In Honduras, a Spiritual and Political Awakening for Tim Kaine
By JASON HOROWITZSEPT. 2, 2016
In September 1980, as violence and civil war erupted throughout Central America, a quiet American left Harvard Law School to volunteer with Jesuit missionaries in northern Honduras.
Around him, the United States-backed military dictatorship hunted Marxists and cracked down on the Catholic clergy for preaching empowerment to peasant farmers. But some locals also looked warily on the bearded and mop-haired Midwesterner in their midst.
Just a few hours south, the Central Intelligence Agency was using Honduras as a staging ground in its covert war against Latin American communism, with right-wing forces training for operations in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
“Some of the people were wondering what’s going on, who is this guy?” Tim Kaine, then a 22-year-old volunteer and now the Democratic nominee for vice president, said in an interview. He understood why. His mentors in the priesthood had also urged him to be wary of friendly American faces.
“It was a time of such intrigue and suspicion,” Mr. Kaine said.
Far from being a C.I.A. operative, Mr. Kaine was a young Catholic at a crossroads, undergoing a spiritual shift as he awakened to the plight of the deeply poor in Honduras. In its far-flung pueblos, banana plantation company towns and dusty cities, Mr. Kaine embraced an interpretation of the gospel, known as liberation theology, that championed social change to improve the lives of the downtrodden.
In Honduras, his recitation of the traditional Catholic mealtime blessing changed to “Lord give bread to those who hunger, and hunger for justice to those who have bread.”
Honduran military leaders, American officials and even Pope John Paul II viewed liberation theology suspiciously, as dangerously injecting Marxist beliefs into religious teaching. But the strong social-justice message of liberation theology helped set Mr. Kaine on a left-veering career path in which he fought as a lawyer against housing discrimination, became a liberal mayor, and rose as a Spanish-speaking governor and senator with an enduring focus on Latin America.
Mr. Kaine taught carpentry and welding to 70 vocational students in El Progreso.
It also gave Mr. Kaine a new, darker view of his own country’s behavior. “It was a very politicizing experience for me because the U.S. was doing a lot of bad stuff,” he said. “It made me very angry. I mean I still feel it.”
Mr. Kaine first went to Honduras during Holy Week of 1974 while a sophomore at Rockhurst High School, a Jesuit academy in Kansas City, Mo. A self-described “sheltered kid” who grew up in a middle class Irish-Catholic family, he delivered donations to a Jesuit mission in the town of El Progreso.
As Mr. Kaine returned to finish high school, race through college in three years and enroll at Harvard Law, the Jesuits back in El Progreso administered to an ever more bloody region.
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Originally Posted by RonPaulMall
one of the most glorious sights to see is 15-20 some odd young 20-ish girls in the rows before you doing splits and stretches all at once. 
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