- Feb 5, 2002
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I hadn’t heard from Fr. Rueda in at least two months when an email message, forwarded multiple times, showed up in my inbox last month indicating he’d died. In time, I would learn there was some rather bizarre news associated with that of Father’s passing.
Fr. Enrique Tomas Rueda was a native of Havana, Cuba. In fact, he’d spent some time in a Cuban jail following the Bay of Pigs invasion before coming to the U.S. as a seminarian. He graduated from Catholic University in Washington as a chemical engineer and then completed his theological training at Fordham University and Dunwoodie Seminary before being ordained by Terence Cardinal Cooke on June 1st, 1968.
Always eager to learn, he soon picked up Masters Degrees in Business Administration, Political Science and Philosophy, which, along with the languages he would later master, would serve him well during the difficult years that lay ahead. In the twelve years I that knew him, Father acquired a mastery of German and Portuguese—the latter with the intent of earning a doctorate in Brazil. He had promised to send me a translation of his thesis as the ever-modest Rueda often claimed that the inspiration for it had come from material I’d mailed him over the years.
Following ordination, he served as a Catholic chaplain at NYU and to migrant farm workers in Upstate New York (Orange County), as well as a parish priest in the South Bronx. While incardinated in the Diocese of Rochester, he directed a drug counseling and education center and was given pastoral responsibility for the Hispanic Community there during what he would call “the happiest days of his life.”
Continued below.
www.padreperegrino.org
Fr. Enrique Tomas Rueda was a native of Havana, Cuba. In fact, he’d spent some time in a Cuban jail following the Bay of Pigs invasion before coming to the U.S. as a seminarian. He graduated from Catholic University in Washington as a chemical engineer and then completed his theological training at Fordham University and Dunwoodie Seminary before being ordained by Terence Cardinal Cooke on June 1st, 1968.
Always eager to learn, he soon picked up Masters Degrees in Business Administration, Political Science and Philosophy, which, along with the languages he would later master, would serve him well during the difficult years that lay ahead. In the twelve years I that knew him, Father acquired a mastery of German and Portuguese—the latter with the intent of earning a doctorate in Brazil. He had promised to send me a translation of his thesis as the ever-modest Rueda often claimed that the inspiration for it had come from material I’d mailed him over the years.
Following ordination, he served as a Catholic chaplain at NYU and to migrant farm workers in Upstate New York (Orange County), as well as a parish priest in the South Bronx. While incardinated in the Diocese of Rochester, he directed a drug counseling and education center and was given pastoral responsibility for the Hispanic Community there during what he would call “the happiest days of his life.”
Continued below.
One of the Original "Canceled Priests"
The top left is the late Fr. Enrique Tomas Rueda and the top right is the late Bishop Bonaventure Broderick. Both are, in some sense, among the original "canceled priests." I re-publish this tragic but inspiring account of Fr. Rueda written with the permission of Remnant Newspaper. Tu Es
www.padreperegrino.org
