I'd say it just grew naturally from the cultural and familial
matrix in which I grew up. In those days it was a great honor,
especially among us Irish, for a son to become a priest-a position
of respect and prestige and responsibility. I had been a faithful
altar boy and thought occasionally of going to seminary. One day,
when I was in the eighth grade, some Divine Word Fathers came
by our school and made a pitch for vocations. I went home quite
excited and announced that I wanted to go away to be a priest.
My mother's response was quite simple: "No. You're too young
for that."
I spent three years in Baghdad, 1955-58. Although I didn't return
to Baghdad, I kept up my Arabic with Fr. Gus Devenny during theology
back at Weston College. But I was also quickly into the recently
launched New Testament Abstracts. I spent an inordinate amount
of time building up its "Book Notices" section, doing
a few abstracts, and publishing a few articles myself. I'd then
cram for the finals and squeak by-barely. Eventually I was asked
to return to Weston to work long term with New Testament Abstracts,
and I did.
In 1971 I was in Peru, giving talks to United States priests.
On the last day of the retreat in Lima, I had told my hosts that
I had yet to see anything of Lima, despite a week spent there
already. So we piled into a car and visited first some rich areas
along the Pacific Coast and then went to the slums on the other
side of the city. It was at that point that I first "saw"
the degradation of human poverty. It was a life changing moment
for me, a watershed in my life. It was so utterly dehumanizing.
Unquestionably there has been a thread holding all my life together.
My 1971 experience in Lima was life-changing. From that moment
on, I felt called to work with and for the poor, the economically
poor. And that has been the leitmotif of all the intervening years:
advocacy and networking in Washington, Jesuit Refugee Service
in Africa, ministering to ethnics in Amman, deportees and prisoners
in Boston, poor kids and their families at Nativity Schools in
Boston and Worcester. I find I relate with poor people far more
easily than with bourgeois. There is no pretension at all. I love
it.
