Recently honored Carmelite father Peter Hinde dies of COVID-19

Carmelite father Peter Hinde, honored for his decades of ministry in Latin America, died on November 19 of COVID-19. He was 97 years old.

His death occurred just two days after he and his friend, Sister Mercy Betty Campbell, were virtually honored with the CRISPAZ Peace Award for their decades of ministry and social justice work in Latin America. Father Hinde helped found CRISPAZ, Christians for Peace in El Salvador, in 1985, during the Salvadoran civil war.

More recently, Hinde and Campbell ran Casa Tabor, a house in a modest neighborhood in Ciudad Juarez near the US border, where they worked with the poor but also to understand what was happening to people in the region. Campbell, who also tested positive for COVID-19, helped take care of her dying friend.

In a long public post on Facebook, Father Colombano Roberto Mosher, director of the Columban Mission Center in El Paso, Texas, said that Hinde was born in Elyria, Ohio, and went to school at Mount Carmel High School on Blue Island. , Illinois. He was the Prime Minister of the 1941 Class. After serving in the Air Force during World War II, he entered a Carmelite seminary in Niagara Falls, Canada, in 1946.

Hinde directed student education at the Carmelite Theology House in Washington, 1960-65, and joined the struggle for black civil rights.

Mosher said Hinde began feeling ill in early October, and “with the help of the circle of friends on both sides of the US-Mexico border, he was hospitalized in El Paso for about two weeks. , but then he recovered enough to be released. “He resided for a time in a retirement facility for diocesan priests in El Paso.

"The day after the CRISPAZ Peace Prize was practically awarded to both Peter and Betty, he was hospitalized again for very low oxygen," Mosher said.