Father Donnelly began as a priest in the diocese of Clogher, Ireland in 1963 and joined the Columbans in 1979, out of a desire to work in South America.
His experience in Peru “was all very novel and new,” Father Donnelly recalled. “There was an enormous amount of ambivalence and confusion as to how to be best at this thing of the preferential option for the poor, who were the poor, etc. I was a diocesan priest, used to a pastoral approach to things, and not a kind of militaristic approach. They called it la lucha, the struggle.”
He began working among what he called “the forgotten people” in Peru’s mountains. It wasn’t long before the country’s militant Communists, the Sendero Luminoso, began making inroads.
“They were a breakaway crowd from the Ayacucho University (San Cristóbal of Huamanga),” Donnelly explained. “We were there for about three years when they came to our area. There was an enormous amount of indiscriminate killing. At night they’d come to these little pueblos. They imposed a three-day curfew on everybody. Nobody was to move out to feed cattle or do anything with their crop cultivation. They took over completely.”
“For the next three years or so we were completely under their threats of every kind,” said Father Donnelly. “We were getting death threats. Because we were getting other people’s lives involved in this, we decided to go to Lima and see what was going to happen from there. The Columbans sent up another Australian, Leo Donnelly, no relation of mine but a very good friend, and he continued on there.”
Irene McCormack, a sister of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart, had been working with the fathers and decided to stay in the area. “It was a decision that was fraught with a lot of danger,” Donnelly said. While Fr. Leo escaped, “Irene was taken out one evening (May 21, 1991) and shot dead.”
Father Donnelly arrived in the United States in 1996 and worked as bursar for the Bristol house in 2000. He returned there for his retirement in 2014 at age 75.
