ABSCHRIFT DES INTERVIEWS

WILLIAM J HARRY, O.CARM.,
My priority is to be an advocate before the UN for these issues that I’ve outlined, the four focus areas, and to bring Carmelite spirituality to those areas. That’s what we do. We’ve been doing that for 800 years. And then I thought, we need to be here. And I’ve been convinced of that ever since.

KEN PINO
Today, we have Father William J. Harry O. Carm coming to us from, you’re in Tucson at the moment, correct? I am. He is in Tucson, spends half the time in Tucson, half the time in Rome these days, more or less. He is currently the, I’m going to say director of NGO, if that’s the correct term, and director of communications for the Carmelite Order over in Rome. So he splits his time between the two. Today we want to talk about the Carmelite NGO. But first, Father Brill, maybe go ahead and introduce yourself and give us a little rundown of the ministries you’ve served and just kind of how you ended up at NGO.

WILLIAM J HARRY, O.CARM.,
I graduated from DeSales High School in Louisville, Kentucky, which as most people know is where the Carmelites came to from Straubing, Germany to establish the order in the US. And I was deeply affected by the Carmelites that were there at that time. and decided I wanted to become a Carmelite. So I went to Marquette, which was a practice for four years. And then I made my novitiate in Niagara Falls. Then I was sent to Tucson, Arizona, which is where I live now. And they always say your first assignment is your first love. And that was true for me. And I made very good friends here, many of whom I’m still in touch with today. And From here, John Malley was the provincial and in the room that is now my room here, he and I met and he was open to the idea of me going to Rome to study theology. And so I always think about that when I’m sitting here in my room, that this is where this all got started, me going to the international scene. So I studied at the Gregorian for four years and love the international experience. It got a little lonely at times. But it was a very good experience for me. After Ordination, I was sent back to Tucson to teach. I did campus ministry. And after that, then I was sent to Mundelein, Illinois, to Carmel High School. And then I did live in the provincial house, at the White House in Darien for seven years. But each of my experiences I have to say, I’ve always thought, I never thought I’d be doing this. It’s been a tremendous experience all the way around. My experience on the general counsel as a member was kind of eye-opening. It was very painful at times, but also very enriching. I learned a lot about people, because you’re both basically dealing with people. And then I’ve worked in administration, again, for the province after that, or in the last few years, worked on the director of publications for the Order, which is basically book publishing and social media. One of the projects there is to try and build a network around the Order with all the various people who do communications for the different entities. to get us to work together and do it effectively, and let’s create some other things. And so that’s what we’re trying to do, to create some synergy around that. And I’ve kept my finger in education. I was joking the other day with the president at South Point that she asked me to be on a committee. And I said, well, I didn’t want you to have a committee that I’m not on, because I’m on every committee in the school. But that also is enlightening. I like being around students. I have masks for them once in a while in school. I had masks this morning for them. and you get to know some of the teachers and you renew old friendships. And it’s been a good experience. So I don’t know how long this will continue, but as long as it does, it’s fine with me.

KEN PINO
So you’ve served across continents, across many roles. So that was good experience for coming into the role. So maybe let’s start with what is the NGO, you know, kind of how did it come to be and what is its purpose and mission? And then we can get into your role in it.

WILLIAM J HARRY, O.CARM.,
Well, as I understand it, Michal O’Neill, who just finished as our prior general, he was serving as general counselor in John Malley’s terms, last term, and in Joseph Chalmers’ first term as general. And he had the idea that we should have a presence at the United Nations. And when he talked about this with the sisters and the affiliated congregations, The congregation of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Louisiana was very interested in this, particularly Sister Jane Remson, who was very involved in social justice, particularly food for the poor and hunger issues in Louisiana, in New Orleans. And they actually established the NGO And so today it still functions as a organization under the sisters. Now they have asked the order to take that over and we’re working on getting that switched over and maintaining our status in the UN because we have a fairly high status being affiliated to the Economic and Social Commission.

KEN PINO
If you had to sum up the NGO’s mission, specifically, and I know it’s kind of over time they’ve got different initiatives, but the overall mission of the NGO.

WILLIAM J HARRY, O.CARM.,
Sure. Well, there’s four areas that we focus on. Sometimes we call it a focus, sometimes we call it a pillar. It’s really the four areas that we’ve identified to the UN that these are what we are going to focus on. And so those would be freedom of belief, sustainability, which would include the environment and food, water, We also have trafficking, human trafficking, and we have education. And so those are primarily the areas that we try and work on. And the way this is, the way this works is that you work with other NGOs and maybe some governments, but mostly NGOs, and we band together with those various groups and are able to then address these issues and build more of a consensus among the NGOs. We do work with a number of NGO affiliations that are not Catholic, but we are also primarily with, I believe, with the Catholic organizations at the UN, of which there are many.

KEN PINO
Of those pillars, Is there any past project that really stands out that people may have heard of or seen that you could talk through?

WILLIAM J HARRY, O.CARM.,
Well, the one that we’ve worked most successfully at, I think, and most vocally has been sustainability, particularly environment. And that’s largely due to Eduardo Scarel, who is a priest from Argentina, but is a member of the Argo Castile Valentine Province. and lives in Honda in Spain. And he’s professionally trained. He works at universities. He’s well-known. He’s affiliated with the Vatican movement and the environment. And so he’s very interested in this and was able to get a lot of other people motivated. And so I would say that’s primarily our major focus. And as you yourself know, the PCM province here in the United States has gotten into the Laudato Si movement and is working very hard on that. And I’d like to think that’s partly in response to the Carmelite NGO being so involved in the environment that it has raised the consciousness of our own guys. And then Dennis Caleb, who is our executive director for the NGO, he’s also works with the province on this Laudate Si project. So it’s been a nice way to dovetail many of these areas together. But I’d have to say also in Indonesia in particular, they’ve done work on human trafficking and also in freedom of belief. And at the chapter, the general chapter, which just was completed at the end of September in Indonesia, Hariawan Adji, who was elected vice general, he and a lady who was a Buddhist, her father was the fourth president of Indonesia, I believe. And he is the one that got the law passed that all religions would be viable and acceptable in Indonesia. And he, Hariawan, and this woman spoke to the chapter. It was like a conversation led by questions fielded by one of the other Carmelites. And it was very interesting because Hariawan is very involved in freedom of belief, freedom of religion. Of course, in Indonesia, The Catholics are a very small percentage of the population. And so I think it’s essential that we become stronger in that, not only in Indonesia, but in other areas where Catholics are the minority and we should also be involved in it where we might be the majority. I think it’s very helpful for religions to get to know each other, to understand each other, and to work together to solve some of these issues. But we can’t do that if we’re not understanding who each of us is and respecting that. And I think that Hairawan in particular has led that initiative. Of course, in education, we run many schools around the world, and that has always been a big work ministry of the order, but also of our own province here at PCM. And that has, I think, a less lasting impact upon not only the students, but upon their families. I was just at an event last night with a lot of the families who no longer have children at at the school here in Tucson, South Point Catholic. But to hear them talk about it’s it’s you can see that South Point has a lasting effect upon has had a lasting effect upon them. The area that we’ve probably been the most lax in is maybe human trafficking, although Indonesia has done some of that, but also formalizing our work in education. We do the work, but we’ve not presented that. We’ve not involved ourselves in the UN issues of education.

KEN PINO
You mentioned Sal Point and the education perspective, and NGO was the initiator of the Laudato C curriculum, correct? That came out of Sal Point.

WILLIAM J HARRY, O.CARM.,
Yep. Yes. And the NGO paid part of that cost, I understand.

KEN PINO
To kind of facilitate that. And I think, Dennis, that Laudato C is now, is that spinning off? Is that still NGO or is that now?

WILLIAM J HARRY, O.CARM.,
I think we all have a different perspective. Our role is to bring issues that the Carmelites have before the United Nations. We have a presence there. Now, if the province wants to bring something before them, they would have to work to get the presence that we have. Or they could say, okay, NGO, let’s work together on this. And it’s like, I believe where it happened with the Laudato Si curriculum. There were, we wanted to work in the environment area and some teachers were interested in that. So we’re able to join together with them. And at that point, South Point was involved, but also Carmelitas down in Peru and maybe some other schools. But I attended a dinner here where there were diocese representatives from diocese around the country. There were other high schools and sent faculty members. And the idea was that this would not be just a Carmelite thing, but that it would expand beyond that, and that people would add to the curriculum that was published, and that it would spread from there. So I don’t think we want to compartmentalize and say, well, this one belongs to this one, and that one belongs to that one. We helped get it started, as I understand it, and it goes from there. But it’s good if we can go to the UN and say, here’s some of the projects that our affiliated groups are involved in. It’s not that we’re saying we’re doing this only, but that we’re in affiliated with these groups and it helps all of us, I think.

KEN PINO
The NGO serving the entire order of any of the provinces or institutions across those provinces have thoughts or ideas that they might think fit into this realm, they can come to the NGO with them. to help facilitate, coordinate, communicate all of that.

WILLIAM J HARRY, O.CARM.,
Yeah, it’s not, and it’s not just the order per se. We want to involve the family. So that would mean also, and I’ve talked to a few of the groups, the affiliated congregations, mostly of sisters, but we do have some male groups that are affiliated, but also the nuns, the second order, the cloistered nuns, that even though they might not be out marching or whatever, but there’s ways that they can become involved in this work and have become involved in the work. And so probably the largest group would be the Lake Carmelites. And last summer, I had occasion to be involved in two different gatherings of Lake Carmelites, and I was astonished at the interest level in the NGO. I didn’t even know if they knew about it. But I had several people come up and say, here’s my background, and I would like to get involved. Do you think I’d be useful? And we want professional people. We have to speak with authority on the issues. And so it’s good to say, well, I’m interested in this. But it’s even better if you say, I’ve got a degree in this, or I’ve worked for 20 years in this particular field, and that’s the type of person who’s coming up to us. And not all of them are Carmelites, but they’re affiliated with us in some way, even if it’s just friendship. For instance, one of the major people in the environment is an Italian man named Renato Rallo. And he is a mechanical engineer, a doctorate in a mechanical engineer. And he has been present at a couple of the COP Congress’s conferences, COP30 was just concluded in Brazil. And he’s extremely helpful and is very involved in it and is very helpful. But he’s not a Carmelite, per se. But that’s fine. That’s fine. We want people who are interested in what we’re doing and getting our message out. Basically, the way the NGO I always pictured it was, We were supposed to talk about the issues before the UN to our people, but we’re not interested in becoming a mouthpiece for the UN. We want to then carry our perspective on these issues back to the UN. And that’s where I think, that’s where we need the expertise, we need to put on most of our effort. It’s very easy for me to say, I can do that in a letter, here’s what the UN is talking about. But then we have to come up with the theology, the spirituality behind how do we as Carmelites respond to that issue. And that’s what we need to focus more on in the coming years on those four areas.

KEN PINO
And then on that note, trying to bring in the talents and the skills of as many as you can, if someone is interested in these topics and wants to become involved, What’s the best ways to approach that here within the province, but then of course beyond?

WILLIAM J HARRY, O.CARM.,
We have a webpage, CarmelateNGO.org. And on one of those pages, there’s contact information and there’s a number of people listed. You can send me an e-mail or send one of the other people an e-mail and just start the conversation. In the current status we’re at, we’re trying to get a long-range plan Together, we have a meeting a zoom meeting tomorrow, as a matter of fact. and hopefully by January 1st we’ll have this available so that people can see clear where and also we can see clear where we’re where we’re headed and how we’re going to get there. And I’ve got probably six or seven people who’ve submitted curriculum vitae and they would like to become involved in some way. So it’s going to be a building process and it’s not something that You know, if you commit yourself to it, it’s a lifetime commitment, unless you want it to be a lifetime commitment. You know, after 5 years, you say, well, I’ve kind of done my thing. That’s fine. Doesn’t have to be lifetime.

KEN PINO
If somebody wants to, aside from the website, kind of know what’s going on with the NGO, current initiatives, current things being discussed, newsletters, social media.

WILLIAM J HARRY, O.CARM.,
Yeah, also on the website, you can sign up for for the newsletters. We have two, basically, at this point. One is called One Page, which comes out once a month, but not at a certain date and stuff. It depends on what’s going on. And we try and hold it to one page. It comes out in three languages– English, Italian, and Spanish. And then in the third or fourth month, we try and come out with a multi-page bulletin called Carmengo. And that usually deals with one major issue. Maybe, for instance, the next one will deal with the COP 30 that we had five people or six people representing us there at COP 30. And they’ll write up a kind of a summary of what happened, what’s in the future, where we got to go from there. And then we’ll have some other issues, a couple of smaller issues that we speak about. And but that comes out just periodically. At this point, none of those are printed. We send them. We have a mailing list. So if you want to get on the mailing list, we have to send it to you. We have about, I would say, maybe 3000 people on our mailing list for those two publications. We hope that will be increasing in the coming years. But that’s another area we have to focus on.

KEN PINO
I think you already kind of touched on these a little bit because it’s kind of easy to tell through your passion as you speak about a topic. But is there anywhere in particular that you’d like to see the NGO focus its efforts going forward? Obviously on everything, but is there any particular area right now that you’d really like to focus on?

WILLIAM J HARRY, O.CARM.,
No, I think the areas we picked out are good. I think we have to kind of give equal time to the different ones. We’ve been very focused on the environment, but as I explained, that’s because we had one guy that that’s his career and he is very passionate about it. And we need to get some other people who are just as passionate about some of the other areas. And the idea is that each of these four areas would have a committee of its own of experts in those areas. And then one of those members, probably the chair of that focus area, would then serve on the executive committee so that we all hear what the different groups are involved in and what they need and where things are going and all, and kind of a coordinated effort. But we need some synergy between the various areas. So I don’t think we need more focuses. I think we need more energy around some of the other focuses. And one of the things we’ve discovered is that a lot of the Carmelites, lay Carmelites, the nuns, the sisters, and the priest and the brothers, don’t understand what the NGO is. So they have kind of a preconceived notion or it’s just something that occasionally gets talked about. And so one of the parts of our long-range plan is to develop an educational program. I don’t know what that will look like exactly. but to explain what it is we’re doing and what we’re not. I’ll give you an example. When I first– I’ve been involved in this since the beginning with the small break when I was provincial. When it was known that I was the order’s representative to the governing committee of this NGO, certain groups would come up and say, well, I need one of those passes to get on the UN helicopters. And I said, I don’t have a pass to the UN, let alone a UN helicopter. How do you do that? He said, well, everybody’s got them. And it was a total misunderstanding of what the NGO is. The people who have them work for the UN. I’m sure they don’t all have passes to the helicopters. But the NGOs, that’s not what this is about. And we’re not a funding organization. They all think, well, if I come to you all, will you all give me $2,000 for this project. Well, we might be able to do that in the future, but at this point, we’re not equipped to do that. And that’s not one of our priorities. Our priority is to be an advocate before the UN for these issues that I’ve outlined, the four focus areas, and to bring Carmelite spirituality to those areas. I’ll give you one of the first, I was not keen on this when I was appointed the representative of the order, to be totally honest. But I thought, okay, it gets me to New York every so often, so I’ll go. So I went to the first meeting and there was a woman from Ireland who was finishing off as the UN refugee coordinator. And she had been president of Ireland at one point. So she gets up to give a talk, last day in business. And the theme of the conference was how to resolve ongoing conflicts. Because as you probably know, most conflicts in the world are continuations of conflicts that were solved at some point. But as soon as the other party gets to be in gets a little bit of power and they’re able to, then they come back and start beating up and killing the party that was doing that to them the last time. So it’s a vicious circle that they go through. So we’re trying to end it forever. And she said, we’re sitting in that hall that you see on TV where the presidents and the kings and the queens and everybody speak from that podium. We’re sitting there. And she says, who do you think’s going to resolve this? Do you think governments are going to? She said, no. Do you think lawyers and no. She says it’s civil society, which is what NGOs fall under, civil society. She said, what we need is reconciliation. We need people to begin to talk about, listen to the issues and to start to resolve those issues. And I remember thinking to myself, my God, she’s talking to us. That’s what we do. We’ve been doing that for 800 years. And then I thought, we need to be here. So I was conversion right there in my seat in the General Assembly Hall. And I’ve been convinced of that ever since. And I say that really, the thing that we’re to get at is the person to person contact with these NGO people and to really begin to work with them because they don’t tend to speak in code. That’s the government types. We’re doing that in the UN. But it’s a fascinating, it’s a fascinating experience. It really is.

KEN PINO
A lot of what you seem to be kind of talking about on a lot of these is just helping create the connections, bringing people together that, you know, maybe one area is looking to start something and you can an expert in that area who might be willing to help and kind of facilitating that on these topics. Is that a decent read on a part of it?

WILLIAM J HARRY, O.CARM.,
Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people would say, well, what are the priests and nuns doing at that? Why are they involved in this? In fact, I’ve had I had a guy, he was evaluating websites, and he gave us a failing mark. And so I wrote him, and he said, this is very inappropriate. He said, well, you’re a priest. You shouldn’t be involved in this. That’s for laypeople to do. And I said, well, I represent laypeople too. I work with them. But I said, you know, the Vatican is into this. It had to be to do with the 10 Millennium Goals that they had, the UN had. And he said, that’s not church stuff. And I said, it’s interesting, Pope Benedict has really worked on those. Oh, yeah, well, yeah, he says, he wrote back, yeah, okay, I can see that. So we got a C on our website or something after that. But, you know, a lot of people just say, this isn’t where we should be. I say, this is where we should be. The world is meeting in that building. The world is literally meeting in that building. And for us to say, well, we’re going to stay across the river and not get involved and stuff. That’s not, that’s not what we’re supposed to be doing at all.

KEN PINO
Yeah. And that’s, oh, maybe this, I was thinking of the statement that just went out on the website a while ago, but I think that might have been JPIC, which would be closely related anyway on the immigration and there were two topics.

WILLIAM J HARRY, O.CARM.,
And we agreed to Of course, to sign on that, to push it, it’s on our website as well and on our social media sites, our platforms. We need to, this is not, this is serious business and we really need to say, this is what the church, this is what Christ is calling us to, this is what the gospel is all about. And it’s going to be a change for some people because some people think it’s going to church on Sunday and going home after an hour and doing whatever you did before. And that’s not what the church, that’s not what Christ called us to do.

KEN PINO
Does having your position as director of communications for the order and being in Rome part of the time, does that help some of this facilitation and connection for the NGO and UN because of that, getting that physical international experience.

WILLIAM J HARRY, O.CARM.,
I would say if I was in Tucson, 365 days out of the year, that would be a bit difficult. What I’ve got to find out how to do is to get to New York a little bit more. So I’ve talked to a couple of the groups, the NGO groups, and they say, well, no, you can participate by Zoom. I’m all for that. But Zoom is not, you have to be physically present at meetings. on occasion, at least. That’s a nice fill in. And I do a lot of Zoom meetings from Rome, back with groups here in the US that I’m affiliated with. As far as being, I live at the Corio when I’m in Rome. And so it’s healthy to hear the discussions that are going on because those fellows have traveled, they’re traveling out in the world, in all the provinces, and they can bring back information. But I would I would say my experience has not been that that’s a primary objective that they have. They, you know, it might come up in a conversation about something. And so we pursue that. But it would be nice to be able to say what he hears going on in these various areas, because we would like to get the provinces much more involved. One of the things is that the UN, everybody thinks, well, it’s located in New York and so it’s all over the world. For instance, in Kenya, where we have a very young presence, but a very strong presence, they have the environmental group is there. And we had an NGO meeting there and we went to the environmental thing, got a great tour and met some of the people. I was there in late May, early June, giving some talks to our parishioners and to the Carmelites that are there. And I tried to go see the NGO and they said, well, I tried to see the UN environmental thing. And they said, well, who do you want to meet with? Why do you want to meet with them? So you got to be much more prepared than what I thought. I thought I could go there with my credentials and just walk on in. You can’t do that. And in fact, the UN, they have separate lines at the airport and everything for the UN people. It’s such a big operation and they’re moving other groups there. So my point in that is it would be nice since we’re involved in the environment to have somebody in Kenya who could go on occasion to the UN facility there for meetings to help us understand the inside story of what’s going on, more so than we would get perhaps by reading their website. And then there’s other places where they’re located. The legal, the court and stuff is up in Holland in the Netherlands. In fact, a group of us took a tour of some of those places when we were there for a Titus Brandsma conference. And there’s things that we could possibly do there, but we have people on site who might be interested in doing that kind of thing. So these are things that over the years, we’ll get this worked out and we’ll see exactly what we need and where we can go. Rome is another one has foul food and food agricultural organization. It’s a huge operation. If you’re not a nun or a priest, you work for FAO in Rome. That’s where you run a restaurant. Those are the occupations there. And so we could have a much stronger presence in that organization as well. It’s only a few blocks actually from the Curia. So There’s lots of things we can be doing if we think, oh, that’d be effective. We might say, no, it’s just not effective doing it that way. Well, we’ll see. We’ll see. We have to talk about it and figure out a strategy and see where we go from there.

KEN PINO
If so, I know we talked a little bit about if someone wants to find out more information, but if you could give one message to anybody who might come across this and be interested, they are a Carmelite, they aren’t a Carmelite, they’re a member of the Carmelite family, they’re a member of different, what would be your one message to them if they were interested in helping somehow.

WILLIAM J HARRY, O.CARM.,
Identify what your strengths are, where your interests are, and we can talk about it. we don’t, we’re not going to have an organization of 5,000 people, but we will have an organization that affects 5,000 people because that’s how many Carmelites we have. If we can get the lay Carmelites, the affiliated groups, the sisters, the nuns, and all of the provinces and commissaries and all those involved, that’s a large number of people all, I think, making these issues a profound understanding of these issues. That affects what they teach, what they preach about, how they work, how they live, And so I think even if you don’t come to all of our meetings and all that, there is a role, there is a place for you in this organization. If I could just give a nod to the congregation of the Sisters in Louisiana, the congregation of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, because they really did grab this by the horns and move it along. And I’ve said to many people that if it weren’t for Sister Jane Remson, the NGO would not exist. I mean, she really worked on this. And I thought was not always treated fairly by some of the folks who didn’t really understand what this was about. And I think we owe a great deal of debt, both to her and to the congregation for sticking with this. And I believe that in the years to come, This will be an organization that many people recognize the value of and will be much more supportive of it and will find their lives much more affected by it than perhaps they think that it will or would. As Pope Francis said a few years ago, don’t know how this is going to end. It’ll be interesting.