Essays and Such
Irish Cultural Society
of San Antonio Texas
Promoting Awareness of Irish Culture
Gary MacEoin: NCR contributor
by Jerry Filteau
Catholic Writer and Advocate of the Poor
Gary MacEoin
July 15, 2003
Catholic News Service
The members of the ICSSA are truly fortunate to have had the pleasure, of an inperson presentation by such a distinguished, articulate, and noble gentleman. LPKelley - President "Take a good look now, for when I'm gone it will be a long time before you see the likes of me again" by ??? WASHINGTON - Gary MacEoin, a prolific Catholic journalist and author, expert on Latin America, human rights activist and advocate of the poor, died of a heart attack July 9 in Leesburg, Va. He was 94. MacEoin's home was in San Antonio for many years, but he died at a rehabilitation center connected to Cornwall Hospital in Leesburg, where he had been recovering from a concussion and a stroke suffered in May. An often acerbic critic of U.S. policies in the Third World and of church leaders who failed to match his passion for social justice, MacEoin wrote more than 25 books, including two sets of memoirs. While Latin America was his specialty, he also wrote extensively on the Catholic Church and on a wide range of other subjects, including Northern Ireland. MacEoin was a founder of the sanctuary movement, through which some U.S. churches in the 1980s provided shelter to refugees who illegally entered the United States to escape the violence in Central America. His involvement in Catholic journalism spanned seven decades, from the 1940s, when he was editor for the Port-of-Spain Gazette in Trinidad and a Caribbean correspondent for Catholic News Service (then the National Catholic Welfare Conference News Service), to the 2000s, when he continued to travel and write regularly for the National Catholic Reporter, based in Kansas City, Mo. Thomas Quigley, adviser on Latin American affairs for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said, "I always thought of him as the dean of American Catholic writers on Latin America.... He was a real student of the area." As a journalist MacEoin covered the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, and in 1968 covered the meeting of Latin American bishops in Medellin, Colombia, at which the bishops declared the church's "preferential option for the poor." In a tribute written for the July 18 issue of NCR, Editor Tom Roberts said, "If a publication can have a grandfather, then Gary MacEoin was that to NCR." He called MacEoin " an insatiable intellect and inveterate social reformer, a scholar and writer, an activist and believer, an Irish countenance with an actual eye-twinkle and a lilt in the voice that stayed with him to the last of his 94 years." MacEoin's relationship with NCR went back to its beginnings in the 1960s. Gary Johnson was born June 12, 1909, in Curry, County Sligo, Ireland. He adopted the Gaelic form of his last name, MacEoin (son of John), years later. He entered the seminary at age 18, planning to become a Redemptorist priest. In his memoirs he said he was informed three weeks before ordination that he would not be ordained - and was never given an explanation despite appeals to the order's superior general and to Rome. Over the next decade he earned a reputation in Dublin as an able writer and editor and earned a doctorate in Spanish. He also became a member of the Irish bar. In 1944 he left Ireland to become editor of the Port-of-Spain Gazette in Trinidad. In 1949 he moved to New York, where he was editor of La Prensa and La Hacienda. While covering Vatican II for Life en Espaņol, he collaborated with Redemptorist Father Francis X. Murphy on "What Happened in Rome" and other publications about the council. The Redemptorist was the then-secret author of the famous Xavier Rynne letters on the council that appeared in The New Yorker. Among MacEoin's books: Latin America: The Eleventh Hour in 1962, Revolution Next Door in 197l, No Peaceful Way: The Chilean Struggle for Dignity in 1974, Central America's Options: Death or Life in 1988 and The People's Church. Samuel Ruiz of Mexico and Why He Matters in 1996. His first book was Cervantes, published in 1950. His last was The Papacy and the People of God in 1998. He regarded his first memoir, Nothing Is Quite Enough in 1953, as his most important book. His second, Memoirs and Memories, appeared in 1986. MacEoin's wife, Josephine, died in 1986. He is survived by his son and daughter-in-law, Don and Brenda MacEoin, and their three children; step-daughter Kristina Jackson and her four children; and three sisters. MacEoin was the subject of a profile article in the Nov. 3, 2000, edition of Today's Catholic..