Juan Pablo Valderrama doesn’t wear his clerical collar outside church. So on the streets of Guadalajara, the Anglican priest doesn’t look different from any 50-ish Mexican man.
It isn’t apparent that he is from Colombia, or that he has celebrated Mass in the Pentagon, gone to Madrid to work in a religious brotherhood, and eagerly visited the famed ancient library of Alexandria, Egypt. Nor that he served as a teniente capellan (lieutenant chaplain) in the Columbian military, where he sometimes carried a gun and saw the dead bodies of soldiers.
But it’s fine with him that he doesn’t stand out in Guadalajara. “I feel at home here,” said Valderrama, who is spending two months at Saint Mark’s Anglican church in Guadalajara, which is searching for a permanent rector who speaks English.
“The food here is about the same as in Bogota,” he said, except for dishes prepared with hot chiles, which he doesn’t like. Corn tortillas are widely eaten in his home country, although they are called arepas and are thicker than Mexican tortillas. The mix of rich and poor people on the streets is about the same as here, he explained, as well as the historic predominance of the Roman Catholic Church, brought to the New World by Spain. (Valderrama began his religious career as a Roman Catholic and has been an Anglican priest for 14 years.)
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