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Eileen Egan was born sometime in 1912 in Wales to Irish parents. In 1926, the family moved to New York City.
After graduating from Cathedral High School in Manhattan, she attended Hunter College in New York and graduated in 1933. Then, she began her career as a journalist who would devote the rest of her life to working for peace, and surrounding herself with peace activists such as Servant of God Dorothy Day and Saint Teresa of Calcutta.
In 1943, Eileen got a job with the U.S Bishop’s War Relief, later renamed Catholic Relief Services or CSR. As the first professional layperson of the group, she was assigned to Mexico where she worked with Polish refugees from World War II. The next year, she found herself working in Portugal with survivors of the Holocaust and then headed the CRS office in Lisbon, Portugal.
After being back in New York City briefly in 1945, she went to Europe to help resettle displaced persons. For her work, she received highest civilian honors from both the French and German governments.
With CRS, Eileen helped provide food, housing, economic assistance, and transportation to war victims. However, as a journalist and dedicated peace activist, she also spent much of her time and energy writing and demonstrating against war. In 1962, she funded the American Pax Society, which later was named Pax Christi USA in 1972.
Eileen also visited many hot-spot troubled areas of the world to encounter problems first-hand, such as Pakistan, Korea, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Gaza strip, and India.
Eileen worked with others who shared her vision. For example, she marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma, Alabama and worked behind the scenes in creating the peace statements in documents of the Second Vatican Council. She also promoted the works of those who brought down the peaceful ouster of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines.
A major accomplishment she had was getting the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in 1987 to recognize conscientious objection as a universal human right. She also argued that the so-called “just war” concept was an alien graft of the gospel of Jesus.
Eileen was a friend of Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, and she traveled with Dorothy around the country. In fact, Eileen was the one who introduced Dorothy to Mother Teresa in 1970, and Eileen was with Dorothy the first time Dorothy was arrested picketing for farm workers in California. In 1973, Eileen brought Mother Teresa to Washington, D.C. where Mother Teresa had the honor of serving the first bowl of soul at the Zacchaeus Community Kitchen run by the Community for Creative Non-Violence.
During her life, Eileen wrote about Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, and other American heroes of peace of the twentieth century.
During her lifetime, Eileen received many awards for her work, but she never sought to put herself first. Rather, she was always pushing her message of peace and love, never herself.
In 1992, Eileen was mugged on the way to Mass in New York and was hospitalized with a broken him and fractured ribs. She forgave her attacker. Eileen died on October 7, 2000.
