Fr Gerry Moore was born in Dublin in 1943 and died on April 1st, 2025, in Guatemala city after 52 years working as a Franciscan priest in Central America.
Before entering the Franciscan order in 1963 he worked in the Brewers’ Laboratory in the Guinness brewery at St James’ Gate in Dublin 8.
After ordination in Rome in 1971, he, along with four other Irish Franciscans and two Sisters of St Clare nuns, established a mission in Gotera, Morazan, in north eastern El Salvador.
This period coincided with the new liberation theology then developing in Latin America, a theology which they fully embraced.
It arose from the 1965 Pact of the Catacombs for a Church of the Poor that had the aim of bringing the church closer to the poor and back to the early church. It was signed in the Catacombs of Domitilla in Rome just after the end of the Second Vatican Council.
The signatories, who later numbered 500 out of the 2,000 members of the council, vowed to enact a preferential option for the poor, renouncing personal possessions, ornate vestments and “names and titles that express prominence and power”.
They also made an oath to “be animators according to the Spirit rather than dominators according to the world”, and to make themselves “as humanly present and welcoming as possible” and open to all, “no matter what their beliefs”.
Archbishop Oscar Romero was one of this group and he returned to El Salvador determined to put these ideals into practice. Fr Gerry and his community fully supported Romero in this commitment which brought them into inevitable conflict with the country’s 14 ruling families and the military and police forces that enforced their rule.
As the conflict heightened, and the government-financed death squads acted with impunity, signs appeared throughout El Salvador urging peope: “Be a patriot, kill a priest”. Resistance organisations developed but were ruthlessly suppressed by Salvadoran military forces trained and armed by the United States.
Archbishop Romero appealed directly to the then US president Jimmy Carter to halt the supply of arms to the Salvadoran military‚ a request that was refused. This letter proved to be the death knell for Romero, as within a month he was assassinated while celebrating Mass. Fr Gerry Moore attended Romero’s funeral which was marked by the national police opening fire indiscriminately into the assembled funeral crowds. Fr Moore helped to bring the bodies of the dying into the safety of the cathedral and, together with Bishop Eamon Casey, he organised an international press conference denouncing the massacre.
Immediate civil war ensued throughout the country which was especially concentrated in Fr Moore’s s area in Morazan. After a massacre in El Mozote, Morazan, of which the Irish Franciscans gradually became aware, Fr Moore contacted Ray Bonner of the New York Times who published the story. The report caused consternation in Washington.
On many occasions, Fr Moore’s life and those of his fellow Irish Franciscans, together with the sisters of St Clare, were threatened by death squads but they doggedly refused to abandon the people of Morazan. On one occasion when I attended a Mass celebrated in Morazan, Gerry had to stop the mass as the Salvadoran military launched mortar bombs from Gotera in our vicinity.
Afterwards I collected the remnants of the mortar bombs and with the help of Gerry gave sworn witness of this indiscriminate attack to the Human Rights Commission in Sao Salvador. The war ended in 1992.
Subsequently, Fr Moore moved to Guatemala where he became a leading figure of the Franciscan order not only in Central America but throughout Latin America, a continent he represented for many years in the Franciscan world headquarters in Rome. Fr Gerard Moore, affectionately known as Gerry, was a strong and courageous proclaimer of the authentic gospel of Jesus Christ as personified in the lives of Francis of Assisi and Oscar Romero of El Salvador.
– Brendan Butler
