by Robert Fraga
What is actual sin?
Actual sin is any willful thought, desire, word, action, or omission forbidden by the law of God.
How many kinds of actual sin are there?
There are two kinds of actual sin: mortal sin and venial sin.
What is mortal sin?
Mortal sin is a grievous offense against the law of God.
Joe did what he was told to do. He memorized the answers to his instructors’ satisfaction and made his first communion on schedule. His parents were pleased. They had expected no less. For Joe, first communion was just another segment in the patchwork of Italian life in the North End. It was linked inextricably to the smell of pizza and freshly baked bread; the All Saints Day parade when laymen carried banners through the throngs that lined the streets of the neighborhood; the loud and operatic Italian spoken by the old folks sitting on the sidewalk chatting with one another in warm weather. It was a seamless culture.
When it came time to leave St. John, the Borellis thought to send Joe to the Catholic High School in East Boston. Joe was not an outstanding student, but he was intelligent, and his sixth grade teacher, Sister Joseph of Arimathea, came up with a radical idea: Why not apply to the Boston Latin School? This was Boston’s premiere public school, primus inter pares, commonly known by its initials BLS. It required an exam to get in. The Borellis had no idea what admission to BLS entailed, but they were willing to be guided by Sister Joseph of Arimathea. Joe applied, sat the entrance exam, and passed it. There was a whiff of “told you so” pride in the corridors of St. John. As far as the Sisters of St. Joseph were concerned, the Wops had shown the Yankee aristocracy what they could do.
Going to the BLS shook up Joe’s insular universe. Left behind were the familiar rhythms of life in the North End. Portraits of distinguished alumni festooned the walls of the school auditorium of BLS. These included governors of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and several signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Even after the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency, BLS continued to be, in its teaching staff and administration, a bastion of Yankee protocol. No jeans. No tee shirts. No sneakers. A tie was mandatory. That did not bother Joe. St. John had had much the same set of rules. But there was still something strange about the rules at BLS, something that rubbed Joe the wrong way, made him feel as if he didn’t belong, and goaded him to rebel against the system. But to avoid censure, it had to be a sneaky rebellion, nothing flamboyant, nothing he could easily be called on the carpet for. Hypocrisy was an art form for the young Borelli. But the foul-mouthed, “altar boy of a lad” was cautious about his transgressions. Doodling in his notebook (when he should have been doing math sums), pulling faces, and making furtive gestures; that sort of thing marked the limits of his resistance to authority.
Slacking off on his school work was another matter. What was the point of studying Latin and Greek? Six years of the former, four of the latter. BLS was saturated with classical language tags. Given its name, that should have come as no surprise.
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.
Who the fuck cared whether Gaul was divided into three or thirty-three parts? Latin was a starch-stiff, dead language, pronounced differently from Church Latin. The Greek was classical Greek, just as dead as Latin and harder to learn. Grades were important here, and it was more difficult to get the high marks that he had accumulated effortlessly at St. John.
Semester followed semester at BLS, and Joe’s situation did not improve. His grades were mediocre. His attitude toward the school was one of sclerotic hostility. Some classmates nicknamed him Signor Bore. After plodding through three years, and in clear danger of his third and final censure, Joe told his parents that he was calling it quits. He wanted a change in his life. A real change. Joe wanted to join the Navy. Joe Sr. had worked in the Boston navy yard, after all. Why shouldn’t Joe follow in his footsteps but up a notch?
Not so fast, though. There was first the need to get a high school diploma. With BLS out of the picture, Joe studied for the GED (General Educational Development). After BLS, that was a breeze for the quick-witted young Italian American. Joe passed the GED exam, and in 1974 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy.
It was a liberating experience, at least in some ways. Like all recruits, Joe shipped off to Great Lakes, Illinois, for twelve weeks of boot camp. This was his first experience of life outside his native New England, and it was different. Joe became friends with a Hopi recruit from Arizona. He was a quiet, unassuming man with copper-colored skin and a hawk nose. His name was a Jaw Breaker: Secaquaptewa. At least that was how the Navy spelled it.
What some people would find regimentation, others would call discipline. Joe got the impression that he was being molded to fit a certain image of a man in the military. The idea was to develop team cohesion: if one recruit fucked up, the whole platoon suffered.
If he wanted to make the grade, then Joe would need to conform to a preordained stereotype: to make his bed a certain way; to do enough pushups to bust his gut; to polish his boots to a mirror-like gloss; to salute and stand at attention until the bones in his back ached; not to flinch when officers screamed obscenities inches from his face (spittle launched onto his cheeks and mouth); and at the end of the day, to get one lousy cap and his navy whites and call himself a sailor, with a certificate to nail to the wall. The Borellis, who attended the graduation ceremony, were proud of their fire-tested, alpha-posturing son.
Before Joe Borelli left Great Lakes, Navy assessors subjected him to a battery of psychological and aptitude tests. Thus it was decreed: Joe would train as an air traffic controller. To do that, Joe moved to a town in western Tennessee north of Memphis called Millington. Classes were held in a building appropriately called the schoolhouse. Each morning Joe and his mates marched to class. At the end of the day, they marched back to the barracks. Midday they marched to and from the chow hall, where they got an hour to chow down under the watchful eye of the chow boss. Joe decided that the Navy’s motto might as well be: if in doubt, get the sailors marching.
The program at Millington consisted of three phases. The first of these was exclusively class work, designed for the students to obtain their Federal Aviation Authority license. The second phase of the AC program was called the control tower phase. In Joe’s day, this involved moving models of aircraft attached to sticks across an airfield configuration printed on a surface the size of a ping-pong table.
The third phase of air controller school was the radar phase. Most sailors considered this the fun part of their training. When they got to radar study, the end was in sight. There was a light at the end of the academic tunnel. And with light, there came a job assignment. For Joe, this meant transferring to the Navy’s principal air station at Pensacola, Florida.
Joe Borelli’s first impression of Pensacola was one of bewilderment. There was all the equipment, thousands, yes, millions of dollars’ worth of equipment. Joe was scared shitless to touch anything, even to ask questions about what he saw. Exposure to Navy hardware was a humbling experience. He shared a room with a fellow cadet, a diffident and religiously disposed rube whose home was a four-hour drive downstate. Their room was a good deal spiffier than what the midshipmen had in their barracks.
The regimen and the routine of military life, were not so different from BLS, an institution often compared by students to Parris Island. But the Pensacola NAS had degrees of liberty that the Latin School lacked. There was enough time on weekends to go downtown, which was a short bus or taxi ride from the Naval Air Station. Joe lost no time to explore an exciting world of wine, women, and song. Or at least what Pensacola had to offer: rum and tequila rather than wine; rock ‘n roll bands and bluegrass instead of lieder. And women.
Ah, yes, the women. After the deprivation of the Boston Latin School, Joe was eager to make up for lost time. And there were opportunities. Joe was a good-looking gob. Picking up women in bars was easy enough, once you got past the awkwardness of the first few attempts
. Weekends melded one into another in a succession of encounters with Southern girls who could spot the Navy dress whites two blocks away. The women were more than willing to share a few shots of Bacardi rum with Joe before showing him around town, driving off to the beaches to skinny-dip in the tepid water of the Gulf of Mexico. One weekend after another went by like this. Nothing stood out in a blur of unmemorable pleasure.
Joe’s life had changed in a religious way as well. He stopped going to mass. The ingrained Catholicism of his youth had mostly evaporated in the fumes of Bacardi rum and Patrón tequila. His day-to-day existence had become, in the language of the Church, a spiritual desert. Yes, he had his Navy buddies, and, yes, he joked and guffawed with them, and, yes, they went barhopping in the raunchier parts of town. But something was missing. Joe’s soul had shriveled up like a dog’s turd in the Florida sun. His roommate sensed this.
“Come to church with me this Sunday?” the religious Floridian asked Joe. Joe thought over the invitation before deciding to accept.
This was how Joe Borelli tasted a branch of Christianity that he had previously known to exist but had never experienced firsthand. One thing seemed to lead to another. Joe succumbed to peer pressure and soon found himself attending Wednesday evening Bible study. His circle of friends widened to include young members of the church. One of these new friends asked Joe if he played an instrument? No, said Joe, but as a teen he had fooled around with a trap set. Would he like to play drums in the church band? Joe shrugged. Would he give it a try? Sure, why not?
That was the beginning of Joe Borelli’s brief but intense career as a Jesus Band drummer. He played in a small combo named after the sponsoring church, the Living Word of Jesus Band. They played mostly for church functions. The lead singer, an auburn-haired woman named Leila, became his girlfriend. Not exactly your typical Southern girl, her family roots went back to Honduras and Lebanon.
Leila knew of Joe’s Catholic background. One day, acting on a whim, she asked him if he would take her to mass. The request puzzled Joe, but he agreed. The next Sunday, he and Leila attended mass at a small Catholic church close to the Pensacola Naval Air Station.
A young and energetic priest celebrated mass. The service and the way it was conducted brought back memories for Joe. He found himself wondering whether he too might do what this priest was doing. A few days later, he discovered, tucked away in a corner of the Navy Times, an ad for a Catholic order called the Holy Ghost Fathers. This order, more commonly known as the Spiritans, was a missionary group that operated in Third World countries like Mexico. The Holy Ghost Fathers evangelized among the poor, among people who had not received the Word of God. They dedicated their lives to serving the oppressed. For several days Joe mulled over a decision to contact the order. Eventually he did just that.
Leila encouraged him. Had she been sent by the Holy Ghost? They parted as friends.
Could Joe hack the rigorous training demanded of its members? A lapsed Catholic, with serious doubts about any commitment to a life of celibacy, he was hardly an ideal candidate for the priesthood. Just give it a try, he was advised by a friendly father confessor. It was the same advice he had received on volunteering to play drums in the Living Word of Jesus Band. Once again, he decided to give it the old school try. Sister Joseph of Arimathea would have been so proud of him.
So the wheel had come full circle. His hitch up, discharged from the Navy, Joe enrolled in Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he studied Latin and Greek. These were the very same courses he had despised at BLS. Still, he sucked it up and labored to master the dead languages, along with philosophy and theology. Years and years of philosophy and theology. After surviving that ordeal, he entered what was then the Spiritan seminary in nearby Bethel Park.
What can one say? Man proposes, God disposes. Somehow the Holy Ghost pulled Joe through. Or was it the Fathers of the Holy Ghost? In any event, on May 25, 1995, the youthful Joe Borelli joined a procession of white-robed men, some in sneakers and baseball caps, shambling into a church where he was duly ordained as a Holy Ghost father. The Spiritan Superior General in Rome, acting in consort with the U.S. provincial (head) of the Spiritan Order and Joe himself, gave young Borelli his marching orders to a poor neighborhood to the west of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. It was called San Judas. Henceforth Joseph Borelli would be known to the world and to his future parishioners as Father Joe.
FAMILY MATTERS
By the 1990s, he owned all the filling stations in the city. He controlled dairy production and distribution throughout north Mexico. All the trucks on the roads of Chihuahua were licensed through one of his companies. All the tequila produced in the province came from distilleries that he owned. One of his companies was the country’s largest transporters of liquid propane gas. He sat on the corporate boards of municipal commissions and half a dozen large companies that operated on both sides of the border.
His name was Pablo Schmidt, and he was one of the wealthiest men in Mexico.
His great grandfather Konrad had emigrated to Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century, at a time of social unrest in Germany. His wife and young son came with him. They were Rhineland Catholics, and they integrated smoothly into the public life of the country, at least on the level of religion. On other levels, however, the Schmidts maintained a self-conscious distance between themselves and the indigenous population of Mexico. The family retained a strong sense of its German identity. Culturally the Schmidts behaved as if they had never left the Old Country.
A merchant by trade, Konrad opened a general dry goods store in Matamoros. The business flourished, and the family bought land outside town. Konrad hired a handful of itinerant vaqueros and took to ranching. He also built a substantial hacienda where his family lived like hidalgos. Shortly thereafter Konrad’s son Gustav married Doña Maria Romo.
The Romo family was large and influential in the border area. It even boasted a saint whose statue stands at the rear of the San Antonio cathedral of San Fernando. St. Toribio Romo was martyred during the Cristero Rebellion of the 1920s when the government in power went on an anticlerical binge. It began to confiscate Church property and to line up Catholic priests before firing squads. After execution, their bodies were hoisted on to telephone poles where they swung in the wind as a warning to the opposition. Everyone who fought in that war kept memories for the rest of their lives, like scar tissue in their souls.
Toribio, a priest, was a reluctant martyr of the Cristero Rebellion. On the night of his death, he was asleep in his bed, when a soldier broke into his room. Toribio woke up, admitted that he was a priest but pleaded, “Please don’t kill me.” These were the saint’s last words. The soldier shot him point-blank. Toribio staggered out of his room before a second shot brought him down into the arms of his sister who had followed him outside. Pope John Paul II canonized twenty-six of the martyred priests. Of these, St. Toribio became the best-known.
Toribio became the patron saint of undocumented immigrants, popularly known as Santo Pollero—literally a little chicken. A vision of the saint is said to appear to migrants en route north, particularly when the going gets tough. Some believe that he made the migrants invisible to border agents.
Gustav and his bride decided to strike out on their own. They moved upriver to Ciudad Juárez and opened a branch of Father Konrad’s store in the center of town. Again fortune smiled on the family. Business prospered, and Gustav expanded across the Rio Grande into El Paso and southern New Mexico.
The younger Schmidts prospered on a personal level, as well, producing two sons and three daughters. The older of the boys, Emanuel, was Pablo’s father. He was a quick-witted if sly child who became his father’s partner at a turbulent time in Mexican history. His brother Abel was utterly unlike Emanuel. A throwback to a more romantic age, he wore his curly hair long and read the poetry of Heinrich Heine and Rainer Maria Rilke, both in the original German and in Spanish translation. As a young adult, he became estranged from his family. Gustav tried
to keep track of his son’s whereabouts and what he was doing, but this was almost entirely through rumor.
Many of the events of the Mexican Revolution that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century took place in the border region between Mexico and the U.S. This is where some of the most prominent revolutionaries resided. Revolutionary newspapers opened and closed every month in the Segundo Barrio neighborhood of El Paso.
Foremost among the revolutionaries was a swashbuckling type called Pancho Villa. That was the pseudonym for a man whose real name was José Doroteo Arango Arambula. Born a year before his sometime ally and fellow revolutionary, Emiliano Zapata, he seized the land of big landowners and distributed it to Mexican peasants. One of Pancho Villa’s legendary exploits was to take control of Ciudad Juárez during the Mexican Revolution. His band of eight men captured Juárez with two pounds of coffee, the same amount of sugar, and eight hundred rounds of ammunition.
Pancho Villa roamed the deserts of Chihuahua and the American Southwest, seemingly at will. Americans knew him as the man who raided a U.S. arsenal in Columbus, New Mexico, killing eighteen soldiers and civilians. One rumor to circulate in Juárez was that Abel Schmidt had been among the Mexicans killed at Columbus. Gustav was never able to confirm that, even though he went to great lengths to do so. He even sought out postcards in El Paso, postcards produced in the aftermath of the Columbus raid, made from photographs of U.S. troops grinning broadly at the camera and propping up the bodies of dead Mexicans. Would Abel’s body be displayed this way, like a big game trophy? Gustav never found any evidence of that. (Postcards like this were as common and as popular in their day as those depicting the carnival-like atmosphere of lynchings in Southern states decades later.)
Pancho Villa bequeathed Mexico a store of bloody anecdotes and secured for himself a niche in the country’s pantheon of national heroes. His death was as sensational as his life: Driving back from his bank in his 1919 Dodge Roadster, he was ambushed by a covey of seven assassins who tore his upper body apart with dum-dum bullets.