Mick Clifford: Brazil remembers Clare priest who was a national figure for the dispossessed

Fr Jim Crowe was not well known here, but his death prompted heartfelt condolences from, among others, the president of his adopted home of Brazil, writes Mick Clifford

Father Jim Crowe is credited with mobilising a community of 300,000, bringing them onto the streets to protest the violence in what was termed a “march for life” during Brazil's "cruel and oppressive military dictatorship". Picture: Jean-Pierre Pingoud/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The two Brazilians were on a mad dash across the Irish Midlands. They landed in Dublin and got a train south as far as Portlaoise. From there, a bus brought them to Ennis and then it was necessary to hire a taxi if they were to make it to the church on time. 

Unfortunately, they didn’t, but they did make holy communion. Their dash was to attend the funeral mass of Fr Jim Crowe in the rural west Clare parish of Clonlara on February 23 last. 

They brought gifts from the people of Brazil and expressions of condolences from that country’s president and minister for finance. The mass was broadcast, partly in Portuguese, with a huge audience from Brazil looking in. 

Padre Jaime, as they called him, was hardly known in his own country but was a legend in the favelas of Sau Paulo, a man who had fought for the poorest and most dispossessed, often putting his own life in danger.

Luiz Lula da Silva, the current president of Brazil, a country with a population of 214 million, took to Twitter when Jim Crowe’s death was announced on February 19. 

“With sadness I received the news of the passing of Fr Jaime Crowe, who did so much for Jardim Angela in the South Zone of Sao Paulo, leading the community in defence of peace and life. My fraternal hug to the friends and admirers of Father Jaime.” 

The Kiltegan Fathers priest and Lula, as he is known, had been friends for decades since they first met in Sao Paulo when both were fighting for workers’ rights. In the late 1970s, when Lula was imprisoned by the junta, Jim Crowe said mass for him to send him on his way.

Fr Jim Crowe with an award.

The minister for finance, Fernando Haddad was equally effusive. “I received the news of the death of Father Jaime Crowe, one of the most dedicated men I have ever met, who worked in the south zone of the city of Sao Paulo. 

"An irreplaceable person, he will remain in our memory and give us the spiritual strength to remain in the fight for social justice. Huge loss.” 

Jim Crowe joined the Kiltegan Fathers in 1969 and in November of that year, he and fellow priest Tony Conroy, left Dublin Airport en route to Sao Paulo where he was to spend 52 unbroken years of service. His new surroundings were about as far from his native Clonlara as you could get.

“He was entering a country governed by a cruel and oppressive military dictatorship,” his colleague Fr Sean Deegan said at the funeral. 

“This was a dictatorship, cruel at torture and disappearance but also slick in public manipulation as it showed in its blatant exploitation of the great 1970 World Cup winning selecao (the National Brazilian soccer team)."

Thrust into the maelstrom of a dictatorship that marginalised the already poor vast majority, Fr Jim quickly became a fan of liberation theology, the Christian-informed approach to the liberation of the oppressed, which was particularly popular with religious in central and south America at the time.

“These new insights would mean praying in the church, Yes.” Fr Deegan related. “But also going out onto the streets. It was here that Jim met people from all walks of life involved in the same struggle for human rights, justice, and peace.” 

The poverty in the areas was appalling, but equally destructive was the role of the police which was irredeemably corrupt and notorious for carrying out murders. Religious figures were often targeted in the same manner that trade unionists and community leaders were.

Father Jim Crowe with Sr Phyllis Heaney.

Fr Crowe began his work in Embu, one of the poorest areas in the city, and in 1974 was joined by Fr Eddie McGettrick and a year later by an Irish nun, Sr Phyllis Heaney. 

“We ran the parish on a participative basis and this led to a very strong social and political involvement in the wider local community,” Fr Crowe recalled in 2010.

“The people were by and large poorly educated and many were illiterate but they were intelligent and resourceful. One totally illiterate woman was elected as secretary of her community and turned out to be an excellent secretary. 

"She had a wonderful memory and when she arrived home on the evening of a meeting she dictated the minutes to her son who wrote them into a minute book. Someone else read them, on her behalf, at the next meeting.

“She was also a woman of great courage. At a meeting where the local chief of police, a powerful man, was berating me for highlighting the plight of a group of youths — one of whom was only eight years old — that had been tortured by the police, she defended me after two priests and a lawyer had already been silenced. 

"Being low of stature, she got up on a chair to address the 300 people present. She would not be silenced and told the police chief that she had heard enough of his lies and asked him to leave the meeting. 

Fr Jim Crowe at a House Mass in Sao Paulo

"He left but was exposed as a drugs baron two years later and was expelled from the police force.”

In 1987, he moved to another area on the southside of the city, Jardim Angela, a place that the UN declared a few years later to be “one of the most dangerous in the world”.  When he began there he was presiding over up to 35 funerals a day, most of them victims of drug-related violence. 

“The standout social problem was the killing of young men by the police,” Sean Deegan recalled at the funeral. “At their graveside, Jim prayed that they go to heaven. But he also began to ask why did they end up in the grave in the first place.” 

He is credited with mobilising a community of 300,000, bringing them onto the streets to protest the violence in what was termed a “march for life”, which became a rallying point for the area.

“The Brazilian people often remind me of our own Daniel O’Connell,” he said in an interview in Africa magazine. 

“They were great at finding alternatives and getting their way around things. For instance, if an assembly was forbidden, they would call it a march and if a march was forbidden, they would call it something else.” 

Through his work he became a national figure, often appearing on TV debates, always advocating for the dispossessed. His colleague Eddie McKettrick, who still lives in Sao Paulo, is not surprised that Jim Crowe’s status in the country was a well-kept secret on this side of the Atlantic.

“He wasn’t well known in Ireland because the work we do here isn’t known at home,” Eddie says. “People in Ireland wouldn’t understand. 

We followed a line of liberation theology. People wouldn’t understand what we were talking about. So whenever we were back on holiday we just enjoyed our holiday and didn’t talk much about it and then came back to the life here.

In 2021, with Bolsonaro in power, adopting a Trump-like attitude to covid, the country was in deep trouble. Jim Crowe, along with other elderly religious, decided to go home in order to preserve his health, not long after his 76th birthday. He returned to Co. Clare where he lived out his days until his death in Limerick hospital in February.

Once holy communion was completed at his funeral mass in Clonlara, the two parishioners from Jim’s old stomping ground in Sao Paulo stepped forward with gifts. There was a written account, “a resume” of the work that the deceased man had done, which referenced “all the lives he had saved”. 

There were also t-shirts, one made at the time of Padre Jaime’s golden jubilee of his ordination, and including a few signatures “representing the thousands of people who would like to be here today”. 

A Brazilian flag was also presented, the final reminder of the place where the west Clare man had left an enduring legacy among those living hard lives on the periphery.