Phoenix priest honors friend a year after brutal attack

Tonight, Father Joseph Terra will say one of the most difficult Masses in his 26 years as a priest.

The Latin words will roll off his tongue the way they always do. But the words he says in English about his friend and fellow priest, Father Kenneth Walker, will not come as easily.

Those words will likely touch on familiar themes, like love, forgiveness, repentance, redemption and grace.

These are not abstract concepts to Terra. They are things he has had a year to think about.

For it was a year ago today that the unthinkable happened. Two men of God were attacked in the quarters they shared next to the church they served in the shadow of the state Capitol.

Now, Terra has returned to serve Mater Misericordiae (Mother of Mercy) Mission, the church he helped rebuild with his own hands. But the Mass he says tonight will be a requiem for the dead. A requiem for Walker.

Terra is an intensely private man, but he knows that because he is a priest and a victim of a violent crime, he is in the public eye. He agreed only reluctantly to be interviewed, sending an enigmatic reply through an emissary, saying that while he did not wish to be interviewed, he would not refuse a request.

In the interview, he speaks in spare sentences, choosing his words, guarding his emotions, as one does when talking to a stranger who is asking too-personal questions.

Every so often, though, his guard slips and his eyes begin to well up as he talks about the night his friend died. And just as often, his eyes twinkle and a smile comes to his face, like when he describes one of his fingers that was mangled in the attack. "I have nine others," he quips.

Several times he excuses himself to answer the phone. Each time his voice becomes excited, jovial and happy to hear from whomever is on the other end of the line. He hangs up and returns to the interview, apologizing for the interruption, and the guard goes up again.

This is completely understandable. Terra has been through hell.

It was late in the afternoon on a Wednesday, and Terra heard a noise in the courtyard behind the rectory.

Thinking his associate pastor, Father Walker, 28, might need help with something, Terra went to the back door and opened it.

The attack was sudden, swift and violent. An intruder wielding a piece of angle iron forced his way in, repeatedly smashing Terra in the head. Authorities told him the attacker struck him at least nine times. The side of his face was caved in and had to be reconstructed.

Terra, 57, takes off his glasses. With that twinkle in his eye, he turns his face, smiles and says, "They did a pretty good job, don't you think?"

Indeed they did.

But there are still deep scars on his head. And there is the mangled index finger, which won't allow him to do calligraphy any more. His left arm was also broken, but has healed for the most part.

"I'm as recovered as I'm ever going to be," he says. "I don't have the stamina I once did; I can't carry the same pace." Because of the head injury, basic math can sometimes be a challenge, and his eyesight is not the same.

"The fact that I'm even alive," he says. "The injuries should have killed me. I guess I still have some kind of work to do."

It's almost a blessing that Terra doesn't remember much of the attack. He's heard the tape of the 911 call he made that night.

"It sounds like my voice," he says, but he doesn't remember making the call or answering the door for the police and paramedics.

What he does remember are confused snippets, bathed in blood and searing pain. At some point he heard the assailant in Walker's room saying "money."

He remembers wrestling with the attacker, but he does not remember hearing the gunshots that killed Walker.

He does know, however, where the gun came from.

"It was mine," he says, with his eyes welling up as the sadness breaks through his guard.

"I was going for it in a last desperate bid for survival," he says. "But my finger was broken, I was in pain and shock."

One of the last things Terra remembers before waking up on a gurney in the emergency room is seeing Walker on the floor in his room and giving him absolution for his sins. He's been told that he also administered the last rites.

He may have, but he doesn't remember.

Terra knows the question is coming. But to him, there really should be no question at all about why a priest would have a gun.

"Everyone has a right to defend themselves," he says. "We're no different."

"Would people prefer to hear you live in a rough part of town and don't have something to defend yourself? Then you make yourself a target."

Still, his friend, a kind, intelligent man who was devoted to God and his church, was killed with Terra's gun.

It was something Terra found himself struggling with.

But while he was still in the hospital, he had a conversation with his brother.

"It was my gun that did it," Terra said.

"Did you pull the trigger?" his brother asked.

"Of course not."

"Then it's not your fault."

Terra is a man who believes that everything happens for a reason, and he tends to see things in black and white instead of shades of gray.

For him, his brother's words provided the clarity he needed to begin to make sense of what happened.

Terra has not followed the court case of the man accused of attacking him and killing Walker.

Gary Michael Moran, a drifter with a violent record, awaits trial on murder, assault and burglary charges. He had skipped a parole hearing days before the attack and was arrested after bragging about beating and robbing a priest.

Terra says he feels "no inclination toward revenge or anger."

"Anger," he says, "can enslave you, especially if it's over something you can do nothing about. ... Is there a greater waste of time than that?"

He points to the story of Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who was imprisoned by the Nazis at Auschwitz and offered to take the place of a man with a family who had been sentenced to death.

"What God allows, both good and bad, is experienced to make saints of us," he says. "Jesus suffered and died on the cross, that's how God willed it."

Terra asks what Jesus must think when ordinary people complain about the hand Providence has dealt.

"He said, 'I carried this cross for you, and you find (your own struggles) objectionable?'"

For Terra, the question of forgiveness was also never even a question. As a priest, he knows he has a duty not only to follow Christ's example, but also to set an example for his parishioners.

"If I'm going to be talking about forgiveness from the pulpit and not practicing it, well, we used to call that hypocrisy," he says with a wry smile.

"In the Lord's Prayer, it says, 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us,'" Terra says, stressing the words "we forgive."

"That leaves us no choice but to do battle with our angry passions, but we're not doing battle ourselves — we have the power of his grace."

Terra tells another story from World War II, this one about Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, who worked in the Vatican and helped hide 4,000 people, mostly Allied soldiers and Jews, from the notorious Herbert Kappler, the Gestapo officer in charge of Rome.

Kappler knew of O'Flaherty's exploits and tried many times to capture him venturing outside the neutral zone of the Vatican, but never succeeded.

After the war, Kappler was tried for war crimes and sentenced to life in prison. For many years, his only visitor was O'Flaherty, who eventually converted Kappler and baptized him.

Terra has not felt compelled toward his O'Flaherty moment just yet. But he does not discount the prospect of someday visiting Moran, if asked.

"It's interesting how Providence worked out," Terra says. "Father Walker is dead, and the man who did it is alive. He has the opportunity to repent. I hope he takes it."

Father Terra says a few members of his congregation may have been scared off by the attack. But from the rest of them he will draw strength tonight, as he has for the past year. Shared hardships bring people together.

His time with them is short. Next month, he is being transferred to a parish in Tyler, Texas.

But for now, he has a Mass to celebrate and the life of a warm, dedicated and caring friend to remember.

"I've been thinking a lot about what I'll say," Terra says. "I'll take a deep breath. It's going to be a long evening."