Father Eugene Hattie
1922-2021
A message from Fr. Don Dunson
Our Church has recently lost a courageous and valiant missionary with the death on June 12th of Jesuit Father Gene Hattie. I had the good fortune of meeting Father Hattie in his beloved Africa twenty years ago. I had heard of his ministry helping to save street children from the dangers that lurk everywhere on the streets of Kampala, Uganda’s sprawling capital city. He was celebrating his 79th birthday when I first met him in East Africa and still in possession of an endless reservoir of energy for ministry. I was in Uganda while on sabbatical from teaching theology at St. Mary Seminary. On July 18th, he would have turned 99 years-old, serving as a Jesuit for nearly 8 decades.
Father Hattie had a special place in his heart for St. Angela Merici Parish. Parishioners here learned of Fr. Hattie and his compassionate outreach to humanity’s most vulnerable members. Members of our parish community sought to band together to help support these noble efforts of evangelization. They formed what was then called a ‘mission circle’ to offer concrete support to Fr. Hattie’s efforts. They made rosaries and other religious objects so cherished by the poor whom Fr. Hattie served. They held card parties, bazaars, and raffles to raise money to help with construction of chapels and schools, to pay school fees for some of the orphaned children and to provide food and medicine for families in crisis. Such corporal works of mercy build up the Kingdom of God and draw the human family ever closer together.
St. Angela families like Roy and Mary Sue Company and Harry and Mary Scherzer kept in contact with Fr. Hattie from the time they first joined the mission circle until the end of their lives. They told me that they felt closely connected to the work of the Church in India and Africa through all the stories Fr. Hattie shared with them. He was a legendary letter writer. He had a typewriter in his room and he sat at his desk everyday communicating with friends and benefactors back home in the USA. They especially felt connected to the young children the Jesuits trained in the faith. They kept pictures of the children on their refrigerator doors just like we do of our own children. Those images reminded them to pray that these children’s future be blest.
I received a message from one of the young boys, Mathias Ssemujju, who grew up at the orphanage Fr. Hattie founded in Kampala. He wrote: “My heart is so sad, all my friends and I are in tears now, but we will forever remember Father Hattie saving us from the hard streets. We are still his sons and he will never be forgotten as long as we live.”
May God give Fr. Gene Hattie life and endless love now in His Kingdom.
