Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time and for organizing this tribute in honor of our precious JOE MOAKLEY and for the great friendship that he had with JOE. The words that he expressed on many occasions on events honoring JOE in the months before his leaving us, in expressing those words, JIM MCGOVERN expressed so much of what all of us felt about JOE. Of course he felt it more intensely and more universally, but we all had some level of participation in those comments.
We all know how much JOE loved JIM MCGOVERN. Indeed, I think JIM's election to Congress at one point meant more to JOE MOAKLEY than his own. It was his mission. When you were elected, it was in your own right but with great pleasure to JOE MOAKLEY.
To JIM MCGOVERN, a former staff member and then colleague to the great JOE MOAKLEY and to his personal staff and the staff of the Committee on Rules, thank you for all that you did to make his work in Congress so great. The sympathies of my own office and those of my constituents go out to the staff, both staffs of JOE MOAKLEY. We are all in your debt for all of the work that you helped JOE do in this Congress.
The gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. MCGOVERN) mentioned the card. I am glad he did, because one of the wonderful things at JOE's funeral is when I met his brothers and sisters-in-law, they said to me how much JOE enjoyed the card. The note I sent with it was that this card was signed by every woman, Democrat and Republican, in the House of Representatives. I think that is unprecedented. We all competed to have the most important message for JOE that would get his attention. Some of us did better than others. JOE's family told me that they were going to frame the card and place it in his library in Suffolk. That should be a source of great pride and enjoyment to the women Members. It was a card from the women Members. With an accompanying note we said that we wanted everyone who took care of JOE in the hospital and everyone who cared for JOE personally to know how precious he was to the women Members of Congress; that the men were jealous they could not sign the card, they thought we were putting our phone numbers, but I guess that was just to amuse JOE.
Also at JOE's funeral, we were blessed to see such an outpouring of support from his constituents and from the clergy in South Boston and indeed from the Boston area led by the Cardinal. Our own Chaplain was there. We all know that the cocelebrants were overflowing from the altar and filling pews in the church. Such was the recognition of the greatness of this man and the humanitarian contribution that he made. One of those participants, Monsignor Thomas J. McDonnell, whom the gentleman from Massachusetts has entered his full eulogy into the RECORD, but in that eulogy, Monsignor Tom McDonnell emphasized JOE's roots as South Boston Irish-Italian Catholic American.
I was so delighted to hear the Italian part because Moakley being an Irish name that is where a lot of the emphasis was, had been in the final tributes. But JOE took great pride in his Italian American heritage as well as has been mentioned here and of course the Italian American community took great pride in JOE MOAKLEY.
No wonder he understood coalition politics. He was the personification of it himself, being Irish, Italian, Catholic and Democrat from South Boston. I think that the pride that he took in his ethnicity, in his Italian and his Irish background, that pride he took made him understand more clearly the pride that so many other ethnic groups and nationalities take in their own backgrounds. That gave him a sense of respect for all the people that he came in contact with.
We all know his important work with the Jesuits in El Salvador, but I wanted to take a half a moment to talk about his work with the Salvadorans in America. Our colleague the gentlewoman from California (Ms. ESHOO) talked about JOE and the Gospel of Matthew of the least of our brethren and seeing the spark of divinity in all of these people. He certainly did with the Salvadorans and the Guatemalans, in this case focusing on the Salvadorans when they were about to be deported to El Salvador because the U.S. Government did not view the fear of persecution that they had in the same way as they viewed the fear of persecution for Nicaraguans. JOE MOAKLEY stepped in to stop that deportation.
He was a leader. He came to my district. We had 80,000 Salvadorans and Guatemalans to be deported in San Francisco. JOE came and met with the representatives of that group. They received great hope from that meeting. They saw in his eyes his understanding, his empathy, his sympathy for their cause; and they knew that they would be better off for it. I just wanted to add that to the, of course, great history that we all know of JOE and the assassination of the six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter.
For the last 14 years, I and everybody who has been in this body even one day, some of our very newest Members who may have shared only a week or two of being a Member of Congress while JOE was, will always be able to take pride in the fact that they served as a colleague to JOE MOAKLEY. That is a badge of honor, to have been his colleague.
He did great work which many of our colleagues have discussed here in detail. He never forgot his roots, his South Boston, Irish-Italian, Catholic American roots, and he worked in this body to represent those people, to represent the needy. In doing so, he was working on the side of the angels; and now he is with them.