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

Louie Reyes
Age: 35
Hometown: Salinas
Home parish: St. Mark’s UCSB Newman Center,
Goleta
Parish assignment: St. Phillip Neri Church, Lynwood
“Priests can actually be joyful. They can
actually laugh and be serious at the same
time and really down to earth.”
VICTOR ALEMÁN
“He took me under his wing,” he said. “I was like ‘Wow!’
Priests can actually be joyful. They can actually laugh and be
serious at the same time and really down to earth. I was like,
OK, this is a different side of the priesthood.”
Suddenly, the call that others had seen in him and that Reyes
had contemplated as a younger man, became the driving
force in his life.
He joined a faith-sharing group called Catholic Isla Vista
(Catholic IV) and started attending daily Mass. The pull in
him became so strong that even when Father Ellis retired a
few years later, he connected with his replacement, Father
John Love, a man who, he said, “just really exuded what the
priesthood is supposed to look like.”
Now that it is time for him to go out in the world as a priest
himself, he wants to make sure that he can affect as many
people as possible. Because of that Reyes, already fluent in
Tagalog and English, has continued to study Spanish since
his first parish assignment, St. Philip Neri Church in Lynwood,
is overwhelmingly Latino.
“I ask that they continue to pray for me as I continue to
learn,” he said. “They are going to have to be patient because
my Spanish is going to need a lot of work. I know they’re
going to help me with that.”
Though he may sound apprehensive about this third language,
his voice belies someone who can’t wait to go on with
his vocation, knowing full well that one person, one smile,
one wing to find refuge and strength under, can mean all the
difference in one person’s life.
“[We’re] trying to bring life into this culture,” he said. “I
don’t think you can find it anywhere else and I know it
doesn’t stay in the seminary, it can’t stay in the seminary. It
has to go out into the world, into the parishes that we’re going
to.”
There’s no need to tell Louie Reyes that one person, one
priest, can change the course of someone’s life. He
knows that. He’s lived it.
It happened while Reyes was attending UC Santa Barbara,
a university well-known, as he said, as “a party school.” And
Reyes admitted he took part in what might be described as a
somewhat Augustinian existence.
“I just got sucked into that culture of party and craziness,”
he said.
Reyes was still going to Mass at the university parish, St.
Mark’s, but he did that more out of habit.
Born in Manila, Philippines, and brought to the United
States by his parents at age 7, he grew up in Salinas and
attended Mass every Sunday, but his spiritual life never really
extended beyond the end of the weekend.
“I was never part of a youth group; faith was just kind of
something on the side for me.”
But it was at St. Mark’s that he met Father Tomas Ellis, who
made an immediate impression on him.
Louie Reyes with Archbishop José H. Gomez at the opening
Mass of the academic year at St. John's Seminary in Camarillo
on Sept. 19, 2019.
ADLA VOCATIONS OFFICE
July 31-August 7, 2020 • ANGELUS • 17