The Rev. Luis Alonso Mejia — Father Luis — took up his pastoral duties Wednesday as the parish priest at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Perry.
A native of El Salvador, Mejia delivered his first homilies in Perry while saying Mass on Saturday and Sunday morning. He spent the previous four years as parochial vicar at Sacred Heart Parish in West Des Moines.
Asked wheher he had occasion in his Sunday sermon to mention the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation raids underway Sunday in some 10 U.S. cities, Mejia said no.
“The bishop advised us to avoid politics in our homilies,” he said. “I came to preach the gospel.”
Born Dec. 17, 1980, Mejia did not experience the assassination March 24, 1980, of Saint Óscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador, who was gunned down while saying Mass in a hospital chapel.
Romero had spoken out against the poverty, social injustice, assassinations and torture bred by the ongoing war between leftist rebels and the U.S.-armed government and right-wing paramilitary death squads.
Mejia said his mother often spoke of San Romero, who was canonized a saint in the Roman Catholic Church in October 2018.
Mejia came to Iowa in 2010 and was appointed the parochial vicar at Sacred Heart Parish in West Des Moines in 2015. He began his seminary studies in El Salvador with a four-year course in philosophy at Blessed John XXIII Seminary followed by theology studies at a seminary in Minnesota.
Mejia replaces the Rev. Chris Reising, who was transferred to an Osceola parish in order to replace the retiring Rev. Dave Polich, who also served at St. Pat’s in Perry until 2013.
