By Thea Jarvis

Jorge Presmanes was a 24-year-old float management officer at First Atlanta Bank when an employee told him about the Cursillo weekend. At the time, the rising young banker wasn't much of a churchgoer.

"I really wasn't a practicing Catholic most of my life," said the newly ordained priest of the Dominican order, who was born and baptized in Cuba and came to the United States in 1966. Father Presmanes was ordained May 24 at Holy Cross Church in Atlanta by Archbishop James P. Lyke, OFM.

His decision to attend a Cursillo was "kind of what started it all."

From that time on, his personal journey involved a close relationship with the Church community that eventually led him to priesthood.

"I feel that my vocation comes out of a call from the community," Father Presmanes said, remembering those who encouraged and supported him. "A lot of people felt I had the gifts to be an ordained minister."

After his Cursillo experience, he became part of a team that facilitated Hispanic youth ministry for the archdiocese, and was involved in a national effort that eventually led to the U.S. bishops' pastoral plan for Hispanic ministry.

For five summers, he did mission work with the indigenous peoples of Tabasco, Mexico, where one priest ministered to a population of nearly 200,000.

"We would go to a village to do home visitation," he explained. "It was like a spiritual renewal of the village."

Father Presmanes worked specifically with lay catechists who conducted liturgies of the Word and prepared people for the sacraments. The priest visited only two to four times a year, he said.

As his involvement with the Church grew, the young Presmanes became interested in the Dominican order. His mother, Ana Benedit, was a parishioner at Immaculate Heart of Mary parish, but helped Holy Cross pastor Father Alberto Rodriguez, OP, begin Hispanic ministry there.

"He's the one who got me into the Dominicans," Father Presmanes said of his friend and mentor.

He entered the Dominican novitiate in the summer of 1985, and after a year in Columbia, SC, was sent to California to begin studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. There he earned degrees in theology and enculturation.

During his student days in California, Father Presmanes worked at organizing dairy farm-workers who lived in "horrific housing" and had little potable water, he said. Their wages were low and "incredible working hours" prevailed.

The situation was "bizarre," Father Presmanes said, because many of the ranchers who employed the workers were members of the parish where he was assigned.

"They placed profit before human dignity," he said. "We were fired at the end of a year."

Such ministry strengthened his commitment to base ecclesial communities, models he believes "may be the answer to parish problems."

These small Christian groups, bound by geography or neighborhood ties, "can be a complete experience of Church that is humanizing, not impersonalizing," he said.

Because of their smaller numbers and a shortage of ethnic priests, Hispanics have had to rely on base communities, which can serve as prophetic paradigms for the Church at large, Presmanes said.

"We're forced into forming community as we do. It happens because of necessity but we're realizing that it's of theological and evangelical value," he said.

Respecting the baptismal dignity of the Christian people means that, through baptism, lay Christians are co-responsible with ordained members of the community.

"It's a shared responsibility," he said, adding that such an approach doesn't minimize the importance of the hierarchy or the ordained ministry. "The gifts of the Holy Spirit differentiate us from each other," but we are "equally responsible for building up the Kingdom."

Father Presmanes spent the past year as a deacon at St. Dominic's Church in Miami, where Father Rodriguez pastors a parish of over 5,000 Hispanic families. He will return to serve as associate pastor there and will continue studies toward a graduate degree in Hispanic Ministry while teaching Christology and evangelization courses at the Southeast Pastoral Institute.

Long term goals will involve Presmanes in "lay enablement," he hopes. "The formation of the laity. That's what I want to do with my life -- raise their baptismal consciousness."

He plans to continue in ministry to the Hispanic community, where a shortage of priests continues to offer a challenge. As his order's promoter of Spanish ministry for the Southeastern province, he is acutely aware of the need.

"Of the Catholics in our province, over 50 percent are Hispanic," he said.

Saint Martin de Porres, the black Hispanic patron of the Southeastern province of Dominicans, is a symbol of the order's direction and mindset.

"We have a commitment to Hispanic ministry," Father Presmanes said with satisfaction.