Father Cutie, how could I have missed you?

So, rarely has my mom called in the last couple of weeks that she doesn’t mentioned Father Cutie. She told me he was a priest in Miami, famous on TV, who got caught in hot embraces with a mamasita on the beach. I didn’t pay much attention. As celebrity gossip goes, it just didn’t grab me. I did, however, think the nickname the Cubans gave the priest was very good: Father Cutie. The Cubans are such a clever people.

Anyway, I got a nail in my tire this week and when I was sitting in the waiting room, I flipped through a Time magazine and there was a story on Father Cutie. And whoa, that is his real name! Though it is Cutié, with accent on the é. Talk about appropriate, because it appears el padre is muy cutie.

From the Time story: 

“Cutié’s last name is pronounced koo-tee-ay, but that hasn’t stopped people from calling the handsome, telegenic priest “Father Cutie” — the kind of hunk-in-a-collar whom smitten Catholic schoolgirls often nickname “Father What-a-Waste.” In 1999, when Cutié burst onto the scene just four years after his ordination with his first television talk show on the Spanish-language Telemundo network, Cambia Tu Vida Con Padre Alberto(Change Your Life With Father Alberto), he remarked to the Miami Herald that celibacy is a “struggle, but it’s a good struggle.”

When I got home, there was an e-mail from a cousin with a link to a video by El Pichy Films — dirty words, dancing priests, funny in a crude way. You can go see it for yourself here. 

And why am I writing about this? Well, I may not be the only Latininta living outside of Miami who has no idea about this story that has the Spanish-speaking, TV-watching world en fuego. This is the problem with being bilingual in the boonies.

My mom often asks me if I heard whatever the latest news about Cuba or Latin America. “How could you not have heard?” she asks. When I worked at a newspaper, it was worse. I was expected to know everything that happened in the Caribbean. But, I often didn’t. Here in the green hills of Tennessee, it is easy to be insulated from stories of hot and famous Latin priests. 

De pena.