In an extensive interview with the Register, Father Hartley said that 42 years of priesthood have allowed him to reflect on challenges facing the missions and the wider Church.
“But this is real missionary work, and I love it. It is the setting of the foundations of a spiritual edifice which we will never see,” he said. St. John Paul’s encyclical Redemptoris Missio is central to his spirituality, he said. “Being a missionary is very different from pastoral work. Pastoral work is the next phase. It comes after the first proclamation of the Person of Jesus Christ,” he continued.
Recalling that a gun was put to his head by a plantation overseer in the Dominican Republic during a mission there, Father Hartley, who had given up a life of prestige and comfort in Spain and the U.K., gave thanks for his celibacy, which has allowed him to work fearlessly in missions. “I had no reason to ask God for a little more time. I can say, ‘Lord, whenever you think it is time for me. If you want me to work more, please take care of me. If it’s all over, then it’s over.’” Unlike a parent or a spouse, he said, “My heart is not divided. I live in the supernatural order. It is the grace of God who binds me to the Mixteco people. If I had never loved Jesus Christ, I would have never met them.”
Ordained by St. John Paul II in 1982, Father Hartley, 65, had volunteered to work with St. Teresa of Calcutta but was assigned, at her request, to a parish in New York City, where he was befriended by Cardinal John O’Connor. Eschewing clerical advancement, he asked to become a missionary in 1997. Father Hartley gained renown in the Dominican Republic for human-rights advocacy for Haitian sugarcane workers who cross into neighboring Dominican Republic, which shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, to work on plantations where they live in substandard conditions, without electricity or potable water, and paid in script rather than wages.
Father Hartley’s work was the subject of The Price of Sugar: a 2007 video documentary narrated by film actor Paul Newman that chronicled his advocacy for Haitians that resulted in the purchase of a small piece of land by the Church where they could live unmolested by the armed guards at sugar plantations. Powerful landowners resisted his work and managed to have him expelled. After nearly nine years in the Dominican Republic, he was assigned to missions in Africa (2007-2018), being one of more than 40 missionary priests from his Spanish diocese.
Charlotte “Charlie” Ponticelli, a former official of the Department of State and Department of Labor who has collaborated with Father Hartley, told the Register that meeting him has strengthened her own faith, which she has shared with her family and in prison ministry. “Father Hartley is, and will always be, a true-life hero and a living saint for me. It’s always amazing to me to see the way Our Lord somehow manages to bring us together so that we may be his instruments of peace and justice in this world.”
Father Hartley said he faced hostility and death threats in Sudan and Ethiopia from Muslims. “I could not celebrate Mass publicly, but I celebrated it privately,” he said, out of fear of reprisals. However, he was able to bring several Muslims into the faith covertly and establish a community of Catholic locals and expatriates. While he was there, he served hospital patients. He himself was hospitalized in Ethiopia after suffering a near-fatal motorcycle accident.
Father Hartley has worked for about a year in Arroyo Prieto, a village in the Cochoapa region of Guerrero in southern Mexico known for its rugged landscape and isolated hamlets and villages separated by mountains. Apart from Spanish, there are four mutually unintelligible native languages, including Mixteco, spoken in the state, while approximately 29% of the speakers of these do not speak Spanish. Father Hartley traverses difficult roads and tracks in a 4WD vehicle or on horseback, while language differences and dire poverty are also challenges. He receives support from the nonprofit MissionMercy.org.
Father Hartley ministers to more than 90 communities. “They were abandoned by the Church and the government,” Father Hartley said, “and for some, this is the first proclamation of the Person of Jesus Christ, the Gospel and the sacraments. These are very religious people with a mixture of their own traditions, pagan and pre-Hispanic, with what the early missionaries — Franciscans and Augustinians — taught them. With the revolutions and independence from Spain, they were left to their fate and completely abandoned by everybody.” He added, “There is no rule of law here.”
Bishop Dagoberto Sosa Arriaga of Tlapa sent Father Hartley in early 2023. Father Hartley told him, “If you have a place where nobody wants to go or if you don’t know what to do with that part of the diocese, I’m your man.” While Comboni missionary priests were already in the Cochoapa region, they had more than 150 communities to attend to. Some have beautiful churches built by locals in preference even to roads or clinics. In some communities, Father Hartley was the first priest to celebrate Mass in more than three years.
Roads are few, as are medical care, schools and law enforcement. Electricity is intermittent. For example, Father Hartley said that immediately before the interview, electricity to the village was cut, but he was able to celebrate Mass by flashlight. “It’s a very hard life. Even the very basics are precarious,” he said.
“But their religion is a reflection of their hardship. Mass intentions are linked to their rural life, so that lightning will not strike their crops, or that disease does not affect their corn and beans. These people don’t live: They survive. And they die for the most unnecessary reasons. There is no doctor. The only medicine here is what I brought from Madrid,” he said.
Their hardship also leads some people of Guerrero to have great trust in witchcraft, Father Hartley said. “Some sacrifice animals at 5 a.m. in front of the church, so you don’t really know what they are worshipping. But I am certain that Jesus Christ is not the core and center of their religion. It’s a mixture. The god of rain is St. Mark, for example. The missionaries tried to transform their worship of gods of wind and sky and rain with the saints. But in the end, you don’t know who Jesus Christ is for them.”
“For example, they pray to the dead: They offer sacrifices to the dead; it’s the dead who will take care of us. There they offer sacrifices to the dead because they are asking them to intercede for them,” Father Hartley said.
Father Hartley said that many people there are religious but ignorant of the Catholic faith. “The very core of our life as Catholics is that, on Sunday, Christ is risen. But for them, the big day is the Day of the Dead or saints’ days. For them, it is not the Risen Christ that matters. They worship el santo entierro [‘the holy burial’], which is Christ lying down. It’s all over Mexico. The focus is on a dead Jesus Christ.”
“Their religion has nothing to do with love — that Christ loves me and that he died because he loves me, no. God is someone they have to please and for whom they have to buy something. They ask, ‘How much does a Mass cost?’ It’s a contractual relationship. For them, a priest has special powers to mediate with God. So, for them I’m like a witch doctor,” he said.
Father Hartley emphasized, “Evangelization is repeat, repeat and repeat.”
Father Hartley said that the Church in Mexico has challenges. For decades since the 1910 revolution, the Church faced open governmental hostility. “There have been very few missionaries, coupled with poorly trained priests,” he said, adding, “You don’t know to which religion they belong. The Holy See has closed seminaries that were basically training revolutionaries, not missionaries, evangelizers or men of God.”
Overall, missionary life has taught this priest so much about life — and faith. “The life of these people is admirable, and I am in awe at their sacrifices as they struggle through daily life. It has been a great lesson for me in Christianity to watch them live.”