Fr. Guadalupe Carney S.J.: the Romero of Honduras

Catholic New Times, May 9, 2004 by Larry Carney, Ted Schmidt

Fr. James "Guadalupe" Carney disappeared in Honduras in 1983, one of many church workers and social activists who were killed or numbered among the desparacidos (The disappeared ones) in Latin America at that time. He was hated by many wealthy landowners and government officials there; he is still revered by Honduran campesinos as a martyr for the gospel. Carney's life challenges Christians, who don't see the importance of social justice issues for their own moral lives.

The Gospel parable (Luke 16: 19 ff) about Lazarus and the rich man should be a call to action: the rich man didn't hurt Lazarus directly; he just didn't seem to notice him at his gates, and he was condemned. We in North America and Europe don't seem to see 80 per cent of the world outside our gates starving, while we let the corporate world entice us to consume more and more without ever being satisfied. Worse still, much of our prosperity comes on the backs of the poor in Third World countries. Guadalupe Carney saw this and his example can be a call to action for those of us who want to make our religion be "just between me and God."

Born in Chicago of a hard-working middle-class family, he looked on his early life as very bourgeois. He served as a soldier in France and Germany during World War II; yet strangely enough, he thought that he would let himself be killed rather than kill an enemy solider. Moreover, his stubborn resistance to authority got him in trouble at times--he felt that all people should be treated with dignity and that officers should get no more respect than other soldiers. He even spent time in the brig because he refused to quit conversing with German prisoners.

His faith was deeply important for him. Yet he was amazed at how little religion seemed to matter to so many Christians, both in his army years and later on in university studies. He also was deeply touched by the extreme poverty of North African Muslims whom he had seen in France, and he wondered why any human beings had to live in such hardship. That experience awakened a desire in him to spend his life trying to change the way people live in the world, for this had to be God's will. He tried to answer this call by becoming a Jesuit missionary in Honduras.

Communists and Christians

Even before his seminary training, in his college years he worked in the Ford factory in Detroit. There he noticed and was bothered by a strange phenomenon: he kept encountering atheistic Communists who gave themselves completely to working for a just society and a better world, while so many fellow Christians gave more attention to getting ahead and the pursuit of wealth and pleasure. He became convinced that the capitalist system was intrinsically evil, fostering a selfish, individualistic and competitive attitude. But he also rejected the Marxist systems of Russia and China, that seemed to lose the value of the human person in the collectivity of the state. He kept searching for a middle way, a form of socialism where people share what they have like the early Christians described in the Acts of the Apostles.

Already a missionary in Honduras in 1961, Carney was enlivened by the Second Vatican Council's ideal of radical service to the poor. In this poor Central America country, Carney reasoned that, just as the Son of God became fully human as one of us, so he had to truly become one with the Honduran campesinos. As Saul became Paul to signify his new life in Christ, Carney took the Spanish name Guadalupe to symbolize his total identification with the Honduran people. Eventually, and after years of working on it, he became a citizen of Honduras and renounced his U.S. birthright.

In his book To be a Revolutionary he elaborated on his ideas about spiritual formation. Traditional theological studies, Carney believed, seemed to train priests in the service of the status quo, the comfortable middle class lives most lived within the capitalist system and hidden imperialist ideals of the United States. Carney maintained that it was the poor campesinos of Honduras who really taught him the Gospel, the Good News that Jesus brought, and that we who have a more middle class outlook cannot really understand what it means "to bring Good News to the poor." The story of his life is entitled To Be A Revolutionary, because Fr. Carney firmly believed that one had to be a revolutionary to live a full Christian life. The Gospel is revolutionary.

Guadalupe saw and understood the problems of the poor. He saw how American fruit companies had taken over the best lands and plantations. They and a few wealthy Hondurans controlled 95 per cent of the wealth. The rest of the people lived in dire poverty. Attempts to organize unions often led to the deaths and disappearances of the leaders. In a rare film clip of the bespectacled priest he is quoted as saying, "the way the campesinos were treated was totally unacceptable to God and it had to be changed." In a story dated July 20, 1966 in the National Catholic Reporter, Carney is defended by his Jesuit superior Fr. Fred Schuller. The latter unreservedly described Carney's work as "that of the church." Called a Communist by the wealthy Borgan family, Carney was accused of "agitating the campesinos and preaching subversion against the Honduran government." Schuller stated that this false accusation was typical, "another instance when those defending the poor were subject to insults. The church may not keep silent when her children are poor and de-fenceless." Eventually Carney chose to live alone in his little mission churches where he completely shared the life and the poverty of his people.