2025 is also the 65th anniversary of Irene Garza’s murder by the hands of a Catholic priest in McAllen, Texas.
On Saturday, 16 April 1960, Garza – a 25-year-old elementary schoolteacher who lived with her parents – said she was going to Confession at Sacred Heart Church in McAllen.
It was the day before Easter. When she didn’t return home, her parents originally thought she stayed at the church for the Vigil.
Her body was found in a canal on April 21. An autopsy showed she had been beaten, suffocated and raped while unconscious, on or around April 16.
Garza was a former Miss All South Texas Sweetheart and a homecoming queen at Pan American College. She was also considered a shy girl who took her Catholic Faith seriously.
In 2005, the Lone State State’s magazine of record, Texas Monthly, published a letter she wrote to a friend shortly before her death, which including the following observation by Garza:
“Remember the last time we talked, I told you I was afraid of death? Well I think I’m cured. You see, I’ve been going to communion and Mass daily and you can’t imagine the courage and faith and happiness it has given me.”
Garza’s murder went unsolved for decades, until 2017, when former priest John Feit was convicted of her murder. Feit died in prison in 2020, at the age of 87.
Through the anguished years of justice delayed, Texas Monthly carried the torch for her. The news magazine represented one of the main efforts to bring Garza’s killer to justice.
Why did it take over 50 years to convict the murdering priest? Because the mid-20th century US Catholic Church protected him.
Feit, who was 28 at the time of her death, came under suspicion with the police early on, after he admitted to hearing Garza’s confession in the church rectory rather than in the confessional.
At his 2017 trial, prosecutors produced evidence indicating that Catholic officials suspected Feit had murdered Garza but wanted to protect the reputation of the Church.
The churchmen received support from politicians, most of whom were Catholic in that part of south Texas.
The other priest working at Sacred Heart Church at the time later admitted to the police in the 2000s that Feit told him he had killed Garza.
Not too long after the murder, Feit was sent to Assumption Abbey, a Trappist monastery in Missouri.
Media reports in the 2000s said it was generally known the priest had murdered someone, and the Church was attempting to ascertain if he “still had a vocation” and could perhaps serve as a monk.
Feit left the priesthood in 1972, twelve years after murdering the young woman.
Dale Tacheny, a former priest from Oklahoma City, was the counsellor for Feist at the Abbey. In the early 2000s, he finally told the police what he knew: Feist told him he had restrained Garza after her confession, then sexually abused her and later drowned her in the bathtub.
“He didn’t show what I would consider to be compunction or sorrow or grief or anything like that,” Tacheny told officers in 2002, as reported by The Texas Monthly. “I felt at the time rather appalled by what had come about. But that wasn’t my job to judge him.”
In 2003, Father Joseph O’Brien told investigators Feit had admitted to him shortly after the murder that he had killed Garza.
The story in The Texas Monthly came out in 2005, but local politics kept Feit from being put on trial for over a decade.
To understand the clerical abuse crisis, and the mafioso-omertà-like silence and “code of honour” that still plagues the Church, think of John Feit: the Church knew he was guilty of murder, hid him away to escape justice, “treated” him in a facility where even the other patients knew what he had done, and then let him free on the world.
The cult of silence was so strong, that men who left the priesthood – even left the Church – still wouldn’t tell the authorities what they knew about this murderer. After decades of silence, one did, and then one more. But most did not.
Note the date: 1960. Before Vatican II. Before the sexual revolution. Before all the usual “explanations” of why things “went bad” with the Church.
Some might even point out that Feit got married after leaving the priesthood and had children and grandchildren. He even volunteered at the St. Vincent de Paul center in Phoenix and was never again suspected of a sexual offense.
None of which will ever bring back Irene Garza or diminish the pain of those who knew and loved her.