Father Bill Woods: A Texas Cowboy for Jesus

Today, our missionary hero is a man of our times, Fr. Bill Woods.

Bill was born in Houston, Texas in 1931, and was ordained a Maryknoll Missionary priest in 1958.  After his ordination, Fr. Bill was assigned to work in Barillas, a town in western Guatemala near the sparsely populated jungle regions of Ixcán, a municipality of Quiché.

Like many new Maryknoll missionaries, Fr. Bill came to his first assignment filled with all the hope, joy, and enthusiasm of a newly-ordained priest.  Bishop John McCarthy, a close friend of Fr. Bill, said this of him: “Fr. Bill was a Texas cowboy for Jesus, ready to enjoy the open spaces of Guatemala, to ride horses, jeeps, airplanes, and motorcycles, and to teach the Indians about the Catholic faith.”

While in Barillas, Fr. Bill opened a wood-carving cooperative for about 25 poor Indian families and a clinic.  But Fr. Bill knew that he was only helping a small minority of the poor Mayan Indians.  To make a more meaningful impact, he would have to help the Indians get their own land.  Right at that time, the Guatemalan government began a program allowing poor peasants to settle in the inhospitable Ixcán, a jungle near Barillas.

This new program inspired Fr. Bill to develop a colonization program in the Ixcán jungle, serviced by small airplanes, where the Indians would be flown into the jungle where they could carve out farms for themselves.  Pilots could then fly their produce out of the jungles to local markets.

In 1965, Fr. Bill learned how to fly a plane and purchased 100 square miles of land between two rivers.  He invited a lawyer to help with land titles and distributed equal-sized plots of land to the Indians.  Fr. Bill made sure that the titles for the plots of land were registered in the name of the cooperatives he founded.  That would make it impossible for the rich to buy out individual farms once the Indians had developed the land and made it profitable.

By 1975, ten years after Fr. Bill learned to fly, he had three small planes to service the five cooperatives he had founded.  He and his pilot friends had flown over twelve thousand trips to and from the Ixcán.  Approximately 2,000 families had been settled forming 5 towns.  Nurseries were set up, schools were built for the children, new plants were introduced, and over 1,000 head of cattle were being raised by the 5 cooperatives.  Each cooperative had a clinic with nurses and paramedics.

To meet the spiritual needs of the people, each cooperative had a chapel and meeting hall that were run by ministers called Delegados de la Palabra, Delegates of the Word, who run little Catholic churches in Central American nations in the absence of the priest.  The Delegados provided religious instruction.

In the early 1970’s, oil prices began to rise, and the Guatemalan government was ready to start drilling.  Generals, favorable to the rich and the dictatorship of the government, set their sights on taking over the land developed by Fr. Bill and the Indians.  When the army came to capture the land, many Indians fled in fright.  Fr. Bill, however, did not back down.  He took the case to the government and fought for the poor.  As a voice for the poor and powerless, he was labeled a troublemaker and marked for death.

 Realizing that he was a target of the anti-Indian forces, Fr. Bill pointed to the sky over the jungle and said, “That is where they’re going to get me one day.”

 On November 20, 1976, on a cloudless day, Fr. Bill took a physician, an American journalist, a lay missionary, and one other person to visit a cooperative in the Ixcán.  Just after 11 in the morning, on a perfectly clear day, the plane crashed into a mountain.  Suddenly, Guatemalan military, who “just happened” to be in this remote jungle area, quickly removed key engine parts that would have shown the plane had been shot down.

 Fr. Bill Woods and lay missioner John Gauker were buried with honors in Huehuetenango.  Thousands of Indians attended their funeral.