Preceded in death by parents, Paul and Rose Newpower and brother Donald. Survived by Wife Rebeca, Son Elias, daughters Rose and Anabel. Brother Tom (Betty). Sister-in-law Margaret. Grandchildren. Cousins Mary (Jack) and John Murphy. 3 nieces and 3 nephews.
Mass of Christian Burial will be Tuesday, January 24, 2023 at Church of Saint Casimir, 934 Geranium Avenue East, Saint Paul, Minnesota 55106. Visitation will begin at 10:00 AM.
Eulogy for Paul Newpower REVISED 3-6-23
My name is Richard Podvin. I have been a friend of Paul since 1974 when I met him in Cochabamba, Bolivia, quite an unusual coincidence since we were both from St. Paul, Minnesota. Now, this friendship includes Rebeca, his wife, and their children Elias, Rose and Anabel. I appreciate that Rebeca has entrusted me with the task of giving this eulogy for Paul.
Paul David Newpower was born April 14, 1941 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He grew up in St. Paul and attended elementary school at the St. Paul Public School located near his home. He then went to and graduated from Johnson High School. Michael Heinrich, one of his high school friends, remembers about Paul that he was a person who cared about other people and tried to help them. In his later years of high school, Paul was the proud owner of a black 1949 Ford of which he took good care - both its appearance and mechanics. Paul enjoyed skiing and was proficient enough to do ski jumping at the daunting Battle Creek ski jump.
After high school, Paul enrolled at St. Thomas College to study physics and later transferred to the University of Minnesota with the same major. He hoped to become part of the United States space program. After several years Paul realized that math and science were not his strong points, so he reassessed his career goals and recognized that his talents were in the area of social work. At 20 years of age, he decided to enter the seminary of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers. He completed college and theology studies in Chicago and New York and was ordained a priest in 1969.
Paul’s seminary studies, while quite strict regarding academics and seminary spiritual practices, also provided him with direct exposure experiences within the mid to late 1960s United States. These included time in parishes in Harlem and a black neighborhood in Chicago. In addition, Paul learned from missionaries returning from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Paul followed closely the non-violent struggles of the Civil Rights movement against segregation and of the protests against the Vietnam War. He grieved the deaths of Dr. Martin Luther King and many other Civil Rights leaders. Maryknoll gave Paul a strong social consciousness. And this united with his sense of justice and his innate courage inspired his actions as a Maryknoll priest.
Paul was ordained in 1969 and his first assignment was to Bolivia. First, he learned Spanish at Cochabamba and did parish work in La Paz, Then Paul went back to Cochabamba to learn Aymara so he could communicate in the language of the indigenous Aymara people he was to serve next at Achacachi, a town on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca. Paul willingly took on this challenge of returning to school. That was where I met him when I went there to study Spanish in 1974 for my own missionary assignment to Venezuela. I admired Paul’s dedication to learn another new language. I went to visit him in Achacachi, where I witnessed not only the chilled, rainy climate of Lake Titicaca, and the difficulty of breathing at 12,500 feet above sea level at the foot of the 20,900 foot high mountain, Illampu, but also the poverty and injustices of the life of the people of Achacachi.
Living alongside the people of Achacachi and its 65 outlying communities, Paul became aware of the cultural and racial differences among his parishioners and the unique ways indigenous Aymara understood the gospel of Christ because of their communitarian and family beliefs. He was infected by hepatitis early in this work and spent several months recovering. He lived under the military rule of Bolivia with his people, and tried to interact on their behalf with the military dictatorship of Hugo Banzer. When Paul left Achacachi after 5 years, people remembered his custom of visiting each of the 65 communities, and always staying to eat with them. This was one of his customs that endeared him to them. The perspective Paul had of the reality he was living was enriched by a month he spent at the beginning of this time, at a course conducted by Gustavo Gutierrez about Liberation Theology and Comunidades de Base.
When Maryknoll reassigned Paul in 1977 to missionary education work in the United States, he carried with him the injustices he had seen in the lives of the people of Achacachi. This fire within him was further built up by meeting his Maryknoll friend Roy Bourgeois in Panama and traveling with him through Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras on his way back to the United States. Paul witnessed the repressive practices of military governments in these countries and learned about the atrocities they were perpetrating and the guerilla organizations which were trying to over throw them No wonder that Paul was disillusioned with the lack of intensity of Americans in response to the atrocities occurring in Central American nations. Fr. Ed Flahavan, who was part of a study group of priests and sisters with Paul in Minneapolis, remembers that during this time he had a life-changing admiration for Paul’s commitment to justice.
Paul left Minnesota in 1980 and went to Maryknoll, New York where he was asked by Maryknoll to become director of their Department of Social Communication. He first went to a 3-month training in London. Upon arrival in London, Paul learned about the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador. He returned to New York with a strong sense of mission toward El Salvador. One of his first duties after returning to New York was to interview Maryknoll sister Maura Clarke. Sister Clarke, soon after, returned to her mission in El Salvador and suffered martyrdom with three other women religious later that year.
After their deaths, Paul and two others were sent to El Salvador to investigate the safety of having Maryknoll priests, brothers and sisters working there. He was able to witness threatening military patrols close to where he was staying, which became for him a symbol of the “insecurity and fear which people lived in El Salvador”. One night, Paul saw the decapitated body of a person thrown at the side of the road which haunted him for years. He learned of a Church Leader who was killed during questioning.
About this same time (1981), Paul’s friend, Maryknoller Fr. Roy Bourgeois, traveled to El Salvador and was able to spend one week with guerillas of the Farabundo Marti Frente de Liberacion Nacional (FMLN). A few years later, Fr. Bourgeois found out that the School of the Americas was transferred from Panama to Fort Benning in Georgia, where the U.S. Army trained and equipped Salvadoran military. Bourgeois established a long running protest to demand the end of the school. Paul worked together with Fr. Bourgeois in 1982 to produce a documentary about the arms race called Gods of Metal which was nominated for an Academy Award. Both Paul and Roy Bourgeois went to Hollywood for the Academy Award Ceremony.
During the remainder of the 1980s, Paul traveled to many different countries, including Mexico, Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Kenya ,Cambodia and Korea to produce videos about the culture and the church presence in them in order to teach Americans about the reality of other countries. Paul was part of a delegation to Cuba and met Fidel Castro. He stayed on to do filming about the church in Cuba which he found to be quite alive. Paul was asked to be the Maryknoll host for Archbishop Helder Camara of Recife, Brazil when he came to New York to speak to various groups, and was deeply impressed by the humility of this man.
Finally, it was time for Paul to return to Bolivia a Cochabamba in 1990. He took up residence in the barrio Villa Busch where he founded a comunidad de base. He worked there for six years. Paul collaborated in the work in Villa Busch closely with a Bolivian lay woman who was part of the Asociacion de Misioneros de Bolivia. Her name was Juana Rebeca Tito Mendoza. They collaborated in projects of family promotion and outreach to youth as well as in the work of the comunidad de base. Eventually this became a love relationship.
In 1994, Paul celebrated 25 years of priesthood. A year later, in 1995, he made the decision to leave active ministry as a priest. In this same time, Paul’s father died and he went to Minnesota with the double intention of saying goodbye to his father and informing Maryknoll of his intention to leave ministry. In 1996, Paul married Rebeca in Cochabamba in a large and enthusiastic ceremony. They have three children, Anabel, Elias and Rose.
After leaving ministry, Paul continued working on production of videos as he had alongside his work in Villa Busch, now with Project Concern International (PCI) in Santa Cruz founded by Dudley Conneely, a former Maryknoller. Paul and Rebeca themselves founded a program called El Buen Samaritano in 1997 to support young adults after they aged out of the orphanage of Asociacion Amistad. Paul eventually, with Rebeca’s help, took over the Amistad orphanage. So then, both as orphans and then later as young adults these youth and others of the barrio were served by Paul and Rebeca to help these young people find themselves and find their way in life. This ministry was to help young adults to obtain college education and careers. In a sense Paul and Rebeca were their foster parents. Paul sought financial help from friends in Minnesota and elsewhere to support this work. Altogether, Paul and Rebeca supported more than eighty young Bolivians in this way over 15 years. Even when Paul and Rebeca came to Minnesota in 2012 this ministry and these relationships continued. They also helped the local primary schools.
In 2012, due to the failing health of Paul’s mother, Rose, Paul and Rebeca decided to move to the United States, to St. Paul, to be able to care for her. They came with their children Elias and Rose. Paul and Rebeca gave dedicated support to Paul’s mother, Rose, until her death in April 2020 at the age of 105. And now Paul has followed his mother in death, after suffering a severe brain injury from a fall in which he hit his head. He leaves a legacy of care for others and good done in this world. In Spanish we would say to Paul, “Pasaste haciendo el bien”, “You went through life doing good.”
I cannot help but remember that in this Church of St. Casimir, where Paul’s mother, Rose, was a member of the Altar and Rosary Society for decades, as was my own mother, Emma, how many hundreds of rosaries were prayed for Paul, myself, and other missionaries. May God through Our Blessed Mother and St. Casimir bless Paul and receive him in light.
After I spoke this Eulogy at the Mass, Rebeca reminded me that I did not mention Paul’s books. I was sorry this got off my mind because the books he wrote were very important to Paul. They held much more of his life experience than I knew about. Paul wrote three books. His first was in 2009: Transformado por la Cultura Andina, written in Spanish. In the same year 2009, he wrote a translation of this first book, Pilgrimage, which had parallel content but was in English. In 2020 Paul wrote a novel, Lithium Rush in Bolivia (in English) and published it through Amazon. Paul's friends, Tom Fenton and Mary Heffron helped him to publish his books.
These books were for Paul a way of documenting his legacy of work for justice. Their message was for everyone, but more personally, in recent years he saw his legacy as being for his children. He wanted to share with them his searching for God and his leaving behind everything to come to know God. So that through his life and his love for them they could come to know God.
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