Passion for Peace

Fr. Roy Bourgeois of the Maryknolls stayed at the Saint Paul's rectory on Saturday May 14. I had the privilege of presenting him with the Passion for Peace Award at the Friends' Center the next day. My first encounter with the Maryknoll order was in 1981. I was vicar of Saint Luke's Church in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. Fr. Albert Reymann returned that year from El Salvador and found his way to our ministry among the poor at Saint Luke's. He was in Philadelphia recovering from a total breakdown after watching countless women and children killed over the past fifteen years of his ministry. He emphasized that the United States was at war in El Salvador not against communism but in the name of private business and even in the name of God. In 1981 on Easter morning Roy Bourgeois flew to El Salvador with a CBS camera crew. It was a trip from which he almost did not return. Salvadoran peasants risked their lives to show him the extent of their suffering.

The School of the Americas Watch was founded in 1990 by Father Roy Bourgeois after six Jesuit priests and a mother and daughter were massacred in El salvador by troops trained at the School of the Americas. The purpose of School of the Americas Watch is to close this school that has been used as a tool of oppression, to stand in solidarity with the poor and to educate the public about U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.