The seminary in Toluca kept him for exactly one week. He punched another seminarian, and they threw him out.
It was not the first time his life had gone off the rails. He was born in 1945 in Hidalgo, one of at least seventeen children. As a boy, he started on marijuana, and as a young man he moved on to pills, then cocaine.
Treatment came first. Then the seminary. Then the punch.
Most men would have taken the hint. He tried again, and this time he stayed, studying in Barcelona, Navarra and Rome. On May 26, 1973, he was ordained a priest.