Metamorphosis: A walking Blessed Seelos miracle

    Leonard “Buddy” Bastida, 70, grew up in St. Alphonsus Parish in the Irish Channel and spent more than half his life in prison.
    His house sat directly across the street from the Father Francis Xavier Seelos Center, where the century-old, 10-foot brick walls muffled the sounds of the world and created an interior spiritual oasis. For a young, ex-Navy sailor lost in a spiral of drugs and robbery, the wall also created an opportunity.
    Buddy’s friend had told him about the safe on the second floor of the Seelos Center. It was easy pickings. While his friend simply dipped his toe in the water by rifling the safe for cash, Buddy always dreamed bigger.
    One morning just past midnight, Buddy drove his car through the gate and into the interior courtyard. It was pitch dark and as quiet as a silent retreat at Manresa. Buddy climbed the stairs to the second floor.
    “I took the whole safe,” Buddy recalled last week from his sister’s home in Harvey.
    Buddy is stocky but not particularly big. Necessity – in this case, his thirst for money – was the mother of invention.
    “I threw the safe out the window and then put it in the trunk of my car,” Buddy said. “Then I took it to the river so we could work on it.”
    Buddy spent 30 years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola and a final nine years at the Rayburn Correctional Center in Angie, years that broke his spirit but also, in ways known only to God, created an opening that transformed death into life.
    Buddy was as tough as they come at Angola. It was the only survival mechanism he knew.
    “Everything was clear-cut, black and white, no in-between,” Buddy said. “I had strict tunnel vision. That’s what I called it. If you did one, two, three or A, B, C, I reacted a certain way. It was like doing a template on a machine. Those were the unwritten rules: ‘Thou shalt not rat,’ ‘Thou shalt mind your own business.’”
    Buddy was in prison when his sister got married, and she sent him a wedding picture of her and her new husband.
    “I cut him out of the picture because he was a police officer,” Buddy recalled. “There was no gray area. He wasn’t family. He was the enemy.”
    Buddy landed in the Disciplinary Unit at Camp J, considered “the bottom of the pit” at Angola, in the summer of 1982. Something in his mind finally clicked that his “Buddyism” – his total focus on self – was about to kill him. He decided to conduct a three-day silent retreat in his cell, refusing to talk or even eat. He put up a sign on his bars saying he would not “respond to verbal interaction.”
    A preacher came by with a pamphlet. Preachers were always coming by with pamphlets. “I pointed to the sign to let him know I couldn’t talk,” Buddy said.
    For some reason, Buddy devoured the booklet, “Born of the Spirit,” and it did what no man could ever do. It made sense. It was a missile piercing the hardened bunker of “Buddyism.”
    Over the next several years, Buddy felt drawn to Bible studies and Kairos prison retreats, where inmates talked about making restitution to those they had harmed. He took catechism classes with Father Joel LaBauve, a Baton Rouge priest who served as the Catholic chaplain at Angola. On Father LaBauve’s recommendation, he took extension classes offered by the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary designed to train inmates to become “missionary” chaplains at both Angola and other state prisons.
    Buddy’s fellow inmates – “the people who I actually grew up with” – were all asking the same question: “How could Buddy Bastida make this type of change?”
     “It was the furthest thing from their minds,” Buddy said. “They considered me one of the real outlaws. Even for me, it was hard to see myself as being something other than I was. I had to keep depending on the power of the Holy Spirit or else I would revert back to Buddyism.”
    On Oct. 6, 2012, just past midnight, Buddy’s sister – the one whose husband Buddy literally had cut out of his life – drove her car to Rayburn to pick up her brother after 39 years in prison. After giving his personal belongings and extra food to other inmates, Buddy walked out with a small duffel bag, containing two shirts and two pairs of trousers, and a $100 debit card.
    They stopped at McDonald’s for a hot chocolate.
    “It was late, but we talked,” Buddy said. “I wasn’t sleepy. I was trying to pay attention to everything taking place. I had never been in that part of the country. I kept looking at the trees.”
    In four decades, the world had changed. Buddy had changed more. He is now participating in Catholic Charities’ Cornerstone Builders program, which helps recently incarcerated persons transition back into the real world with various jobs.
    Buddy hopes he will be able to minister to teenagers and young adults using his life experience as a highway guard rail. He will do prison ministry in the archdiocese. When he attends Narcotics Anonymous meetings every week, he looks over at “kids” and sees himself in the mirror, 50 years ago.
    “The Holy Spirit told me if I continued on a  positive path, I could dig myself out of the hole I had dug myself into,” Buddy said. “I want to actually make up for the wrong I’ve done and end my life on a positive cycle.”
    A year before Buddy left Rayburn, someone from the Blessed Seelos Center drove up to Angie bearing relics of the 19th century Redemptorist priest, who was known as the “Cheerful Ascetic” and a merciful confessor. The relics are kept in a shrine – right next to the building where Buddy once threw a safe out a second-floor window.
    As the tiny relics were passed from hand to hand, the new Buddy shivered.
    “When I held his relics, it was almost like a regression – it brought me all the way back to that day,” Buddy said. “I understood those relics were meant especially for me. They were letting me know my time was coming to fruition. Mercy and forgiveness to somebody like me made all the difference, and that’s what I understood when the priest gave me those relics.”
    Blessed Seelos needs one more miracle to become a saint.
    “I’m probably that miracle,” Buddy said.
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].