ENFLESHMENT OF THE BEATITUDES

 

Our next American, hopefully one day to be canonized, was a woman of many talents. EILEEN EGAN was an American journalist, Catholic activist, and co-founder of the Catholic peace group American PAX Association and its successor Pax Christi USA, the American branch of Pax Christi.

Born in Wales in 1912, she moved with her family to New York City in 1926 and completed her secondary education at Cathedral High School. She later graduated from Hunter College in 1933 and began a career as a freelance journalist.

In 1943 she joined the staff of the U.S. Bishops' War Relief Services (later known as Catholic Relief Services, or CRS) as its first professional layperson. Her first assignment was in Mexico, where she worked with displaced  Polish war refugees. The following year she was posted to Barcelona, where she ministered to victims of the Holocaust. She then headed the CRS office in Lisbon, Portugal.

She was a longtime friend of Dorothy Day and  (St.) Mother Teresa, whose biography she wrote, Such A Vision: Mother Teresa, the Spirit, and the Work. Eileen arranged for Mother Teresa’s first trip to the United States to speak to a group of Catholic laywomen, and spent the next 17 years as Mother Teresa’s global traveling companion.  

Back in New York briefly in 1945, she was out of the office the July day a B-25 crashed into the CRS headquarters on the seventy-ninth floor of the Empire State Building. Ten fellow staff members were killed. The following year, Eileen was back in Europe helping to resettle waves of displaced persons. Writer Mike Aquilina observed that "...these works of mercy might involve carefully planned news leaks, sifting through propaganda or misinformation campaigns, or even ... using Chicago's Polish vote to protect Polish refugees." She later received the highest honor awarded civilians by both the French and German governments.

In the course of her work, Eileen visited Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Chinese exiles in Hong Kong, and displaced civilians in Pakistan, Korea and Vietnam. In 1955 she met Mother Teresa in Calcutta. She was Mother Teresa's official biographer and helped introduce the latter's work in the West.

Eileen combined CRS's practical work of providing economic assistance, food, housing, and transportation to war victims with speaking, writing and demonstrating against the causes of war. In 1962 she co-founded the American Pax Society, which under her leadership evolved into Pax Christi USA in 1972.

She marched with Martin Luther King Jr. at Selma, Alabama, had a major, behind-the-scenes hand in framing the "peace" statements of Vatican II, and promoted the work of Jean and Hildegard Goss-Mayr, (nominated for the Nobel Peace prize three times), crucial to the peaceful ouster of Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines.

One of her major achievements was the 1987 recognition of conscientious objection as a universal human right by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (resolution 1987/46). She first coined the term "seamless garment" to describe the unity of Catholic teaching that all human life is sacred and should be protected by law.

She traveled widely with Dorothy Day, introducing her to Mother Teresa in 1970, and was with Dorothy picketing for farm workers in California in 1973 when Dorothy was arrested for the final time. In 1973 she brought Mother Teresa to Washington, DC, where the nun served the first bowl of soup at Zacchaeus Community Kitchen, run by Community for Creative Non-Violence founder J. Edward Guinan and Kathleen Guinan.

Eileen Egan was awarded the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award in 1989. It was named after a 1963 encyclical letter by Pope John XXIII that calls upon all people of good will to secure peace among all nations. Pacem in terris is Latin for 'Peace on Earth'.

Eileen did not consider herself a pacifist. She did not care for the term "pacifist" because of its misleading echo in the word "passivity". She said that she used the term "gospel nonviolence, or "gospel peacemaking" instead. She argued that the so-called just war concept was an alien graft on the gospel of Jesus.

In 1992 at age 80, Eileen was mugged on the way to Mass and had to go to a New York hospital with a broken hip and several fractured ribs. Her response to her attacker was one of care and forgiveness. She refused to testify against her assailant, a homeless man with mental illness, and often she checked on his well-being when he was incarcerated.  

She died on October 7, 2000, aged 88.   The homilist at her funeral Mass called her “the enfleshment of the Beatitudes.”

Books by Eileen Egan:

Peace Be With You: Justified Warfare or The Way of Nonviolence

Such a Vision of the Street: Mother Teresa, The Spirit and the Work

For Whom There Is No Room: Scenes from the Refugee World

Prayer Times with Mother Teresa: A New Adventure in Prayer

Suffering Into Joy: What Mother Teresa Teaches About True Joy (with Kathleen Egan, OSB)

Blessed Are You: Mother Teresa and the Beatitudes (with Kathleen Egan, OSB).