Political Padre: Raymundo Chávez Vázquez and Illegal Immigration

It's standing room only in the lobby and in the halls leading to church offices. Approximately 1,500 people are crammed into a space meant for hundreds fewer. When it comes time to kneel, a group of kids in oversized T-shirts and baggy jeans with spiky, dyed hair finds a little space outside a hall leading to the bathroom. They cross themselves and bow their heads as Father Raymundo leads the congregation in prayer.

During the homily — the sermon — Father Raymundo steps down from the pulpit, carrying an open Bible. He starts to preach, applying Bible verses to troubled relationships, problems on the job and topics such as domestic violence and gender roles. He walks up and down the aisle, working the crowd and feeding off its energy. Like an evangelical preacher, he can thunder his message one minute and then change to a whisper to emphasize a particular point.

After mass, Father Raymundo stands in his white robes near the street in the sweltering central Texas sun. As the church­goers file out, he patiently blesses the objects they bring to him. They crowd around him like he's a star quarterback who's just won a big game.

In a sense, Father Raymundo wasn't that different from any other Mexican immigrant when he arrived in the United States seven years ago. He was a young man on his own who barely spoke a word of English. ("My English is still broken," he admits in Spanish, which he still prefers for interviews.)

At the time, he didn't know much about politics, immigration laws or the deep racial divisions in Texas. He only knew he wanted to preach the Word of God in his native Spanish. "I didn't want to come here, to be perfectly honest," he says. "I love my country. I love my family. I always imagined myself as a priest on a Mexican ranch, ministering to rural people."

In a country deeply divided between rich and poor, Father Raymundo grew up in a large, middle-class household in the central Mexican town of Celaya. His father was a farmer who also ran a successful taxi business in the city. Celaya didn't have the rampant violence and drug trade of many Mexican cities, but the stark division between the haves and have-nots made an early impression on him.

"Latin America has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in the world," he says. "And yet the vast majority of the population is Catholic. What's going on? It means that we're not living like good Christians."

Father Raymundo isn't afraid to take this social gospel into the church. "Sure," he says, "it's a message people don't want to hear. When you start talking about economics, no one wants to listen to you. But the same thing happened to the prophets. Jesus Christ preached a gospel that the powerful didn't want to hear. And what happened? He got the death penalty."

Father Raymundo has never lacked in the self-assurance department. He decided that he wanted to be a priest at age six. He started seminary at age 13. (Most U.S. priests begin seminary during or after college.) Out of seminary, his first job as a priest was to minister to a drug-infested barrio in Mexico City called La Merced, where pimps were known to harass Catholic priests who tried to get prostitutes off the streets and into church.

"Fortunately, they never threatened me," he says. "Maybe it's because I've never looked like a normal priest with my goatee and my looks. The pimps probably thought I was one of the customers, so they left me alone."

He describes this first mission as "painful." Some of the prostitutes had AIDS. Some of them came to church after being beaten up by their pimps. Still, he felt like he was doing God's work in his native land.

When an invitation came to visit the United States, he wasn't sure he wanted to come — even for a vacation. In the end, though, he accepted. He thought his stay in this country wouldn't last long. "Then a bishop told me there weren't enough priests to minister to the immigrants," he said. "I thought I would only be there for a month and then go back home."

Before he knew it, though, he had settled in Tyler, Texas, at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. It was no longer a vacation, but he enjoyed it. He worked as an assistant for an Anglo priest, and there were just a few Hispanics. He felt welcomed by Anglos. "I wanted to hide under the altar, my English was so bad," he says. "It was embarrassing."

At this point, Father Raymundo wasn't sure what he was doing in the United States, especially in the affluent, English-speaking parish he served. "Then one night," he says, "I woke up in the middle of the night and said, 'What the devil — excuse my language — am I doing here? Why am I in the United States?' I still don't really know why, but here I am. You can't escape from God even when you want to. God won't let me escape."