THE VIGIL FOR FATHER CARNEY

Feb. 21, 1998

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A LETTER TO FATHER JAMES CARNEY

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TO: Persons and organizations concerned about the disappeared of Honduras, especially FATHER JAMES (GUADALUPE) CARNEY, a U.S. citizen who "disappeared" in 1983 after entering Honduras as chaplain to a revolutionary group.

FROM: Joe Mulligan, SJ

Apdo 2419

Managua, Nicaragua

tel: (505) 278-6965

email: guvols@nicarao.org.ni

Dear Friends,

In this communique I would like to share with you an article which I have written in the form of a letter to Father Carney.

Please use it, if you wish, as a free op-ed in newspapers, magazines, newsletters, etc. Feel free to shorten it if necessary.

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LETTER TO FATHER JAMES "GUADALUPE" CARNEY

DISAPPEARED IN HONDURAS IN 1983

by

Joseph E. Mulligan, S.J.

Hi Jim,

We went to look for you in Honduras last October--your brother John Carney, your cousin Sister Jean Brenner, Bishop Tom Gumbleton of Detroit, Matt Eisen, and myself. Fourteen years had passed since your "disappearance," when you entered Honduras as chaplain to a revolutionary group. But Che Guevara's remains were recently found and identified, 30 years after he had been killed in Bolivia, and so we feel it is possible to find and identify your remains in Honduras.

You had worked in Honduras for 18 years, identifying with the peasants and supporting their struggles to organize and work for justice. For you, the Church's official "option for the poor" meant not only incarnation in the situation of the poor but participation in their struggle to change oppressive structures. That's why you were deported from Honduras in 1979.

Then you lived in Nicaragua for a few years (1979-1983), experiencing the social achievements of the Sandinista revolution especially in health and education. Thanks for writing your autobiography, "To Be a Revolutionary" (Harper & Row, 1985), which has influenced thousands of people since. But your heart was always in Honduras, and you wanted to help bring about the same kind of changes there that you were seeing in Nicaragua.

During those years it was great to meet you twice in Detroit, first when you visited your mother and your sister and then when you came there for your mother's funeral. I remember how you talked with your nephews and nieces in the basement lounge of the funeral home, gently and lovingly but clearly challenging them on the anti-gospel values of the American culture (individualism, egoism, materialism, violent competitiveness) and inviting them to commit their lives to the poor and to justice and liberation.

They loved you, as did your fellow Jesuits of Honduras, even though they found your prophetic message disturbing. You "spoke the truth with love," as the Quakers say.

In Nicaragua you were a pastor in a small country town. Everyone remembers how you lived in a little hut on the outskirts of the village, eschewing clerical privileges. You wanted to be called "brother" rather than "Father," as Jesus told his disciples they should be called.

In July 1983 you returned to your beloved Honduras, crossing the border from Nicaragua as a priest accompanying an armed revolutionary group, convinced that the armies of the poor had just as much right (even more) to a chaplain as did the armies of the oppressive establishments. As Sister Jean and I traveled north by land from Nicaragua into Honduras in October, we felt the presence of our cousin and friend who had crossed that border (though at a different place) 14 years earlier.

John, whose journey to Honduras took him through El Salvador, had felt the presence of his brother at the museum of the martyrs in the Jesuit university, where your picture and belongings are right there with the mementoes of the others who gave their lives for justice 6 years after you did.

Honduras was teeming with foreign soldiers in 1983: U.S. troops in joint military maneuvers with the Hondurans, Salvadorans being trained by U.S. advisers, and Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries using Honduras as a springboard for their attacks on Sandinista Nicaragua. I've heard some very good friends of yours say how they tried to dissuade you from going with the revolutionary group: that Honduras was not ripe for an armed uprising, that you could do more for liberation as a priest "above ground."

But then, you were barred from the country you had served for so many years, where you had become a naturalized citizen. And I think you and your comrades knew that Honduras would not rise up immediately to support your revolutionary initiative, but that you would start a flame that would grow over the years.

So as not to compromise your fellow Jesuits, you signed out of the order, with the intention to return afterwards. Since your disappearance, the Society of Jesus has defined our mission as "the service of faith and the promotion of justice," a definition which you and many other martyrs helped to shape.

It is said that you and the others were debilitated by lack of food after entering Honduras (forced to hunt monkeys) and enveloped in clouds of merciless mosquitoes. But the political leader of your group, a medical doctor, wrote in his diary that you were valiantly struggling along, in spite of a bad leg. We all know that you had the quality of revolutionary stubbornness!

In early August, 1983, a few of your group either deserted or were captured by Honduran troops. The U.S. Army attache from the embassy went to interview them but shortly thereafter could "not remember" whether they had told him that a U.S. citizen, a priest, was with the group!

The official U.S. government version is that they didn't know anything about your presence with the group until the September 1983 press conference called by the Honduran army, although in August 1983 there was a flurry of telegrams from the embassy in Tegucigalpa to Washington trying to determine whether you were still a U.S. citizen. (You had renounced U.S. citizenship when you became a Honduran citizen.)

I think the American officials knew you were with the armed group; and so, when the Honduran troops captured you, they must have looked for a signal (at least) from the U.S. officials before torturing and executing you.

At that press conference in September 1983, the Honduran army boasted that they had defeated the insurgency and killed the M.D. who was the political leader of the group. They said they knew nothing of you, even though they handed over to your relatives your stole and chalice, explaining that these had been found in an arms cache.

A few years later a deserter from the Honduran army's death squad told The New York Times that he had interrogated you and that you were later killed by Honduran troops. Another ex-torturer said that he saw you in very bad shape in a dungeon at El Aguacate, the Nicaraguan contras' camp run by the U.S.

In 1995 the human rights commissioner of the Honduran government officially asked the U.S. government for any documents which may help in the prosecution of violations in your case and others. The files released by the CIA and the U.S. Army are an insult to your family and to the Honduran government and have put the issue on the human-rights agenda once again, since they are over 50% blacked out!

Outraged, your relatives and friends went to the U.S. embassy in Honduras to express our concerns and demands to the ambassador. We wanted the U.S. government to release more information and to offer whatever technical aid may be necessary to help the Honduran government to find your remains and identify and prosecute your assassins.

After announcing that we would wait in the embassy for a serious response from Washington, we stayed there until 7 p.m., when eight U.S. Marines picked up your cousin, Sister Jean, and me and deposited us on the sidewalk outside.

Then some of us continued in a vigil at the embassy and a liquids-only fast for 45 days. We are not really looking for "you," since you are not in some hole in the ground; you are in us and in your beloved people of Honduras, giving us strength and courage to continue to struggle for liberation. We found people all over Honduras who knew you or knew of you, who demand that your remains be found and that your killers be identified and brought to justice.

Social and economic conditions in Honduras, as in Nicaragua, are worse now than when you walked these roads, and so the need for organizing and social struggle is greater. But if the oligarchy and military of these countries remain convinced that they can get away with murder, even the killing of a priest, to thwart social change, then the deck will remain stacked against the poor.

One weekend during our fast and vigil, Sister Jean (who has followed your footsteps and is working in Nicaragua!), Matt Eisen (a young man from Cincinnati who is now working with at-risk youth in San Salvador and has come to know you during the past six months), and I (your old friend from Detroit) were the guests of the bishop in the cathedral of Santa Rosa de Copan. We spoke during the Masses, we held a large banner saying "Padre Guadalupe, Where are His Remains Buried?," we distributed thousands of leaflets, we had your picture at the front entrance.

Were you ever in this cathedral? There is a vivid statue of Jesus carrying his cross, identified as "the true benefactor of the poor." I know what your interpretation of that would be: that Jesus is the real helper of the poor because he not only fed and healed them but also awakened in them a sense of their own dignity and rights and denounced their oppressors.

The first reading in the Sunday Mass was from Daniel 12: 1-3: "those who lead the many to justice shall be like the stars forever." In my homily I said that you, by your prophetic words and example, taught justice to the many.

And how about the great cathedral in Tegucigalpa? In a side chapel, the altar features a tabernacle which seems right out of Teilhard de Chardin! It is a globe, with the continents of the world clearly depicted. Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is inseparable from contemplation of Christ present in the world. You would say: especially in the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the homeless. And that is what He said in Matthew 25.

I also spent a Sunday in the Jesuit parish of Tocoa, where you had worked and where you still live in the hearts of the people. For the anniversary of your disappearance in 1996, your sister Virginia and your brother John were there, among thousands in a procession and Mass with the Jesuits and the local bishop.

About 50 people, many of whom knew you, joined with me in an all-day vigil and fast in the church, spending most of the time in silence but occasionally sharing some memories of you. I'm sure you were pleased by the huge banners they displayed: "Guadalupe: Priest, Peasant, Brother," and "Lupe: With Us in Our Struggles."

Every weekday we held posters in front of the U.S. embassy saying: "Where Is Father Carney?" and "What is the U.S. Government Hiding?" Other posters showed blown-up copies of the blacked-out pages from the CIA and the U.S. Army. One day you brought out 100 people from the indigenous Lenca group (some of whom knew you personally) to join with us in the protest, another day 200 from a community organization. Many Jesuits also took part in the picketing and leafleting, and some people came from Nicaragua to participate: Brother Camillus, Sister Rita, Helder, Nan, Miguel, Pablo.

Net result so far: (1) your case is better known in the U.S. and elsewhere, thanks to email and considerable coverage in the mass media; and (2) many people are demanding that your disappearance be clarified and that justice be done, including U.S. Senators and Representatives, editors of major papers like the Washington Post and the Miami Herald, Nobel Peace laureates Rigoberta Menchu and Adolfo Perez Esquivel, and many others.

Some Honduran human-rights organizations have said they may be able to find and exhume your remains this year. It will be a great Irish and Honduran wake! The blood of martyrs is the seed of faith and hope and courage. We also want your torturers and killers, Hondurans and/or Americans, to be identified and convicted.

We and you will still not rest in peace, for the Honduran people still have a long way to go in the construction of a just and fraternal society. But their struggle will be assisted significantly by a resounding victory against military impunity and against U.S. involvement in "dirty wars."

END