Singing Soldier

Buenos Aires matrons sighed with nostalgic rapture. Not in eight years had their radios brought them the rich, persuasive tenor of Jose Mojica, onetime idol of Latin women up & down the hemisphere. But last week he was back once again, on a program sponsored by a B.A. department store. Jose's programs were no longer filled with rollicking Mexican airs and passionate love songs. Handsome Jose, now a greying 54, had long since given up the luxury and adulation of a movie star's life and become a Franciscan monk.

Out of This World. For his half-hour programs of folk song and plain song, interspersed with religious talks, Argentina's Radio Belgrano paid Fray Jose a record 60,000 pesos ($6,750) for eight broadcasts. But the money no longer went for the upkeep of lavish homes in California and Mexico. Fray Jose, bound by a vow of poverty, had turned it over to a Franciscan seminary now abuilding in Arequipa, Peru.

Even as a boy in Mexico, Jose had been an unworldly sort. But his golden voice and romantic profile soon had him performing at the Chicago Civic Opera, most notably as Nicias in Thais. He went into the movies, made a succession of highly successful musical films in Hollywood, Mexico City and Buenos Aires.

In 1941, shortly after his mother's death, Jose gave his fortune to charity and went off to Peru to enter the Franciscan order. Six years later, after he was ordained a priest in Lima's San Francisco Monastery, police were called out to control the admirers surging into the church to hear him sing his first Mass.

Back to the Old Trade. As a novice in his order, Fray Jose Francisco de Guadalupe had been startled to learn the extent of the chronic shortage of clergy in Roman Catholic South America; he found that on the continent there were areas half as large as Spain without a priest, some 40,000 parishes without pastors. His decision was to go back as a priest to the crowds and microphones he had given up. Since then he has carried his recruiting and fund-raising campaign into Venezuela, Chile, Colombia and Argentina.

"Never did I think when I began my religious life," he told his Argentina listeners, "that I would some day return to these microphones. But the life of the true soldier of Christ is based on obedience and discipline . . . Our youths, with their eyes on material things, disdain the priesthood. But I, who have had in abundance all that our youths dream of possessing, have come to say to you that all the world's gold, fame, power, applause and pleasure is not equivalent to one hour in the service of Christ."

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