Angelus News | July 31-August 7, 2020 | Vol. 5 No. 21

Filiberto Cortez
Age: 43
Hometown: Puebla, Mexico
Home parish: St. Dominic Savio Church, Bellflower
First parish assignment: Our Lady of Lourdes
Church, Northridge
“I’m called for ... the salvation of souls.
There’s no greater joy than to see a soul
restored in Christ.”
VICTOR ALEMÁN
“Why do I still feel something is missing?” Cortez asked
himself. “I could not figure it out.”
One day, his existential crisis brought him to shed his first
tears in years. It was then, he said, that he had an interior
experience of God’s forgiveness.
For Cortez, the healing process was long and slow. The
difficulty of overcoming his old habits pushed him to go back
to church for help.
Cortez’s older brother, a religious brother, encouraged him
to frequent the sacraments of confession and the Eucharist as
much as possible.
“Fili, when you fall, just get up,” he would tell him during
visits.
One of the things that took Cortez time was coming to
terms with the pain his sins had caused other people in the
past.
“I knew the Lord forgave me, but how do I forgive myself?”
Eventually, Cortez said, he received a grace that helped him
with that, too. He also recalled an emotional reconciliation
with his father, with whom he’d had a difficult relationship
growing up, as a turning point.
But the person Cortez is most grateful to is his mother, who,
when her son was suffering the most, would pay all-night
visits to the Blessed Sacrament in the middle of the night at a
nearby parish that offered nocturnal adoration.
“She was always the pillar, praying for me,” he said.
From there, things began to “fall into place” and Cortez
began to realize that his conversion experience was a sign of
a greater plan. He left his job as a health teacher at a charter
high school in South LA to discern with the Salesians of Don
Bosco for three years before entering St. John’s Seminary.
When asked about his vocation, he said it can be summed
up in one word: gratitude.
“There’s one thing that I’m called for, and that is for the
salvation of souls,” said Cortez. “There’s no greater joy than
to see a soul restored in Christ.”
If the Catholic Church is a “field hospital,” as Pope Francis
says it should be, parishioners at Our Lady of Lourdes
Church in Northridge are getting a priest who has been to
its intensive care unit.
Filiberto Cortez was born in Puebla, Mexico, but moved
with his family to the Downey area when he was 11. The
“culture shock” of life in a new country made the adjustment
a difficult one, and Cortez eventually drifted from his family’s
traditional Catholic faith while trying to keep up the image of
being a “tough guy.”
“I felt like God was punishing me, like he had something
against me because growing up was so difficult as a child,” he
said.
The next several years were spent looking everywhere he
could for satisfaction and meaning: relationships, partying,
overseas backpacking trips, off-road adventures in his Jeep
Wrangler, and even existentialist philosophy.
That search, and the lifestyle that came with it, led Cortez
to a place he called “rock bottom.”
Filiberto Cortez on a backpacking trip to Machu Picchu, Peru,
in 2011.
SUBMITTED PHOTO
12 • ANGELUS • July 31-August 7, 2020