An urban planner found his calling to the priesthood working among the poor in Nicaragua.
By Fr. John Boles

"To make people happy---that's the primary task of the priest. And, if you're making others happy, it's impossible to be unhappy yourself." 

I heard those words some 35 years ago, and they still give me the best justification I have for becoming a Columban missionary priest. They were spoken by my chaplain when I was still in secondary school back home in Manchester, England. He wasn’t talking about superficial “pie-in-the-sky” happiness, but sharing with people the fact that Jesus had lived, died and had risen so we could be with Him forever, starting in the here and now.

Now, this conversation did not have an immediate effect. I was still an adolescent rebelling against authority, and I had a negative image of diocesan priests, seeing them as dry, boring, repressed individuals who were most at home sipping tea with elderly ladies.

I was fueled by youthful idealism, however, and believed I was called to help make the world a better place. I kept these ideals as I progressed through university studies and a career in the British local government. I gave up everything to be an urban planner in Nicaragua in the 1980s. There, I worked with a nongovernmental organization helping resettle refugees during the infamous “Contra War.”

It was there, amidst the poverty of Latin America, that I came to know quite a different breed of Catholic priest: passionate, committed, struggling to proclaim the faith and secure social justice, at one with the people, especially the most-deprived. This, I knew, was a job that I could do, a life that I could lead.

Columban Father John Boles is pictured early in his ministry working among the Quechua-speaking of the Andes Mountains in Peru.

But at the top of their list was “a priest.” That sealed it for me. I sought advice from a foreign priest about which Catholic missionary group might be best-suited to me. He replied with the immortal words: “John, the only crowd as daft as you are the Columbans.”

What he meant was that Columbans worked in areas considered too difficult or dangerous by the Church. I had never heard of them, but I sought them out, liked what I saw, joined the seminary in 1989, became ordained in 1996 at age 42, and ended up in Peru, where I have been for the last 13 years.

Sometimes I work in the Andes Mountains with Quechua-speaking indigenous people, sharing the expression of their faith in Christian and pre-Christian rites. Mainly I minister to poor urban-dwellers who live in shantytowns on the edge of Lima, Peru’s capital.

Both groups are poor and live on the margins of society. But the hope that the preaching and practice of the Gospel brings to their lives has finally proved to me the wisdom of my old chaplain’s words.