BY THEA JARVIS

When 13-year-old Severino Lopez Parre left Chicago’s southside for the Claretian seminary in California in 1931, the young Mexican-American had no idea he wouldn’t see his family for the next 12 years.

“It was three days and three nights on the train. Boy, was I homesick!” remembered Father Lopez, now 75 and celebrating his 50th year as a Claretian.

The teenaged Sevy had joined the order when rules were hard and fast and expectations were rare.

“They were so strict they wouldn’t allow me to go back to Chicago,” he said. On the homefront, his father, the owner of three successful groceries, had gone bankrupt extending credit to customers during the Depression. There was no extra money for a family trip to the West Coast.

After four years in the minor seminary, Sevy had a novitiate year to decide if he would remain with the Claretians. Family or no family, by then he was hooked.

“I didn’t know any better,” Father Lopez admitted. “I fell in love with my surroundings.” The quite cleanliness of the seminary, about 12 miles outside Los Angeles, was appealing. The lush gardens and mild weather were a far cry from the old neighborhood. He loved the sports, the studies, the friends he had met there.

“Who would want to leave such a place?” he asks now.

The young seminarian re-upped for another three years, a grueling grind of day and night philosophy courses, followed by four more years of theology classes.

Today, Father Lopez’ easy smile and gracious manner belie his seminary struggles. From the comfortable living room of Corpus Christi’s rectory, where he has spent the last two years as parochial vicar, he sees a clear, if meandering, path stretching from Jalisco, Mexico to Stone Mountain, Ga.

“There was the hand of God in all this,” he said. “God called me as he called Samuel, as a young kid. He was going to make a priest out of me, fashioning me little by little, without my knowing.”

Ordained in Los Angeles in 1944, Father Lopez celebrated his first Mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in south Chicago, where he had been an altar boy. It was the start of a life of change and movement.

The energetic, open-hearted priest was sent everywhere from inner city Chicago parishes to Hispanic communities in San Antonio, Texas. In New Jersey, Father Lopez said Masses in boxcars for Mexican braceros, who had come to work the railroads during World War II, and fought for their rights with local lawyers and judges.

In the sixties, he toured Mexico with a Claretian mission band, validating marriages, baptizing babies, riding into the hill country on horseback to administer sacraments. He traveled the U.S. with a mission band here and pastured three Chicago parishes and another in Fairfax, Va., following a stint as campus minister at George Mason University.

When he was made comptroller of his order in 1971, Father Lopez enrolled at the University of Notre Dame for two summers and earned a graduate business degree. With a $3 million portfolio to manage, he said, “I wanted to know what the whole thing was about.”

This hands-on, down-to-earth approach to priestly life didn’t go unnoticed. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley appointed Father Lopez one of the city’s five commissioners for human relations in 1973. The following year, Father Lopez helped establish the Office of Professional Standards (OPS), a citizens group mandated to investigate police corruption and violence that was the first of its kind and is still active today.

In 1985, when his order saw the need to support and encourage Hispanic students, Father Lopez was one of two counselors chosen to staff Casa Claret, a residential facility for Latinos attending Chicago colleges and universities.

Fellow Claretian Father Richard Farrell, who first met Father Lopez in the seminary and now serves with him in Stone Mountain, said his friend’s gifts were apparent early on.

“I learned a lot from him,” working with Father Lopez at Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Mary’s parish in Fairfax, said Father Farrell. Today the two remain partners in ministry and golf.

“He knew his people,” particularly the youth, Father Farrell remembered. At Our Lady of Guadalupe, he often played football with the kids, tackling and hitting without holding back. “I thought he was crazy,” Father Farrell said of the exercises. Yet, “this is what kids admire. You gain loyalty that way and bring them into the church. He took that as a priority,” always making “time for kids, time for people.”

Since coming to the Archdiocese of Atlanta two years ago, Father Lopez has “spread himself very thin,” Father Farrell said. “He has a big heart. He’s stretched himself out.”

At Corpus Christi, Father Lopez regularly rotates parish duties with three other priests and celebrates Sunday Eucharist in Spanish. Because of the shortage of Spanish-speaking priests, Father Lopez also celebrates Masses in Spanish at St. John Neumann in Lilburn and St. Patrick’s in Norcross and ministers to a group of poor Mexican laborers in Conyers.

“He’s very loyal to the priesthood and to the Church, particularly to the Hispanic community,” said Father Farrell, who called him “a role model, especially for our younger priests. He’s very unassuming, very bright, very well-read. He keeps abreast of what is going on.”

Father Lopez is proud of his Mexican heritage and his strong family roots. His father, a teacher and journalist, left Mexico during the revolution when the political climate put the family at risk. They lived in California, where Sevy was born, but returned to Mexico a few years later. After the Cristero uprising of the mid-1920s, the family was again uprooted, this time moving to Chicago, where they settled permanently.

“My father was very dynamic, always involved with people,” Father Lopez said with admiration. “His faith was his foundation, his motivating force.” As one of the intellectuals who shaped the Cristero movement, Don Severino Lopez stood up for the right to worship and celebrate Mass at a time when such liberties were threatened in Mexico.

Father Lopez described his mother as “a very holy woman” with an appealing, down-to-earth piety. In their family of seven children, he was “right in middle, in between.” The move to Chicago, a big industrial city with plenty of job opportunities, had been a step forward until the Depression hit. But despite the family’s financial setbacks, Don Severino continued as a church and community leader, directing local distribution of government relief for hard-hit parishioners.

There is much of the father in the son.

Chilean-born Mercedes Heinis, who with her husband and two children attend the Spanish language Mass at Corpus Christi each week, said Father Lopez continually gives of himself to his people.

“I don’t understand how he does it,” Mrs. Heinis said. “He’s working almost 24 hours,” making Mass, family counseling sessions, confession, weddings available to Hispanics in their native language.

“He can be retired easily,” leading a quiet, relaxing life in Florida, she said, but he chooses to remain in active ministry. “He’s a wonderful person.”

Father Farrell said his friend is known for his patience and compassion, even in tough situations. When a bride was late for a one-o’clock wedding Father Lopez was to celebrate, he stayed calm.

“She had hired a chauffeur and they were lot in Atlanta for almost two hours,” Father Farrell recalled. “They couldn’t find us.”

With another wedding scheduled for three o’clock and a Saturday evening Mass slated for 5:30, Father Lopez “squeezed” in the nuptials when the bride showed up. “He (kept) them all happy” and made it to the reception as well, said Father Farrell.

Regular exercise figures prominently in Father Lopez’ busy routine. An avid golfer who recently shot a hole-in-one at DeKalb County’s Sugar Creek course, he walks three miles a day and swims every other day. Double bypass surgery, back and shoulder operations and a pacemaker haven’t slowed him down.

“I’m held together with bailing wire,” he said with a smile.

His years of priesthood have allowed him to “be Jesus,” to act in the person of Christ when others have needed counseling and compassion, Father Lopez said. It’s a role he finds “scary but very comforting.”

He admits to choosing a difficult vocation. Things run smoothly until the “heresy of action” sneaks up on you, he said, when “you don’t know the Lord or yourself.”

His personal struggle came “when I knew myself as a human being,” drawn by the world like everyone else. Moving beyond that brought maturity and peace to his ministry.

“Priests can’t forget to be human beings,” Father Lopez believes. They aren’t a caste set apart from the rest of the Church.

“They have to be with the people, they have to be people themselves.”