“MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING NOT ONLY IN RELIGIOUS MATTERS, BUT ALSO IN DEVELOPMENTAL AND LINGUISTIC TOPICS
HAS ALWAYS BEEN
A JESUIT PURSUIT.”

Peru has been a Jesuit mission since 1568, but not until more recently did it become a vice province, and then a standalone province. Over the past 60-plus years, three Midwest Jesuits have spent the majority of their lives there: Jesuit Fathers James “Jaime” Regan, Edward “Eduardo” Schmidt and Lewis Charles “Carlos” Murtaugh.

“The Jesuits who went to Peru in the 1960s and ’70s gave our province wonderful examples of what it means to be a Jesuit,” says Fr. Karl Kiser, SJ, provincial of the USA Midwest Province. “Jaime, Eduardo and Carlos left their family and their culture and fully integrated themselves in Peruvian culture so that they might better understand how to minister to the people they worked with. They are fully and completely the kind of Jesuits that St. Ignatius hoped for.”

In the 1960s, Pope John XXIII asked religious orders in the United States to send 10 percent of their personnel to Latin America. Father Regan and a group of Loyola University Chicago students spent six weeks volunteering among the Mayan Tzotzil people in Mexico, and that made him want to work more with the Indigenous group.

“I asked the bishop how I could prepare myself to do so, and he told me to study anthropology,” Fr. Regan says.

Anthropology would become one of his disciplines, but Mexico would not be his country. During theology studies in Peru and Bolivia, Fr. Regan learned the Quechua language to prepare himself for work with people of the Andes. Next, he was sent to the Amazon jungle, where he encountered the Aguaruna people (or Awajún, as they refer to themselves), whose language he learned so thoroughly—being one of the few Westerners who knows it—that for years he has taught it.

Father Regan’s acceptance of a research project commissioned by The Amazon Center for Anthropology and Practical Application (CAAAP) led to his planning and coordinating a project to study folk Catholicism in the region. The project began in 1977, which was the year Fr. Regan, now 83, asked to be transcribed to the Peruvian province to dedicate his life to the Amazonian peoples.

Since then, he has contributed to the knowledge of Peruvian traditions through his extensive writing on the ethnology, linguistics and ethnohistory of the Peruvian Amazon.

“Mutual understanding not only in religious matters, but also in developmental and linguistic topics has always been a Jesuit pursuit,” he says. “To be a good missionary, you have to learn the language and be concerned with the lives of the people you serve. We see similarities in South Dakota with Lakota language and culture.”

Before Fr. Schmidt entered the Society of Jesus, he earned a degree in business and economics at Xavier University and worked as an insurance agent. “In 1967 I came to Peru during formation, as one of the early Chicago Province Jesuits making a permanent commitment to Peru in answer to Pope John XXIII’s request,” he says.

Despite serving in many roles, Fr. Schmidt had one formal assignment for decades: professor of business ethics at the Universidad del Pacífico, which was founded by the Society and Catholic Peruvian businessmen. There, he designed a new approach to teaching business ethics, expressed through more than 130 culturally sensitive cases that Latin American business professionals can apply to real life.

The teaching approach caught on, resulting in his helping to form an applied business ethics center at the Universidad Catolica San Pablo in La Paz, Bolivia; serving as visiting professor of business ethics at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Cali, Colombia; and conducting training seminars for business ethics professors in Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Spain.

As an amateur radio operator since age 13, Fr. Schmidt once alerted a pilot flying from Los Angeles to Lima that a surgical valve was needed for a baby who otherwise would have died. In another instance, the Peruvian government asked him to reestablish communications after a devastating earthquake. His work led to the formation of the Rainbow Network, which gave radio transceivers to more than 300 missionaries across Peru.

Today, Fr. Schmidt helps at a parish and does pastoral work via the internet, while attending to his health at a senior living facility for Jesuits in Lima—for which he expresses gratitude to Midwest Jesuits benefactors.

Father Murtaugh’s history in Peru dates to 1958, when Fr. Felipe Mac Gregor, SJ, then superior of the Jesuits in Peru, first discussed interprovincial cooperation with Fr. John Connery, SJ, of the then-Chicago Province.

“A few years later, Fr. Mac Gregor gave a talk to anyone interested in going to Peru,” Fr. Murtaugh says. “Here I am, more than 60 years later. A lot of things came together, and I can see the hand of God in most of the events that conspired to get me here.”

Events involved assignments like assistant pastor, teacher and counselor in Parroquia Nuestra Senora de los Desamparados school in Lima; minister, treasurer and assistant pastor at Communidad de Fatima in Lima; pastor at San Ignacio in Camajarca; province archivist; and assistant pastor, minister and treasurer at Parroquia Jesus de Nazareth in Trujillo.

Since 2018, Fr. Murtaugh has ministered at the Parish of San Pedro in Lima, a colonial church connected to the arrival of the first Jesuits sent from Europe by St. Francis Borgia. “Working with the parish groups has helped my own prayer life,” Fr. Murtaugh says. “Some things I have done were just ‘doing my job,’ such as saving the house when the sewers were being replaced and sewage started flooding us. But dealing with the people in a pastoral setting is really living.”