The Rev. James Carney, friends say, was a maverick a radical Roman Catholic priest whose convictions led him to challenge injustice in his adopted country of Honduras.
Twenty years after his disappearance and death, Honduran officials said last week that Carney's remains may have been located in a common grave in a jungle region of their country near the Nicaraguan border.
Friends and family, who believe he was "captured, interrogated and eliminated," wait in hope that the possible discovery could resolve the uncertainty still surrounding Carney's case.
"It's been a 20-year effort to get to the truth," said W. Joseph Connolly of St. Louis, husband of Carney's sister, Eileen, who died in 2001. "It doesn't die. It's like Jim and Eileen are urging it on. It's not just a case of Jim, but a case of justice."
Carney's autobiography, "To be a Christian is ... To be a Revolutionary," to be published for the first time in Honduras this year, describes how he was radicalized by seeing the struggle of the poor Hondurans he served in the 1960s and '70s. In his view, the needs of the nation's poor majority weren't being met by its rulers.
Those who knew the activist priest long have suspected the military-influenced Honduran government then in power ordered death squads to kill Carney after he accompanied a band of Honduran revolutionaries on a mission from Nicaragua. Carney served as the group's chaplain, though he was opposed to bearing arms.
The rebels and Carney, a World War II veteran, left Nicaragua in July 1983. Carney, 58, was not seen again.
Honduran officials later presented Carney's family with his priestly stole, holy oils, a chalice and Bible he'd carried with him, but they never produced his body. They held a news conference in September 1983 saying the insurgents had been defeated.
Over two decades, Carney's family has sought answers by imploring help from members of Congress, the CIA, federal courts, and groups such as Amnesty International. They ended up with "20 feet of documents," including a 1998 CIA Inspector General's report that has passages edited out, Connolly said.
The declassified CIA report said Carney was captured, tortured and dismembered by the Honduran army and buried near Nueva Palestina, a settlement on the fringe of the Patuca jungle region. But another account had him being thrown from a helicopter.
Carney grew up in a traditional conservative Catholic family in St. Louis, where he attended Jesuit schools. After serving in World War II, he entered the seminary and became a Jesuit himself.
His politics changed soon after he moved to the Central American country one of the poorest in the Western Hemisphere upon ordination in 1961.
He did pastoral work but also organized peasant unions, cooperatives and efforts in human rights and land reform. His efforts got him expelled from Honduras in 1979, said his friend, the Rev. Joe Mulligan, a fellow Jesuit based in Managua, Nicaragua.
"He came into contact with oppression and human misery, people struggling for survival," Mulligan said. "He was very pastoral and close to the people. He lived austerely."
After his expulsion, Carney's Jesuit community arranged for him to work in neighboring Nicaragua. He was pastor of a parish for a year, then became associated with a revolutionary group of Hondurans in Nicaragua, Mulligan said.
It was during this time, on a spiritual retreat while visiting St. Louis, that Carney decided to be the rebels' chaplain. "It was about his trust in God, and by the end of it, he had decided," said fellow Jesuit, the Rev. John Kavanaugh of St. Louis, who directed Carney's retreat.
"He never wanted to carry arms himself. He just wanted to get them married, pray with them, baptize them. For a guy who was so politically committed, he was one of the most simple and pure men I've ever known in terms of his devotion."
Mulligan said Carney figured that if the armies of the world can have a chaplain, "a little army of the poor can have one too."
He left the Jesuits because he didn't want to embroil them in his undertaking, but he planned to rejoin them later, Mulligan said. Then Carney disappeared.
Said Kavanaugh: "He believed you have to resist people who have power and money and military might."