THE MAKING OF A PROPHET
For Mormons, succession drama is against their religion.
More than 70 percent of Americans say religion is important in their lives, but this year’s obituaries reveal the vast diversity of religious life in American culture.
Spirituality takes a lot of different shapes in America. Some people preach, some pray and some evangelize. Some break the law. Some serve an institution and a hierarchy while others build individualized cathedrals.
A number of fascinating figures died this year. Their lives show the real range of religious life in this country:
Patrick Fernández Flores
Patrick Fernández Flores was the first Mexican American in the hierarchy of the U.S. Catholic Church. Born to migrant workers, Flores wanted to be a priest from childhood, even though he had a limited education and Anglo clerics discouraged him. He was ordained in 1957 and made a bishop in 1970, rising to the level of archbishop of San Antonio in 1979.
No stranger to political controversy, Flores was an advocate for Hispanics and the poor. “If you reject the poor,” he once told the city of San Antonio, “you reject Jesus.”
Flores co-founded the influential Catholic Television of San Antonio in 1981 and brought Pope John Paul II to Texas in 1987. In 2000, he was held hostage by an Salvadoran man who feared deportation. The man surrendered to police after nine hours. Flores supported the man’s family for years after. He died in San Antonio at 87.
Gelek Rimpoche
Gelek Rimpoche served as a leading teacher of Tibetan Bud- dhism in America. He was one of the last Buddhist teachers to be fully educated in Tibet. He entered monastery at the age of 5, leaving at age 19 when the Chinese Communists killed monks and shelled monasteries in 1959. As a refugee in India, Rimpoche played a crucial role in preserving the tradition, editing and publishing 170 volumes of rare manuscripts. He also wrote a popular book on reincarnation.
In 1987, at the instruction of his superiors, Rimpoche moved to Ann Arbor, Mich., to teach Buddhism to Americans. He became a U.S. citizen and worked hard to understand American culture, watching “Days of Our Lives” and televangelist Jim Bakker on TV. Rimpoche established Buddhist communities in Ann Arbor, Chicago and New York City, teaching a number of notable Americans, including composer Philip Glass. He died in Ann Arbor at 77.
Frank Worthen
Frank Worthen was first told he was gay by his pastor at age 13. At the time, Worthen recalled, he didn’t know what the word “homosexual” meant. He accepted his gay identity until his evangelical conversion in 1973.
Worthen recorded a cassette tape recounting his experience and advertised it in a gay newspaper popular in San Francisco. “Do you want out of homosexuality?” the ad read. “Send for a Brother Frank tape on a Christ-centered way out of homosexuality.” About 60 men asked for copies the first year and Worthen launched a group called Love in Action. A network of similar ministries was formed in 1976 with the name Exodus International. “Conversion therapy,” as it came to be known, became increasingly controversial. Exodus International closed in 2013, apologizing to those who had been a part of its ministry.
Worthen continued to believe Jesus could free people from same-sex attraction until his death in San Rafael, Calif., at 87.
Michael Sharp
Michael “M.J.” Sharp believed in the power of peace. That’s why the Mennonite from Indiana would walk deep into the Congo forest, sit beneath a banana tree and talk to armed rebels.
Sharp started his career as a peacemaker after graduating from Eastern Mennonite University in 2005. He counseled U.S. soldiers stationed in Germany, telling them how to declare themselves conscientious objectors. Then, in 2012, Sharp went to the Democratic Republic of Congo. With a budget of $12,000 per month, he coordinated a group of Christian volunteers who would talk to rebel fighters. In three years, they convinced 1,600 rebels to lay down their arms. When funding was canceled, Sharp contracted as a United Nations observer, investigating rapes, massacres and child soldiers in Congo.
He and a U.N. colleague, Zaida Catalán of Sweden, were kidnapped in Congo in March. Their bodies were found two weeks later in a shallow grave. Sharp was 34.
Donald Weiser
Donald Weiser was pivotal in the spread of occult beliefs in middle America. He published books on Western traditions of “secret knowledge,” including astrology, tarot, paganism, witchcraft and magic.
Weiser started as an antiquarian, taking over his father’s rare book business in New York in 1950. He specialized in acquiring occult libraries to sell to collectors. By 1957, however, Weiser realized there was a broader interest for these books. He started publishing 15 to 20 cheap editions per year and selling them to hippies, housewives, soldiers returning from Korea and Wall Street brokers looking for a supernatural advantage.
When mainstream publishers repackaged the occult as “New Age” in the 1970s, they recruited Weiser’s proteges to run them. They established New Age as an official category, so when Borders and Barnes & Noble launched their superstores in American suburbs in the 1980s, the occult was made widely available to middle America. Weiser died in Greenacres, Fla., at 89.
William Lombardy
William Lombardy was the greatest chess-playing Catholic priest of the 20th century. He learned chess at 9 from a Jewish neighbor in the Bronx. At 19, he became the world junior champion, winning 11 games in a row, an unheard of feat. But he was quickly overshadowed by a young friend named Bobby Fischer.
A priest serving in the Bronx, he continued to play chess at the highest levels, even assisting Fischer in his famous Cold War victory over the Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky. The church, however, did not always approve of the priest’s games. A cardinal chided Lombardy for “pushing meaningless wooden pieces across a wooden board.”
Lombardy left the priesthood in 1977, criticizing the church’s wealth. He spent his later years in poverty. In 2016, he was evicted from his apartment, more than $27,000 behind in rent. Lombardy died in Martinez, Calif., at 79.