Patrick Flores
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Styles of Patrick Flores |
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| Reference style | The Most Reverend |
| Spoken style | His Excellency |
| Religious style | Monsignor |
| Posthumous style | not applicable |
Patrick Fernández Flores (July 26, 1929 – January 9, 2017), was a Roman Catholic cleric who from 1979 to 2004 was the Archbishop of San Antonio, Texas. Flores was the first Mexican American to become a bishop of the Catholic Church.
Flores was born in 1929 to Patrico and Trinidad Fernandez de Flores, American migrant workers, in Ganado, Texas. In the tenth grade he considered dropping out of school after his father had become ill, but he was persuaded to stay after a bishop agreed to finance his education. He worked as a janitor at a local cantina and decided to make the world a cleaner and more habitable place by becoming a priest.
He graduated from Catholic Kirwin High School (now O'Connell Consolidated High School) in Galveston, Texas. He studied at St. Mary's Seminary in La Porte, Texas and at St. Mary's Seminary in Houston. He received his divinity degree and was ordained a priest on May 26, 1956 by bishop Wendelin Joseph Nold in Galveston. He then served as a parish priest in the Diocese of Galveston-Houston.
In the early 1960s, he directed the Christian Family Movement in the Galveston-Houston diocese and the Bishop's Committee for the Spanish Speaking, a ministry that encouraged bilingual congregations. Later, in October 1969, Flores joined forty-seven other Hispanic priests to establish PADRES Padres Asociados para Derechos Religiosos, Educativos, y Sociales (Spanish for "Priests Associated for Religious, Education, and Social Rights"), an organization meant to draw attention to the problems of Hispanics in the church and society.
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