Irish-born priest on mission from Boston was decades-long champion of community solidarity

by Tim Kirk
Special to BIMagazine

Father Eugene Kirk, a longtime member of Boston-based Missionary Society of Saint James the Apostle, passed away in December at 90. The society was founded in Boston in 1958 by then-Archbishop Richard J. Cushing who was inspired by Pope Pius XII’s call to strengthen bonds between dioceses in the northern and southern hemispheres. The society is not a religious order but an organization of diocesan priests who serve impoverished and often remote communities in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. While most priests serve the Society in the missions for 5 years, Father Gene served for more than 60. His life as a missionary priest was admirable in every way and an example of how Boston and Ireland’s histories are intertwined. 

Padre Eugenio finds his life’s mission 

I first met Father Gene in 1986 on a dusty road in Lima, Peru. His compassion, generosity of spirit, and willingness to work side by side with his parishioners in a densely populated urban parish had already made “Padre Eugenio” a legend.

Born and reared in Kilkerley, County Louth, Ireland, Father Gene joined the Society of Saint James after his 1962 ordination in Dublin. After a year in Belmont and Chelsea parishes as well as time spent in language training in Cochabamba, Bolivia, Gene was assigned to parishes in the Andes. He developed a deep connection to the campesinos (country people) of the mountains, a bond that would inform and enrich his life and work. Soon Gene found his life’s mission in the “pueblos jovenes” (young towns or shanty towns) on the outskirts of Peru’s capital city. 

Large-scale migration from Peru’s mountain villages to the capital started in the late 1960s and was accelerated by a terrorist campaign waged by the Maoist group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path). Unprotected by the Peruvian military, hundreds of thousands of campesinos abandoned the Andes and moved to Lima. There was no support awaiting the migrants there, no jobs, housing, medical care, running water, sewerage, electricity, schools, police service, welfare, transportation system or even roads. The people built it all themselves.

In 1971, migrants established the squatter settlement that became Villa El Salvador on empty sand flats south of Lima by erecting rudimentary shacks from straw, discarded cardboard boxes and whatever else they could find. Father Gene moved to the settlement to serve the few thousand campesinos. The community grew to three hundred thousand in three years. Poco a poco (little by little), the people organized themselves to build an entirely new city. The church community served as a meeting place and organizing platform. Father Gene worked at the grassroots level with activists, partnering with the community’s democratically elected representatives, some of whom were members of the local communist party. Together they secured land, running water, electricity, and established schools, community gardens, and soup kitchens. Eventually “Villa” gained full recognition from the government. After eight years, Gene was brought back to Boston for two years in Dorchester’s St. Paul’s Parish, but his heart was in Peru. Cardinal Humberto Medeiros allowed him to return, and apart from occasional trips to Boston and Ireland, he stayed there. 

The vast majority of slums in South America are miserable concentrations of poverty, criminality, and hopelessness but Villa El Salvador has always been the opposite: solidarity. The remarkable success is held up as an inspiring model of self-help and self-government for squatter communities around the world. Major news outlets, including the New York Times, have written stories and produced documentaries about the triumph of Villa El Salvador, often quoting Father Gene. Straw shacks were improved to cinder block dwellings and eventually fine multi story homes. The development of housing and infrastructure was achieved with almost no external or governmental funding. 

Liberation theology sets out a new course 

The establishment of Villa El Salvador coincided with the liberation theology movement. In 1971, the same year that Villa was created, liberation theology’s most visible champion, Gustavo Guttierrez, published his seminal work, “A Theology of Liberation.” The movement inspired human rights and social justice advocates from the clergy and lay community. The central goal was to align the Catholic Church with the struggles of the poor. Traditionally, the church in Latin America has been an instrument of the powerful, but progressives believed that to live up to the mission of Jesus, the church must choose the “preferential option of the poor.”

Father Gene and his like-minded brother priests and women religious were not liberation theologians as such; they were practitioners. They naturally sided with the poor in their daily struggle to survive rather than the powerful interests of aristocratic landowners, military, and multinationals. By building communities of peace, prosperity and fairness, they showed that solidarity works.

Boston Irish readers who are over 50 may remember this period of Catholic progressivism (after the Second Vatican Council and before John Paul II) fondly: “Godspell,” guitars at mass, using pita bread rather than the industrially produced wafers for the eucharist. In my parents’ circles of friends and family, priests, women religious, and lay people all anticipated that women would be priests and that priests would be able to marry. 

Cold Warriors launch a backlash

The social justice initiatives of Father Gene and priests like him were not really political, or even theological. They wanted to help people improve their material conditions like having food, water, and shelter. Nevertheless, discussing “social justice” from the pulpit drew attention from reactionary forces within and outside the church. The world of the 1970s-1990s was split into the simplistic cold-war binary of communism vs. the free world. Liberation theologians’ analysis of the Latin American reality drew heavily on the work of Karl Marx. In the context of the Cold War, quoting Marx put the movement in the crosshairs of a new pope and the United States of America. The Vatican and successive US administrations aggressively rolled back progressives in Latin America and around the world. Father Gene was placed on a CIA communist watch list. In Villa El Salvador as a teenage lay volunteer, I was asked by several wary parishioners if I were in the CIA.

The backlash was effective. Upon his elevation in 1978, John Paul II and his right-hand man, Cardinal Ratzinger, used their power to systematically neutralize the leadership of the liberation theology movement by demoting, silencing, defrocking, defunding, and excommunicating those who preached or wrote books about the movement. The pope forbade anyone to speak about women’s ordination. In Massachusetts, after the human rights activist and Jesuit priest, Bob Drinan, had served in Congress for 10 years, he was forced to resign. In Latin America, progressive cardinals, bishops, and lay leaders were replaced by conservatives. To the people, the pope said: “You should be more interested in getting into heaven than making heaven on earth.” In the face of economic hardship, he encouraged the people to “pray.” In Villa, they believed in the power of prayer but they also believed in organizing. 

Why would church leaders disband or cripple lay organizations that were helping the poor feed themselves while at the same time call upon rich people to feed the poor? Progressives saw a reassertion of the church’s millennia-long relationship with the rich and powerful. Conservatives argued that the pope and Ratzinger were right in saying that all people – rich and poor – are worthy of salvation and that “siding with the poor” meant excluding the rich.

The United States was not playing games in Latin America, either. The CIA orchestrated the assassination of Che Guevara in 1967 in Bolivia, reportedly at the hands of the Nazi Klaus Barbie, World War II’s “Butcher of Lyon.” After the war, Barbie worked under an assumed name for the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, spying on French communists. After he was convicted in absentia of war crimes, Barbie was smuggled out of France by the CIA and the Croatian Catholic Church. Thanks to the CIA, Barbie lived freely in Bolivia and Peru until 1983, training special forces on torture techniques to repress left wing movements. He died in 1991 in a French prison. In other actions, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger violently overthrew the and socialist Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 and Ronald Reagan armed and trained death squads in Central America including those who killed Bishop Romero in 1980. The list goes on. 

A pope panders to Peru’s elites 

In 1985, John Paul II visited Peru, where rather than cheering the self-help of the community, he pandered to the elites of Peru and encouraged them to “feed the poor.” The poor of Peru were not asking for charity. What they wanted was not to be beaten, tortured, and disappeared by the ruling class for demanding their rights. During the pope’s visit, there were blackouts caused by bombs detonated by Sendero Luminoso, whose attacks had originally driven the campesinos to leave the mountains. The pope lumped together left-wing politicians, activists, and priests with the rebel group. He was wrong. Of liberation theologians, the pope declared: “When they begin to use political means, they cease to be theologians.” But what is politics really? Is using collective action to demand clean drinking water politics? Perhaps, but community leaders like Father Gene did not shy away from that responsibility. 

He stood with “his people” for the rest of his life. All his advocacy work was in addition to his vocation as a priest: baptizing children, performing marriages, anointing the sick, consoling the bereaved, counseling the discouraged, and celebrating the Mass for a very large parish. 

A skilled carpenter, an ability he honed while serving a Cistercian Abbey in Louth as a young lad, Gene built his own home in Villa El Salvador and helped build many others. He was proud that every tile and every brick of the churches in Villa was made by the people themselves. Maybe the magic ingredient of Villa was the Irish concept of ‘Meitheal’ that Gene brought from Ireland. Indefatigable in service, he was famous for riding his yellow motorcycle to perform his pastoral duties well into his 80s. 

Father Gene was as humble as he was generous, maintaining that it was the people who led the way in building a peaceful and prosperous community from scratch. He believed that he was there simply to “accompañar” (accompany) la gente (the people) on their life’s journey, which included the struggle to survive. Community groups, often led by women, to buy milk or stoves collectively and prepare and distribute nourishing meals to the least fortunate all took root during Father Gene’s tenure. Community and medical centers are lasting marks of a community that “found shelter in each other.”

On Saint Patrick’s Day in 1987 at the celebration of the 25th anniversary of his ordination, I was lucky to hear Father Gene share two life lessons that I have reflected upon ever since. First, he said that “the capacities for gratitude and forgiveness are two of God’s most important gifts.” Secondly, he said, that “wherever there is love and service to others, God exists.”

A few years ago, our daughter Laura honeymooned in Peru. She and her husband took a bus to Villa El Salvador and asked the first person they met where they could find “Padre Eugenio.” Even though Villa El Salvador had over 500,000 residents by then, they were immediately guided to Father Gene’s home. The door, as always, was open.

John Paul II’s long papacy halted the liberation theology movement. He was followed by an even more conservative Benedict XVI and by a personally progressive(ish) but doctrinally restricted Francis. The result is an ultra-conservative Church obsessed with restricting reproductive rights (isn’t that politics, too?) rather than empowering the poor to improve their lives and communities. 

Reactionary forces prevented the development of many more Villa El Savadors, but they could not undo what the spirit of Villa El Salvador had already created, and Father Gene played his part. The last time we met in Boston, he admitted, “Ach, you know in Villa, after so many years, I’ve become a bit of an icon,” a modest understatement offered not with pride but with bemusement. 

If there is a heaven, Padre Eugenio is in it, and he will leave the door open.