TAOS (NM)
Taos News
November 15, 2018
by Cody Hooks
Donald Naranjo had gone back to the seminary campus in Santa Fe only once since he was a teenager, but driving through the city, he still knew where to turn: make a right at the midcentury house with a double garage, go east about a mile, turn left.
Naranjo, now 70, was a sophomore in high school when he convinced his parents to let him heed a calling. He started his studies to be a priest at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Seminary on the eastern edge of the city near the foothills. For a kid from the Española Valley, a devoutly Catholic and mostly Hispanic community about an hour north of the seminary, it was the kind of choice that makes a family proud.
“If you wanted to seek a vocation in the church, it was wonderful,” Naranjo said. “You’d be right there next to God.”
Naranjo’s mom, sitting behind the wheel of the family’s Ford Falcon, dropped her son off at the seminary in August 1963.
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