Born in Longview, Wash., on October 31, 1939, he was abandoned by his father, a house painter and farmer, whom his mother had repeatedly taken to court in fruitless attempts to earn money to raise children.
“He was not abusive; he just left us, and it was very painful,” he said. “That’s the essence of it all: I want to be a priest to help other children so they don’t get hurt and hurt like I did.”
As a young boy, he left home to join the seminaries of the Roman Redemptorists in Oakland, California, and in Oconomowoc, Wis.
After his ordination, he recalls the thrill of giving his first sermon in a small wooden church in South Dakota built by his Irish relatives and seated only for 40 people.
“It was a very important moment for a priest,” he said, pointing to a small framed black and white photograph of the church hanging on the wall above his dining table.
When he arrived in Thailand in 1967, on a mission assigned to him by the Redemptorist Order, he was first sent to the extreme northeastern part of the country and to Laos. Returning to Bangkok in 1971, after the war came to Laos, he was handed over to Klong Toey, almost completely out of sight as if he were in the remote highlands.
“The priest there was drunk,” he said, “and I replaced him there, as a drunkard and a priest.”
In Klong Toey, he met a Catholic nun, Sister Maria Chantavarodom, now 92, who led him through narrow alleys and with him founded a small school in an old pigpen.
