Priest known for hispanic ministry dies at age 78

Georgia's Latino community lost a dear friend with the death of Passionist Fr. Joseph Augustine Fahy, who died Jan. 22 of pneumonia at age 78. For more than two decades, he served with the Hispanic ministry of the Atlanta archdiocese.

Fahy's friend, Jorge Lawton, a specialist in international economics and ethics, wrote in a tribute how he enjoyed his "never brief, meandering, wide-ranging conversations" with Fahy. "What you could count on was his unbending attitude of charity-even toward the very ugly forces who were oppressing the ones he had long since cast his lot with."

"The man simply exuded love," Lawton told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "It was not a valentine. It was not a eulogy. It was almost a physical characteristic."

Fahy was a missionary in Honduras, where he served as an outspoken champion of the poor, Lawton said. "Joe was a gentle, gentle man with a backbone of steel," Lawton wrote.

In the early 1980s, Fahy began a ministry to the more than 3,000 Marielitos, Cubans who were being indefinitely detained at Atlanta's U.S. Penitentiary. Fahy eventually lost his prison visiting privileges because he criticized prison policy and publicly called for the detainees to receive due process.

After a 1988 prison riot, most of the Cubans were moved from Atlanta, and Fahy continued to work among the state's burgeoning Latino population.

On Sundays, Fahy often drove hundreds of miles to celebrate Mass at Latino outposts in remote areas of North Georgia, said Deacon Hilliard M. Lee Jr., who lived with Fahy at St. Paul of the Cross Parish.

Fahy was "saintly," Lee said. "He had a great love of people. He was like a circuit preacher for some of the Hispanics in North Georgia."

Passionist Fr. John O'Brien, who also once lived with Fahy, delivered the homily at Fahy's funeral at the Cathedral of Christ the King, with many Passionists present.

"He brought a deep love of scholarship and learning where he could talk to scholars, and deep love for the humblest, of the janitor and the domestic worker," O'Brien said in an interview. "He lived what the vocation is supposed to be, really the self-emptying of Christ so that other people may flourish."

Because Fahy had an eccentric side, O'Brien said, not all of his brother priests understood or appreciated "the tremendous gift that was there .... I think to those that knew him he was an inspiration."

Born in Rome, Ga., and reared in Washington, Fahy held a master's degree in Latin American history from New York University and a master's in theology from Princeton Theology Seminary.

[Patrick O'Neill is a freelance writer living in Raleigh, N.C.]

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