This is the fifth in a series of articles throughout
the year celebrating the 50th anniversary of the reinstitution of the permanent
diaconate in the United States.
Atanacio Sandoval never met a permanent deacon. He grew up in El
Salvador, where the only deacons were seminarians on the path to the
priesthood. As a father of two, he never imagined that he would be ordained, baptize
children, officiate at marriages, preach the Gospel at Mass and counsel
parishioners of St. John Neumann Church in Reston.
It was a simple invitation from Sandoval’s pastor, Oblate Father
Thomas E. Murphy, that changed everything.
“Why don’t you become a
deacon?” Father Murphy asked Sandoval one night during a dinner at the parish
hall. He knew that Sandoval and his wife, Celia, were devout Catholics.
“I didn’t know at the time how much I was able to do as a
deacon,” said Sandoval. But he was intrigued by the opportunity “to help the
community.”
The leap of faith would change his life — and the lives of many
others. Deacon Sandoval was ordained in January 2015 and is now the sole
Spanish-speaking member of the clergy at a parish with a large Hispanic
population. And while the 48-year-old deacon stresses that he ministers to all
parishioners, not just Spanish-speakers, the need for his service stretches far
beyond the boundaries of his Reston parish. In a diocese that is about 45
percent Hispanic, only 11 out of 93 permanent deacons are Hispanic. Calls come
in from as far away as Manassas.
To meet this need, Deacon Sandoval typically rises at 4 a.m. each
week day and goes to his job working in office renovations and construction. At
2:30 p.m., he goes home. Then from 4 to 7 p.m., he spends time in appointments,
often with teens whose families have reached out because of depression, drugs
or friends who are bad influences.
As the parish Hispanic Coordinator, Celia has become a key part
of his ministry. Once, she took a call from a man who was in the hospital. He
needed a Spanish-speaker, so Celia called her husband, who was making dinner at
home. “OK, I can do it tomorrow,” Deacon Sandoval told her. “No, you’ll go
today,” Celia said firmly. As it turned out, the man died the next day — with
the spiritual consolation he had sought.
“She gives me so much work,” Deacon Sandoval said with a smile.
“Or rather, the Lord gives me so much work through her.”
Deacon Sandoval sees his long journey from a young boy serving at
Mass in El Salvador, to a married man ordained as a deacon, as part of something
much larger.
“God has his plans for us. His plans are not our plans,” said Deacon
Sandoval. “He called me back to the road that he wanted to walk.”
A long road
In 1989, in the midst of a civil war, 19-year-old Atanacio was
forced to join the Salvadoran army.
“In El Salvador they recruited on the streets. They would get you
off the buses and if you were 18, you were eligible to give your service,” he said.
More than 75,000 civilians died between 1980 and 1992, during a
conflict between the leftist revolutionary group, the Farabundo Marti National
Liberation Front, and the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government. A United Nations commission
later found that government forces were responsible for more than 85 percent of
murders, torture and kidnappings.
Sandoval seized an opportunity to desert the army during training,
not long after he was recruited. He would join tens of thousands of Salvadorans
who fled to the U.S. for safety. It took him two and a half months to reach
Texas, with much of the journey on foot.
“The coyote — or trafficker — that we paid, he took me to Guatemala,” said
Sandoval. “That was the first hardship that we faced: he went missing.”
The trafficker checked Sandoval and other immigrants into a
hotel, paying the bill for a two-week stay. On the day the hotel was about to
kick them out, the trafficker suddenly showed up. Sandoval continued the walk
to Mexico at night. He slept by day in the woods and in banana plantations. Then
suddenly, disaster struck. The Mexican police had found him and the other
immigrants he was traveling with.
“They were waking everybody up, and I was just making myself
dumb,” by pretending to sleep, Sandoval said. “They were poking me like, ‘You!’
They were calling me bad names and bad words. ‘Wake up! We know you’re
listening!’”
He can laugh now at his desperate attempt to evade notice, but
their discovery had real consequences.
“They took every bit of money that everybody had,” he said. But they
were allowed to continue on their way.
A week later, they reached the Rio Grande. The smugglers said
they would need $250 from each person to cross in a makeshift floatation device.
The money would be collected from the immigrant families later. A smuggler lay
down in a tube, pulling the others across the river. Suddenly, a man fell into
the river — but the water only reached
his knees.
The smugglers were “just trying to get easy money,” said
Sandoval. “So everyone took off running across the river. They didn’t make any
money.”
Once Sandoval reached Houston, he called his cousin who had given
him a loan to come to the U.S. He had expected to join her in Miami.
“When I called her from Houston, she said, ‘I just got into a new
relationship. My boyfriend is very jealous; he doesn’t want you to come to my
house,’ ” Sandoval recalled. “I said, ‘OK, what do I do now?’ ”
The cousin called Sandoval’s uncle in Washington. It turned out
to be a fortunate twist of fate. “That’s how I got to D.C. and met this
beautiful bride of mine,” said Sandoval, who is now a U.S. citizen. A roommate introduced
him to Celia a year after he arrived. They dated three months; then he proposed.
They’ve been married 26 years.
Giving back
The Sandovals’ daughters were in high school when Atanacio began
the formation process for the diaconate. For Celia, it was an easy decision to
support his unexpected vocation.
“Ever since I was little, I was involved in the church,” she
said. “I loved the church all the time. So for me … It’s good if he wants to do
it. I’m very happy to support him.”
Working together is “an unusual arrangement, but a blessing,”
said Deacon Sandoval. “I’m doing my part as a deacon and she’s doing her part
as the wife of a deacon.”
“Our culture is different,” said Celia. “We have many things we
believe or ways to practice our faith a little bit different. Maybe a secretary
who speaks English she can (not) understand, but in my case, because it’s a
cultural thing, I understand.”
Today, Deacon Sandoval often encourages other men to think about
the permanent diaconate and asks families to pray for vocations.
“Especially to my Hispanic community, I invite the guys that I
see that have the potential or the call,” he said. “I say, ‘Do not be
intimidated.’ I explain, ‘Where did I come from?’ If they do speak some
English, they will do well, as long as they are really responding to the call
of God to be what he has invited them to be.”