Columban Fr Leo Donnelly passed away in Peru on February 4, 2014. He lived with the people, stayed with the people, and was buried among the people. Fr Peter Woodruff shares his memories of Fr Leo's life.
His was a huge life - just like his hands and his heart. Fr Leo served in nine parishes in Peru: in Lima (on the coast), in Huasahuasi (in the Andes Mountains), and in Tamshiyacu (in the Amazon jungle region). Besides being a missionary priest for over 50 years he painted, wrote poetry, gardened and published pastoral/theological articles in The Furrow.
This is how Fr Leo saw our shared mission: “We did not just come to do things for our parishioners and then go home. We came here to share our lives with the Peruvian people, to live close to them and to value them as daughters and sons of God. As missionaries, we could not bring them the faith because they already had strong faith. What we could do is value them as humans."
Fr Leo began by learning the ropes of working in a parish, where the hardest thing to bear was the poverty and misery of his parishioners, which “ground away at one’s very soul in the constant encounter with families without hope of changing their wretched situation.”
Even so, Fr Leo once wrote on returning to Lima in 1971, “It doesn’t take much to get you out of the doldrums. You are a born optimist or you wouldn’t be in this game at all. All it takes is a word of welcome, a smile, a ‘good to have you with us again’ and you are on your feet and ‘God is in His heaven, all is right with the world’.”
Such was the quality that enabled him to push on when there seemed to be little joy in life: “I arrived back just in time to celebrate my anniversary as a priest. Fourteen years of what? Of frustration and loneliness and pig-headedness and ignorance and misunderstanding? Every step forward seems to have been followed by two backwards. One minute it is problems with personnel and once you sort them out, the work itself or the people start creating others and you lay one burden down to pick up another.”
On two occasions that I recall he put his life on the line for justice, once in Lima and later in the rural town of Huasahuasi. Fr John Hegerty spoke of one such life-changing moment at Fr Leo’s funeral Mass:
“Leo was assigned to the parish of St Martin de Porres when a group of workers, who had been unjustly sacked, occupied the church to go on hunger strike. The police arrived with orders to remove them but Leo refused access. Then the workers themselves persuaded him to open the doors. This experience of utter disillusionment with the status quo and the dignified courage of powerless factory workers marked for Leo the beginning of belief in the power and the right of the oppressed – a moment of deep conversion.”
Fr Leo once wrote: “I have tried to act as a Peruvian priest recommended to a group of young priests who had recently arrived in Peru: ‘You have come as empty chalices to my people. Allow them to fill to overflowing that chalice with their Gospel. When they have done so then and only then will you hold something of value for them. You will then articulate for them the Gospel they have given you.’”
Fr Leo wrote of his time in Huasahuasi in the Andes Mountains: “In Huasahuasi, in January and May crosses from all over the hills are brought in to the parish church, blessed at a Mass and then carried back to a hillside overlooking a village. Daily life happens in the shadow of His saving cross. The crosses, scattered over the hills, silently proclaim the faith of the residents of this region: ‘We are the people of God; we are one.’ The people I’ve been sent to work among tend to see God not as a strict taskmaster but as God showed himself to us, as ‘Abba,’ a loving and caring father.”
“I was deeply moved and renewed in my own faith by the people of Huasahuasi as they relived and made so real Christ’s redemptive act. At the Easter Vigil the Paschal Candle was lit as a symbol of hope for everyone in the town that had experienced violence and death but looked to a day when injustice would end. Families kept their faith alive and passed it on to their children through this old and ever new ritual.”
“In my time in Huasahuasi, I buried 28 people who had been murdered by the Shining Path guerrillas. In the beginning they shot people but later they killed with knives. The ordinary farmers and village people of course suffered from both sides. The military would go into a village and burn it down so that the Shining Path guerrillas could not hide there.”
Sr Irene McCormack, an Australian Sister of St Joseph who worked in Huasahuasi, was murdered on May 21, 1991. Fr Leo went on home leave in mid 1992 and knew that many of his Huasahuasi parishioners doubted he would return. Soon after he returned in early 1993 ten men were killed by Shining Path and, in the midst of the senseless killing, he found himself asking once again, “Who’s next?”
Fr Leo wrote poetry about much of what he experienced with the poor of Peru:
I believe
that somewhere in this morass
He is there in Spirit
inspiring, encouraging, sustaining
each and every individual
who raises his voice in
protest. (1984)
Luke and Marion Guthrie of Mildura, former volunteer English teachers in Lima, spoke of Fr Leo with deep gratitude. "Fr Leo was an inspirational servant of God. He was a humble human being who showed respect for every person he met regardless of their station in life.”
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LISTEN TO: He stayed with the people |