c. 1998 Religion News Service

KATMANDU, Nepal _ In the 27 years the Rev. Thomas Edward Gafney, S.J., ministers to the lost boys of Nepal, the orphans and the addicts, he never once allows them to celebrate his birthday.

A jug-eared Jesuit from Lakewood, Ohio, Gafney has a weakness for bad puns and cheap cigarettes but other than that he is as serious as the Ten Commandments.

He also is revered, not so much as a Catholic, or even a Christian, but as a man of compassion who introduced the concept of social work into a country where cows, not people, are sacred. And he is the “Beloved One,” the spiritual father of thousands and thousands of Hindus and Buddhists to whom he has given a second life _ a life beyond the garbage-strewn streets and the hard drugs souring the Shangri-La image of this ancient Himalayan kingdom nestled between China and India.

Over the years, Gafney sets up a network of social service centers in Patan, the oldest city in the Katmandu Valley, just across the Bagmati River from Katmandu. Gafney opens the country’s first treatment center for drug addiction as well as its first free medical clinic.

It is a one-man operation, and it takes its toll. The last few years Gafney looks more frail than feisty. He has a couple of bouts with skin cancer, and the local cigarettes and air pollution have him coughing like a consumptive.

He agrees it might be time to plan for his retirement in heaven, and train a successor, choosing David Ekka, a young Jesuit seminarian from North Bengal, India. And Ekka decides the best way to thank his mentor is to finally celebrate his birthday.

On Nov. 28, 1997, Gafney turns 65. Ekka arranges a party at the Social Service Residence, an orphanage Gafney started with nine street boys in 1970. Now it is home to 76 boys. They don’t have money for a big cake or lots of presents. Instead, they decide to honor Gafney with a show.

Gafney doesn’t want to go. Ekka argues with him.

“This is an expression of gratitude,” he says. “We’re thankful to God for your gift of life.”

Reluctantly, Gafney agrees to attend.

After a couple of song-and-dance routines, the boys line up and one by one present Gafney with bouquets and garlands of flowers.

Ekka is delighted. But Gafney is grim.

“This looks like my funeral,” he says.

And 16 days later he is dead, assassinated as he sleeps Nepali-style on the floor, his head nearly severed by a single blow from a curved tribal knife.

The death makes international headlines: Gafney is the first murdered American and the first Catholic martyr in the world’s only Hindu kingdom.

Four months later, the police have made no arrests. They are still investigating.

“It is one of those great evils,” says the Rev. Jim Donnelly, S.J., who worked with Gafney in Nepal. “A good man done in for no good reason.”

The Making of a Priest

Gafney is a nice kid, but nobody figures he’d become a Jesuit. He grows up Catholic, the son of a cleaning supplies salesman.

He smokes. He drinks. He dates. He drives a beat-up ’34 Chevy. He graduates from high school and does two years pre-med at John Carroll University.

His plan is to attend medical school in St. Louis. He wants to be a doctor.

But God wants something else.

The plan takes shape at a university retreat led by a Jesuit priest named Dismas Clark, famous for his work with ex-cons in the 1950s.

“I wish I could be like that,” he tells friends later. “That I could see people who were in trouble and spend a little time helping them.”

That summer, Gafney tells his buddy Todd Lee he’s been accepted. Lee figures medical school and congratulates him. But Gafney corrects him.

“The Jesuits,” he says.

“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” Lee says. “He never talked about religion. It was always doctor, doctor, doctor.”

On Sept. 1, 1952, two months before his 20th birthday, Gafney enters the Society of Jesus Novitiate of the Sacred Heart outside Cincinnati.

Then, in 1959, Gafney goes “on mission” to Nepal, the birthplace of Buddha, a medieval and landlocked country of majestic mountain peaks and abject poverty that had opened its borders to the world only eight years earlier. The Hindu state’s constitution forbids proselytizing, so the Jesuits _ invited here in 1951 by King Tribhuvan Bir Bikram Shaha Deva to establish the country’s first educational system _ keep a low profile. They teach and serve as witnesses to a good life.

The Jesuits open their first school, St. Xavier’s Godavari School, in a former prime minister’s summer palace eight miles south of Katmandu. Gafney spends three years here teaching English grammar and literature as well as moral science (“Do good, avoid evil”). Then he goes to Kurseong, India, where he trains for the priesthood. He becomes a priest in 1965, in Patna, India but returns to Nepal after taking his vows.

By now Gafney speaks fluent Nepali. The simplicity of life and the gentle nature of the country’s people strike a chord in him. But he fears for their survival under the onslaught of Coca-Cola ads and red-eyed hippies.

Cheap and legal marijuana, hashish and opium make Nepal the doper destination of the ’60s. Katmandu becomes a magnet for street boys, runaways who flee their remote mountain villages for a better life in the big city.

They don’t find it.

The War on Drugs

Gafney is restless. Teaching rich kids and working in the Jesuit hierarchy bore him. He wants to get onto the street where the real problems are.

In 1970, his prayers are answered by two French graduate students. They have spent a year in Katmandu caring for nine street boys. Now it is time for them to leave.

Gafney doesn’t hesitate. He temporarily moves the boys into a nearby youth hostel and then obtains the permission of his fellow Jesuits to buy a house two doors down from the Jawalakhel School. At the new St. Xavier Social Service Residence, the nine boys become 20, and then 50, and then 80. Gafney persuades the Jesuits to buy a farmhouse and two acres of land about three miles away in the village of Nakipot.

Here he opens a second social service center, this one for 20 boys, most of them blind. In 1972, he becomes a Nepali citizen, and he opens the third and most controversial center _ the Freedom Center for “psychologically troubled, drug-abusing youth.”

It is the first facility of its kind in Nepal, and it changes Gafney from a social worker into a social activist.

The king has recently outlawed drug use, and so officially there is no drug problem. This infuriates Gafney, who treats thousands of heroin addicts, first using acupuncture to detoxify them and then months, sometimes years, of counseling.

It takes a decade before the first public forum is held to discuss the problem of heroin addiction. It draws quite a crowd _ social workers, doctors, psychologists as well as police and government officials.

Gafney starts it off with a bang.

“The people who are supplying the drugs,” he says, “some of them are sitting right here in the hall with us.”

This is the first time friends fear for Gafney’s life.

But he doesn’t back down.

Gafney still runs the country’s only drug treatment and rehabilitation center, but that changes in the early 1990s with the introduction of a U.N.-sponsored $1 million anti-drug master plan. Literally overnight 45 drug treatment centers open up. None ever actually treats an addict, but they get funded anyway.

“Dangling $1 million before the eyes of officials in a country like ours,” Gafney writes to the plan’s administrator in Vienna, “has predictably produced a situation in which it is now virtually impossible to work effectively in the drug scene.”

That causes some embarrassing questions and red faces in political circles.

But Gafney doesn’t care. He has watched the world transform this village kingdom into a place he hardly recognizes. There is a meanness now, a moral corruption that infuriates him.

Since 1970 Gafney has served as a powerful witness for the greater glory of God. The year 1995 should be a happy time for him, but it isn’t.

The Jesuits have discovered they were given a phony deed to the land they bought around the Nakipot farmhouse. Gafney writes to the editors of Newsweek and the Far Eastern Economic Review, proposing they send a team of reporters to investigate “corruption in Nepal.”

In 1997, he has a letter published in the local newspaper with the headline, “Ashamed To Be A Nepali!”

People begin to wonder if Gafney is becoming bitter in his old age.

Then he gets murdered.

The Murder

When Rachan Yonjan, Gafney’s cook and handyman for 15 years, shows up for work at 8 a.m. on Dec. 14, 1997, and notices the front gate ajar, he is not surprised. Maybe Gafney has an early appointment with someone who couldn’t wait for regular office hours.

Yonjan is a 33-year-old Buddhist, a member of an indigenous hill tribe. He doesn’t believe in a Christian God, but he knows a holy man when he sees him.

Gafney took Yonjan in when he was 18 years old, fresh from his mountain village, wandering wide-eyed through the seething streets of Katmandu. Gafney taught him how to drive, sent him on his first plane ride and bought a house for Yonjan and his wife.

Yonjan pushes open the door to the room where Gafney sleeps. The priest lies on his back on the floor, his mouth open, a gaping wound where his throat should be. Yonjan calls for help.

Nothing seems to be missing. The computer, the fax machine, the video recorder, the CD player, even the little black-and-white TV set are all there. There are no signs of forced entry.

Apparently Gafney was murdered while he slept. The police find a curved, thick-bladed knife known as a khikuri. They ask Yonjan if he recognizes it. He doesn’t.

On Dec. 16 a funeral Mass is held. The American ambassador attends, but Nepali government officials and representatives of the royal family are notable by their absence.

Gafney’s body is cremated as he had requested. The fire is lit by Rajendra Shrestha, who grew up in the orphanage and now runs the Freedom Center. He is 37, the oldest of Gafney’s “boys.”

Initially the police tell the Jesuits they believe Gafney’s murder was a professional hit. Then the investigation abruptly changes direction. The police turn first on Yonjan, beating him during questioning, then arrest and torture other social service staff members.

Stories begin to surface about Gafney no one has ever heard before. Anonymous police sources are quoted saying Gafney was gay; that his murder was a sex date that went bad.

The allegations take the Jesuits and the foreign community by surprise. Gafney had been a prominent and outspoken social activist for almost 30 years. His reputation was impeccable.

Then the police say they have two suspects. One has “absconded,” and the other is “under our eyes,” says Deputy Superintendent Shiva Lamichhane. The man will remain in custody until DNA tests are completed in India on a blood-stained T-shirt he was allegedly wearing. The police say they expect to make an arrest soon. But the arrest does not come.

U.S. Embassy officials say they are monitoring the progress of the investigation. Although Gafney became a Nepali citizen in 1972, he did not give up his American citizenship.

Who Killed Gafney?

The Jesuits and observers in the foreign community say his murder was part of a larger drug-related criminal conspiracy that has co-opted the police investigation.

“He knew dirt,” the Rev. Jim Donnelly says. “He knew names. He was privy to highly explosive information.” The police deny it.

The important thing is that Gafney’s work continues, says the Rev. Bill Robins, who has taken over the St. Xavier Social Service Centers. Together with David Ekka, Robins plans to continue to care for the orphans and the addicts.

They have turned the murder scene into a preschool for indigent kids. Gafney had paid his rent through 2000.

But Gafney’s first “son,” Rajendra Shrestha, is still angry with God.

“Father Gafney did so many good things,” Shrestha says. “But he died in that way. I ask to myself, `Where is the God?”’

And that, of course, is the biggest mystery of all.

DEA END EVANS