WIMAUMA, Fla. -- With Mass ended, Father Demetrio Lorden hurries to change before everyone leaves.
An overcast sky looms above the parking lot, threatening to dampen a spring festival in front of Our Lady of Guadalupe church.
A craggy, serious face protrudes above his white vestments and collar.
"Start the music," he yells in Spanish to the DJ outside before he hangs the robe in the vestibule and beats a path to the parish hall.
Inside his office, Father Lorden, 58, transforms.
He buttons up a red one-piece suit with white polka dots and big yellow and green circles.
"I forgot my socks," he mumbles.
He clips a red floppy collar around his neck and slides on a matching hat. He slips a rainbow-colored bag, satchel-style, over one shoulder, stuffing limp balloons inside.
Back in the parking lot, adults smile and wave: "Hi, Father." Some stare.
Children run after him.
"Do you want a balloon?" he asks.
Most of them are used to this routine by now: the clown in him that surfaces regularly for festivals and plays. For Lorden, the clown does more than make balloons and draw some laughs. The costume helps him break down the formality attached to priestly garb.
And for some in his congregation, living in the shadows, Lorden needs all the help he can get to reach them.
"As a priest, some people like me, some don't," he explains. "As a clown, everybody loves me."
Making his mark on world
Demetrio Lorden grew up in a small mountain village in Leon, Spain. His family farmed and herded sheep, goats and cattle. Surrounded by poverty, young Demetrio decided he'd make his mark on the world by helping the poor.
After seminary, he was ordained in 1970 and ministered in small towns. Thousands were leaving villages for bigger cities in Spain and other parts of Europe. Lorden went back to school in Madrid, got a master's degree in geography and history and taught in Catholic schools and a seminary.
"This is what I've always loved, books," he says. "I'm always asking questions, why why why?"
He also loved theater and directed plays in the seminary: modern plays, the Stations of the Cross, the Resurrection.
"If I had not been a priest, I think I would have liked to work in the circus," he says.
Disillusioned by church politics in the seminary, Lorden turned to missionary orders. His bishop convinced him to remain a parish priest, and steered him toward church missions in the United States.
There was a need in Dade City at St. Rita Catholic Church for a Spanish-speaking priest. They wanted a minister for the mostly Mexican migrant workers.
He had to leave his books and teaching career.
"It cost me more (to leave those behind) than to leave my family and my country," he says.
"You are not alone"
Lorden arrived at St. Rita the day before Halloween, 1981. Someone had to explain to him why children dressed as goblins were asking for candy.
As assistant pastor, he visited the fields and migrant camps every day.
"I knew the dogs and rats they had there," he says. "I knew everybody there."
Over coffee he'd listen to their problems, tell them about the church.
"It's our obligation to say, 'Someone is here for you. You are not alone here,' " he says.
Lorden blew up balloon figures for the children, and revived his theatrical skills, directing plays. Someone made him a clown suit, and he found that it helped break the ice during festivals.
He also held weekend leadership retreats in Spanish, a feature he expanded when he was moved to Corpus Christi Catholic Church in Temple Terrace in 1991, and became coordinator of the entire Hispanic ministry for the Diocese of St. Petersburg.
When a pastoral position opened five years ago at Our Lady of Guadalupe in Wimauma, church leaders turned to him.
"We needed someone who had a real rapport with the people," says Monsignor Harold Bumpus, pastor at Prince of Peace Catholic Church at nearby Sun City Center.
He learned of Lorden's work with Hispanics years before in another parish.
Our Lady serves about 800 families, more than half of whom live in Wimauma year round. The rest come and go for agriculture work, or live in nearby communities such as Apollo Beach and Ruskin.
About 90 percent of its congregants are Hispanic. The rest are volunteers from Sun City Center or non-Hispanics who live nearby. Masses are in English and Spanish.
Lorden does more than entertain. He rallied the community to raise $1.3-million over the past several years for a church hall that opened in April. The diocese provided $50,000 in seed money; Prince of Peace gave $300,000; and the remaining $250,000 was borrowed in a diocese-backed loan.
The 10,000-square-foot building has a food pantry, thrift store, computers, classes and meeting rooms.
Lorden also organized a children's fair for the students who attend Sunday catechism, says Alma Sanchez, 41, of Riverview. Originally from Mexico, she and her husband Franklin Piedrahita, 35, from Venezuela, drive down from their home in Riverview to attend Mass and teach Sunday school.
"(Father Lorden) preaches like he was a teacher, like he was giving you a class and he does it on your level," Sanchez says. When Sanchez and Piedrahita married last year, Lorden made doves out of balloons.
Sanchez likes how he treats everyone with respect. "He doesn't feel like they are beneath him."
In a congregation with many Mexican farm workers who live on the fringes of American society, Lorden offers weekend retreats on spiritual guidance. Where others see field hands, he sees leaders.
Prepare for a miracle
Father Lorden pulls into a gravel lot next to a weathered mobile home. He gets out and puts on his white vestments. The sky glows a dull yellow that melts into soft pink as the sun sinks. Children run and chase each other on bicycles along the dirt road of the migrant camp.
In the small grass clearing, Father Lorden prepares for a miracle.
He borrows a round table from the mobile home and sets it up on a concrete slab out front. Then he covers it with a clean white tablecloth, and unpacks his gold chalice and small bottles of ointments.
A woman in a blue-green sedan drives by:
"Are you having Mass?" she yells from the car.
"Yes, we're about to begin," he answers.
The home's owner, Luisa Martinez, sits on the doorstep. She lives here with her children and another family.
Others pull up folding chairs and place them in the grass in front of the makeshift altar.
An air conditioner grinds away in a nearby window, and he asks that it be shut off.
A reverential hush settles over the scene.
Laborers walk up in scuffed pants, and the acrid smell of bug repellent hangs in the air. Lorden leads the small group in a Spanish hymn, their discordant refrain blending with the crowing of two roosters.
Instead of a formal sermon, Father Lorden talks with them, quizzing them on patron saints, the meaning of God living in their hearts.
They kneel on the ground, and pray for the workers in the camp, for their families, for loved ones with illnesses. He serves them Holy Communion.
He closes with words of encouragement: "One way the Holy Spirit teaches us most is through life, and some ways are the things you never wanted to happen in your life. These are moments of teaching."
When it's over, they smile and linger to talk as Father Lorden packs up the chalice and vestments.
"I always have God in my heart, but sometimes when the weekend comes, I can't make it to church," says Martinez, 30. "I like having the Masses here."
Father Lorden rotates among camps throughout Wimauma, visiting one every Monday night.
Rita Orendain, 20, had heard about the Mass, so she rushed over in her sedan.
"My husband works on Sunday, so I can't go," she says.
Lorden drives back to the church in the darkness. He relishes these visits, wishes he could do them every day. As pastor, he just doesn't have time.
Ministering to the workers, Lorden has learned a thing or two about faith.
"Many people have been able to cope with all their problems with their faith," he says. The more money they make, he says, the less faith they have.
"They lose their faith when they get here, with the easy money and the easy life, not the hard life."
Lorden says he has learned something else, so many years after leaving his books and classroom.
"In some sense," he says, "God gave all these things back to me."
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