SANTA FE (NM)
New Mexican
March 16, 2019
By Rebecca Moss
It was early summer and the altar servers for Holy Cross Catholic Church were squirming in the heat of their white robes. There was no air conditioning in the sacristy behind the chapel as the children prepared the church for the 10:30 a.m. Mass.
Isaac Casados, who was 10 at the time, had grown up in this church. He planned to become a priest and felt that leading his fellow altar servers was the first step.
“Every young kid at Holy Cross was taught being an altar server is the greatest thing,” said Casados, now 37. “At the same time, all the nuns would always teach you the priest was kinda the closest thing to God. What they did, what they said, was firm. You did not refute it, you did not question it. Because if you did, you’d go straight to hell.”
On that hot Sunday nearly three decades ago, Casados was a fourth-grader at a school run by Holy Cross and one of several children assigned to help the Rev. Marvin Archuleta, an assistant priest for the Sons of the Holy Family at Santa Cruz de la Cañada parish in Española.
Casados said in a recent interview that the priest, known as Father Marvin, told him he needed to adjust his altar robe, which had bunched in the back.
“I thought he was going to straighten out my shirt,” Casados said. “He came up behind me … and instead, his hand went straight into my pants.”
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