If all the key stakeholders in our communities today need to be on board to combat the national addiction crisis that certainly hasn’t spared our own region, then we can be thankful for the county’s newest parish priest, the Rev. Peter Naranjo.
The 56-year-old Roman Catholic priest recently assigned to St. Mary’s Parish in Orange was ordained just four years ago after experiences that make him especially qualified to tend to his parishioners’ spiritual and social needs, redemption and recovery.
The path to his new parish led him from a troubled childhood in New York and New Hampshire, to an early life of addiction, then a rescue by the Mormon faith and eventually a return to the Catholic Church.
Born in Long Island to a Spanish immigrant father, Naranjo moved with his family to southern New Hampshire when he was 14. He was born Catholic but never practiced the faith. He describes his younger self as a “troubled kid” who began using marijuana and alcohol by age 10 or 11 and became addicted to cocaine and other drugs as a teenager.
“I was a juvenile delinquent. I was not a good kid. I was a troublemaker, and (drugs) just seemed like what I should be doing as a troublemaker, I guess,” he says. “I know what it’s like to wake up behind a Dumpster. I know what it’s like to suffer from cocaine psychosis. I’ve lived it.”
Over the years as a layman, Naranjo learned other more positive lessons from a range of jobs, including as a consultant in the software industry and a play-by-play sportscaster covering Minor League and Atlantic League baseball.
Naranjo says that his prayers to God for guidance led him to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormon church). He served as a Mormon high priest for 17 years before learning about the Eucharist, which he credits with bringing him back to the Catholic Church.
While he made “wrong decisions” in his youth, Naranjo believes God has let him learn from those mistakes “in a way that I can help other people.”
So for those in the region who need that special kind of understanding and compassion, Orange’s new pastor has come in the nick of time. And for those with other, more spiritual needs, parishioner Maureen Rindeau notes, Naranjo’s sermons are educational explanations of the Scriptures, and the pastor himself, a warm and welcoming presence.