Lifetime calling

This September morning at Woodland Memorial Hospital, the room behind the nurse's station is cool and quiet. A nurse wraps a baby girl in a white blanket with pink and blue stripes. She lays the infant on the counter and steps away.

The Rev. Uriel Ojeda moves closer and makes the sign of the cross. Guadalupe was stillborn less than two hours before. The priest whispers a prayer.

Three times in two months the new priest has been called to bless a baby who died at birth. He has presided over 11 funerals, more death than he expected, more heartache than he imagined. The babies' grieving families visit his dreams.

He comforts Guadalupe's mother. She worries about her baby's soul, about hospital and funeral costs, about telling her husband, who is still working in the fields and doesn't know.

Her eyes plead with Ojeda through tears. At first, she can only choke out one word.

"Padre," she says.

He meets her gaze.

"Oremos," says the priest. Let us pray.

Ojeda heads to the elevator and wonders if he said the right thing.

Standing in the hospital parking lot, he stops to take a long deliberate breath. Then he slips into his '91 Honda Civic, pauses for a moment holding the steering wheel and steels himself for more.

"What can I say? What can I do?" writes Ojeda in his journal. "What could I possibly bring that would give some sense to this senseless event? There are no answers. All I have is hope."

Ojeda is 28, a new priest in the first six months on the job in a changing Catholic Church – one healing from a past of sexual abuse scandals and preparing for a future shaped by a growing Spanish-speaking congregation.

The priesthood's blessings beckon Ojeda, as do its burdens. He knows the calling isn't answered by many anymore. Only 466 men took their priestly vows in the United States this year, half the number of 40 years ago.

Yet, the Catholic population surges, with nearly 70 million making up the nation's largest faith group. More of them, including Ojeda, speak Spanish.

Sacramento church officials say 60 percent of Catholics in the region will be Latino in 10 years.

Ojeda, ordained in June, is the face of the church's future. And like other new priests, he wants to restore the image of the clergy in the scandals' wake with new ideas, new energy, new hope. Even as he struggles to find his way.

'WHY ME? WHY HERE? WHY NOW?' HE WONDERS

Ojeda wasn't the best student in seminary. Or the most pious. In his early 20s, he hit the dance clubs and took up smoking. His superiors thought he spent too much time with women. Once, he packed his bags after a teacher reprimanded him for his behavior.

But he couldn't leave. His call was too strong. He recommitted. Now he brings to the priesthood the same playfulness that once led him to lie in a casket during a class on funerals – scaring another seminarian who opened the coffin.

Ojeda is serious about his calling. Like other new priests, he knows he has to be. "They know there is no room for them (the new priests) to mess up. They have to be completely committed," says the Rev. David Toups of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Ojeda heard the call when he was 10. His parents weren't sure. You want to be a priest? Why? They asked the boy who talked so much in class that his teacher, a nun, cried.

But he was sure. He has tried to explain his calling over the years – that the joy he feels is more fulfilling than any other job, any other relationship could be.

Still, in quiet moments alone, Ojeda sits in chapel and asks: "Why me? Why here? Why now?"

He asked as a heartbroken teenager realizing he would never date, as a seminarian struggling in school, as a young man making $100 a month washing dishes, and now as a new priest planning funerals for babies.

'I AM A LITTLE BIT NERVOUS, BUT I AM NOT AFRAID'

Ojeda is the youngest priest in the Sacramento diocese, among the youngest in the country. He listens to salsa and rap on his iPod, taps away on the iPhone he received as an ordination gift, plays soccer at midnight and has a skull and crossbones on the front of his car.

About the writer:

• Call The Bee's Jennifer Garza, (916) 321-1133.