Troubled ex-S.A. clergyman still with group in C. America
Express-News Mexico City Bureau/January 4, 2004
By Dane Schiller

San Isidro de Grecia, Costa Rica -- Father Alfredo Prado has a new life here, a reinvigorated purpose and circumstances as unusual as his protégé, self-proclaimed visionary Juan Pablo Delgado.

The 73-year-old Austin-born clergyman has proclaimed the Gospel for decades in Texas, Mississippi, Arizona and villages in Mexico, where he used a bullhorn to preach under the stars.

Because of problems in his past - the exact nature of which neither he nor Catholic Church officials would describe - he doesn't have the church's permission to be in Costa Rica or to function as a priest. He says he needn't answer to church officials on that subject - just to the Virgin Mary.

And so he prays, counsels, advises and even celebrates Mass with pilgrims who come here to listen to Delgado, who says he receives messages from Jesus Christ, the Virgin and St. Michael.

Prado said he is Delgado's spiritual adviser and that he was called here by the Virgin.

He said the Oblates turned their backs on him despite his having preached the Gospel for so long.

"They threw me out in my old age and my blindness and all they threw me out, no money, no nothing," said Prado, who said his only income is a monthly $160 Social Security check.

Prado left the United States last year without permission and is disobeying the church by functioning as a priest, wrote Father David Kalert, who heads the U.S. Oblates out of Washington, in an Aug. 20 letter to Archbishop Hugo Barrantes Ureña of San José, Costa Rica.

"There are various, very grave allegations against him, and they seem to be credible," states the letter, without mentioning specifics....