became deaf, I thought I was the only one.”
This changed when he enrolled in a secular university in the Congo. There, in the course of finishing his master’s degree in sociology, he met more people like himself and started to learn more about deaf culture.
“I realized that perhaps it was God’s way of helping me to encounter new friends and to discern a different vocation,” he said.
It was at the university he was first encouraged to learn to sign. He had been relying solely on lip reading. Lip reading, he said, requires close proximity, and even then in some situations is nearly impossible. Signing opened a whole new world for him.
He started teaching the Bible to the deaf in local churches. This experience in turn led him back to the seminary after meeting men and women religious who encouraged him to seek his vocation in spite of the challenge of hearing loss. One of the priests himself was deaf, and from the United States. That meeting eventually led to Deacon Bazikila traveling to America.
Deacon Bazikila spent a year in New York in seminary, a pastoral year in Boston, and then, at the encouragement of then-Archbishop William Levada, he and several deaf seminarians came to St. Patrick Seminary.
Deacon Bazikila said his five years in Menlo Park have been a growth period both for himself and for the school in its efforts to reach out to the deaf community. When he first arrived, he and the other deaf students had to rely on typed notes from hearing classmates. Later, captioning services were available, but he said these were done by people off-site and were at times unreliable. Eventually, the seminary brought on signing interpreters available not just for class but for Mass and social occasions.
“In the beginning the seminary had no idea about deaf culture and how to accommodate our needs,” Deacon Bazikila said. “It was a learning curve for all of us involved.”
Because his father is too ill to make the trip to San Francisco for ordination, the seminarian received special dispensation from Archbishop George Niederauer to be ordained in Africa. He will also say his first Mass there, before returning to the United States.
Deacon Bazikila said he is grateful to the Archbishop for the opportunity to be with his family for his ordination.
Last June, Father Paul Zirimenya, a native of Uganda, was ordained for the Archdiocese by Archbishop Niederauer. Currently residing at St. Gabriel Parish, San Francisco, Father Zirimenya works with the deaf Catholic community from the Bay Area to the Oregon border.
(By Michael Vick)
