By Jerry Filteau
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- 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, 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 C. Fox, NCR publisher, said in a telephone interview shortly after MacEoin's death, "I don't know of a single human being who has been so outspoken for so long on the needs of the poor as Gary has been."

"His commitment to the poor of Latin America was his passion and his inspiration for decades," Fox said.

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."

"In the nine-and-a-half years that I've been at NCR," Roberts wrote, "Gary has been to Hong Kong, China, Italy, Ireland several times, lectured in Europe several times, scrabbled around the Guatemalan Highlands, been to El Salvador twice and spent time in Chiapas, Mexico."

MacEoin's relationship with NCR went back to its beginnings in the 1960s. Fox said it was MacEoin who in 1967 obtained for NCR the then-secret majority and minority reports of the papal birth control commission, revealing that the majority had advised Pope Paul VI that artificial contraception should be regarded as morally acceptable. In 1968, Pope Paul in his encyclical "Humanae Vitae" ("Of Human Life") reaffirmed church teaching that the use of artificial contraception in the conjugal act is intrinsically wrong.

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 Espanol, 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 magazine.

Among MacEoin's books are "Latin America: The Eleventh Hour" in 1962, "Revolution Next Door" in 1971, "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.