Last year, Fr. Val LaFrance, O.P., celebrated his 50th anniversary as a Dominican priest.  For most of his religious life, Fr. LaFrance has been an extremely popular itinerant preacher, especially in New England and Florida.  Recently, the Miami Herald published an article on Fr. LaFrance and his life and struggles as a preacher.  Below is the full text.

Role of a Lifetime:  Former Actor Finds His Calling as an Itinerant Preacher

Val LaFrance ditched the packed New York theater scene to seek Miami stardom. For 13 years in the late 1940s and 1950s, he produced and acted in plays in the subtropics, earning good reviews -- and a steady girlfriend who wanted to marry.

So when a nun in the theater department at Barry College (now University) suggested he turn his talents to preaching, he couldn't imagine it at first.

''I wanted to be wanted. And I wanted money,'' said LaFrance, 87. He didn't want to be stuck collecting donations in the sanctuary, but that's exactly where he found his most devoted audience.

LaFrance recently marked 50 years as an itinerant preacher, attracting 300 fans from as far as Montreal and California to an anniversary celebration at St. Justin Martyr Catholic Church in Key Largo.

A member of the Dominican Order, devoted to preaching, LaFrance is still on the job.

At six-foot-two, he cuts a striking figure in floor-length white robes bisected by a long rosary that dangles from his hip. He doesn't have to work hard to get attention, but loves to put on a show, inserting self-deprecating anecdotes into his homilies, goading parishioners like a stand-up comic and using props to make mock threats.

''I trust that you are going to stay throughout the entire program,'' LaFrance likes to tell audiences before pulling a fake tomahawk from his robe. ''I have to warn you, I'm American Indian . . .'' In another favorite bit of business, he throws the top of his robe over his head and pretends to be a nun.

DOING HIS PART

Over his career, LaFrance says, he has preached at three-quarters of South Florida Catholic churches. His itinerary takes him from Jacksonville to Maine from late spring to October and from Jacksonville to the Caribbean through April.

On a semi-sabbatical this year, he still sends fans regular mailings with his national schedule. They, in turn, support him in various ways: donating airline miles for his travels, for example, and delivering meals to the South Miami house where he rents a room when not on the road or at Dominicans' U.S. home base in Washington, D.C.

''He doesn't fit the mold. He makes you laugh and makes you cry,'' said Toni Pallatto, 53, who met LaFrance six years ago at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Kendall. Pallatto, who prepares his Miami meals (mini-meatloaves are a favorite), remembers an admonition from that first homily: ``Worry is a sin against faith.''

LaFrance preaches in a booming voice that's equally suited to Shakespeare or Psalms, gesturing with leathery hands and breaking into large, potent smiles. While he has the energy of a young man, he suffers from afflictions of age: loss of feeling in his feet and legs, a deaf ear and loss of balance that make him reliant on a stout cane. He's also a recovering alcoholic, sober for 28 years, and often attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

''Alcoholism has made me a very successful preacher,'' LaFrance says, "because I know everybody has addiction.''

LaFrance's family was, in fact, Iroquois. He was born in 1921 in Manchester, N.H., into a poor home where his father supported 11 children with shoe factory and milk delivery jobs. He served in France and Great Britain during World War II and moved to Miami in 1945 to teach theater at the former Gesu High School, where he used training from London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

LaFrance performed at the Coconut Grove Playhouse and directed plays by Gilbert and Sullivan, Moliere and Oscar Wilde at Barry University and the University of Miami before entering the monastery at St. Stephen Priory in Dover, Mass., immersing himself in philosophy at St. Joseph College in Somerset, Ohio and receiving a theological degree from the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C.

He was ordained in 1958, and began his preaching -- and drinking -- career.

''Many a time I would preach fully drunk, fully out of my head. But I knew when I was on stage, so to speak, the audience didn't know that,'' he says.

GETTING HELP

On an early winter morning in 1981, hundreds of people packed a Catholic church in Sarasota, waiting to hear LaFrance preach. He was too drunk to stand. Soon after, he checked himself into a treatment center for alcoholic priests in Michigan.

''I thought every priest was perfect. I tried to be perfect, but it didn't work,'' he says of those lonely years. "There was no intimacy in the priesthood.''

Instead, LaFrance discovered that closeness with the extended family he found in his audiences.

Peter Newman, 57, a former chaplain for the Miami Police Benevolent Association, met LaFrance in 1996 while a patient at Mercy Hospital.

''He saw me reading a book, and just came up and started a conversation with me,'' says Newman, who has seen LaFrance preach 20 times. "If the church had more priests like him, it would have no empty seats.''

Actually, fans don't have to go to church to see LaFrance. He has an extensive line of DVDs on topics ranging from sex and addiction to love and suffering that quickly sell after his speaking engagements.

Manuel Padron, 47, a Miami urologist who met LaFrance a decade ago at St. Augustine Catholic Church in Coral Gables, has a handful of those recorded homilies and keeps a prayer LaFrance sent him on his desk.

''Although he is humorous, he is never inappropriate,'' Padron, says. "Although he talks about himself, it's never really about him. It's about the much bigger picture in life.''