Eileen Egan

Eileen Egan (1922-2000) was a Roman Catholic pacifist and activist. She first coined the term "seamless garment" to describe the unity of Catholic teaching on life issues.

Born in Wales, she moved with her family to New York in 1926. A graduate of Hunter College, she was drawn in the early 1940s to the Catholic Worker movement which was started by Dorothy Day. Day felt that Egan's vocation lay elsewhere and she began a career as a freelance journalist.

In 1943 she joined the staff of the U.S. Bishops' War Relief Services (later known as Catholic Relief Services, or CRS). Her first assignment was in Mexico, where she worked with displaced Polish war refugees. The following year she was posted to Barcelona, where she ministered to victims of the Holocaust. She then headed the CRS office in Lisbon, Portugal.

Back in New York briefly in 1945, she was out of the office the July day a B-25 crashed into the CRS headquarters on the seventy-ninth floor of the Empire State Building. Ten fellow staff members were killed. The following year, Egan was back in Europe helping to resettle waves of displaced persons. She later received the highest honor awarded civilians by both the French and German governments.

In the course of her work, Egan visited Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Chinese exiles in Hong Kong, and displaced civilians in Pakistan, Korea and Vietnam. In 1955 she met Mother Teresa in Calcutta. The two became lifelong friends and collaborators, Egan helping to introduce the latter's work in the West.

Egan combined CRS's practical work of providing economic assistance, food, housing, and transportation to war victims with speaking, writing and demonstrating against the causes of war. In 1962 she co-founded the American Pax Society, which under her leadership evolved into Pax Christi USA in 1972.

She marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. at Selma, Alabama, had a major, behind-the-scenes hand in framing the "peace" statements of Vatican II, and promoted the work of Jean and Hildegard Goss-Mayr, crucial to the peaceful ouster of Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. One of her major achievements was the 1987 UN recognition of conscientious objection as a universal human right. She traveled widely with Dorothy Day, introducing her to Mother Teresa in 1970, and was with Day picketing for farm workers in California in 1973 when Day was arrested for the final time.

Eileen Egan was awarded the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award in 1989. It was named after a 1963 encyclical letter by Pope John XXIII that calls upon all people of good will to secure peace among all nations. Pacem in Terris is Latin for 'Peace on Earth.'

Egan did not care for the term "pacifist" because of its misleading echo in the word "passivity". She said that she used the term "gospel nonviolence, or "gospel peacemaking" instead. She argued that the so-called just war concept was an alien graft on the gospel of Jesus.

In 1992, at the age of 79, Egan was mugged on the way to Mass and had to go to a New York hospital with a broken hip and several fractured ribs. Her response to her attacker was one of care and forgiveness.

She died on October 7, 2000. She was 88 years old.