A report from Ken Hackett, CRS "travelin' man"

Children share a portion of corn and meal distributed by Catholic Relief Services in the village of Arba Gosa in central Ethiopia. CNS

SAN ANTONIO • Ken Hackett’s traveling days began as a Peace Corps volunteer, following his 1968 graduation from Boston College. In June, as president of Catholic Relief Services (CRS), his travels brought him to San Antonio for a CRS Board meeting, held in conjunction with the annual spring meeting here of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). CRS carries out the commitment of the bishops of the United States to assist the impoverished and disadvantaged overseas in the spirit of Catholic social teaching.

Hackett’s travels in what would be his life’s work started with his Peace Corp assignment to Ghana, West Africa. Following his Peace Corps service, his thoughts turned to the CRS mission in Ghana and he applied for work with CRS, hoping to return to Africa. However, his salary expectations were too high and his application was rejected.
He next applied to the United Nations, having also done a stint with them for the Peace Corps, and to CARE, but chanced to meet a priest with an “in” at CRS who set up a second interview for him there.
All three interviews were scheduled for the same day in New York and, as luck would have it, the CRS one was first. When the monsignor interviewing him asked what he wanted to do, Hackett promptly responded that he wanted to return to Africa and work with the people there and was hired on the spot.

His first CRS assignment was in Sierra Leone, West Africa, in 1972, followed by a move to the regional office and eventually becoming regional director for Africa in 1978. It was here that his traveling reached an exhaustive all-time high. “In one week,” he recalls, “I was in and out of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, three times, jumping between New York, Geneva and Addis Ababa as we mounted this massive response to the famine of 1984.”

Feeling the need to slow down (and having met the woman he would soon marry), he took a stateside position with CRS in 1985, doing diocesan relations and fundraising. After their marriage in 1986, the couple was off to work for CRS in the Philippines, where their first child was born. Their second was born in Kenya. Then, in 1993, Hackett was tapped to be CRS’s chief executive officer.

His years in CRS have been fruitful and challenging. He recalls the most traumatic effort he was involved with for the agency as being the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, which occurred immediately following his time as head of the East Africa regional office. “I knew people there,” he said, “and the places and the context, so when in April this horror was unleashed, it wasn’t something strange to me. It was something deeply upsetting, personally upsetting.”

From this horrendous tragedy there came an epiphany for the agency, which had been involved in Rwanda for almost 45 years. CRS had done many wonderful things in that country, Hackett related, building grain silos, providing food for almost every school child in the country and clinics for expectant mothers.

“We were part of the fabric of the country,” he said, “not some foreign agency and, all of a sudden, to see people who we knew slaughtered. ...” Pausing for a moment, he states emphatically, “We, Catholic Relief Services, we the church, were not doing what we should be doing. We were not healing the rifts in society, fostering right relationships, bringing about a culture of peace.”

From this came an agency-wide awareness that their focus must not be solely on development in the countries they assist, but that CRS needed to base its actions on a sense of Catholic social teaching, striving to foster justice, peace and the building of good relationships. As they struggled to help Rwandans and the Rwandan church recover, it was done in the context of what was simultaneously occurring in Bosnia, where Christians, Muslims and Orthodox were at each others throats. “We saw that really what our world has to be about is trying to build peace,” he continued, “not merely giving ‘things’ to people.”