HUNDREDS OF people gathered at a church in Fermoy, Co Cork over the weekend to pay tribute to human rights advocate, Pat Rice, who died unexpectedly in Argentina last month.
The former priest was credited with saving hundreds of victims of Argentina’s former brutal regime, in which nearly 30,000 “disappeared” from 1976 to 1983.
Amongst the congregation at the memorial Mass at St Patrick’s Church on Saturday was Pat Rice’s son Carlos and deputy Argentine ambassador to Ireland Ana Pisano De Ashton.
Fr Vincent Twomey said the Fermoy native “exuded the joy which only comes from suffering for others”. He told the congregation that Pat Rice was a man of prayer, otherwise he could not have persevered in his tireless campaigning for the less fortunate.
Prof Dermot Keogh of UCC recalled the tributes paid to his late friend Pat by the Mothers of the Disappeared at his funeral mass in Buenos Aires last month.
“For those of us who were privileged to attend his funeral in Buenos Aires, we witnessed with our own eyes the esteem in which he was held. It took seven hours for all the people who came to the Church of the Holy Cross to express their appreciation of his life’s work,” he said.
“The Mothers of the Playa de Mayo, with whom he was particularly close, were present. As a mark of respect, a number of the mothers left on the coffin their treasured white headscarves on which were written the names of their disappeared children. He had shared the nightmare of those dark days of the 1970s with his fellow Argentines and they would not easily forget.”
In a statement, Pat Rice’s widow, Fatima, said she and the couple’s children Carlos, Amy and Blanca would not rest until society became fairer.
Born in Fermoy in 1945, Pat Rice was educated at the Christian Brothers school. He joined the Divine Word Missionaries and was ordained in 1970. His order sent him to Argentina as a university chaplain in the city of Santa Fe. He later became a worker priest with the Little Brothers (Hermanitos) of Charles de Foucauld in Santa Fe province, helping to unionise forest workers and labourers.
In 1974, he moved to Buenos Aires. Following a coup in 1976, the military authorities viewed the Hermanitos with suspicion.
In October that year, Mr Rice and catechist Fatima Cabrera were abducted after leaving a prayer meeting and tortured for days. Action by the staff of the Irish Embassy in Buenos Aires helped save them both. Mr Rice was reunited with Fatima in 1984. A year later, he was laicised and they married.
On his release, Pat Rice was instrumental in the creation of the Committee for Human Rights in Argentina; the US government hearing on the Disappeared in Argentina; and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. He was a founding member of the Latin American Federation of Associations for Relatives of Disappeared-Detainees.