This year is a big one for anniversaries in the Church, with the 20th anniversary of the death of Pope St. John Paul II this week, and the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea starting next month.
The Year of Our Lord, 2025, is also the sixty-fifth anniversary of Irene Garza’s murder by the hands of a Catholic priest in McAllen, Texas.
On Saturday, 16 April 1960, Garza – a 25-year-old elementary schoolteacher who lived with her parents – said she was going to confession at Sacred Heart Church in McAllen. It was the day before Easter. When she didn’t return home, her parents originally thought she stayed at the church for the Vigil.
Her body was found in a canal on April 21.
Her autopsy showed she had been beaten, suffocated and raped while unconscious, on or about April 16.
Garza was a former Miss All South Texas Sweetheart and was a homecoming queen at Pan American College. She was also considered a shy girl who took her Catholic faith seriously.
In 2005, Texas Monthly published a letter she wrote to a friend shortly before her death:
“Remember the last time we talked, I told you I was afraid of death? Well I think I’m cured. You see, I’ve been going to communion and Mass daily and you can’t imagine the courage and faith and happiness it has given me.”
Garza’s murder went unsolved for decades, until 2017, when former priest John Feit was convicted of her murder. Feit died in prison in 2020, at the age of 87. Through the anguished years of justice delayed, Texas Monthly carried the torch for her. The news magazine was one of the major reporters on the efforts to bring Garza’s killer to justice. Why did it take over 50 years to convict the murdering priest?
Because the mid-20th century U.S. Catholic Church protected him.
Feit, who was 28 at the time of her death, came under suspicion from the police early on, after he admitted to hearing her confession in the church rectory rather than the confessional.
At his 2017 trial, prosecutors produced evidence Catholic officials suspected Feit murdered Garza but wanted to protect the reputation of the Church. The churchmen received support from politicians, most of whom were Catholic in that part of south Texas.
(The other priest working at Sacred Heart Church at the time later admitted to the police in the 2000s that Feit told him he had killed Garza.)
Not too long after the murder, Feit was sent to Assumption Abbey, a Trappist monastery in Missouri. Media reports in the 2000s said it was generally known the priest had murdered someone, and the Church was attempting to ascertain if he “still had a vocation” and could perhaps serve as a monk. Feit left the priesthood in 1972, twelve years after murdering the young woman.
Dale Tacheny, a former priest from Oklahoma City, was the counsellor for Feist at the Abbey.
In the early 2000s, he finally told the police what he knew: Feist told him he had restrained Garza after her confession, he sexually abused her and then later drowned her in the bathtub.
“He didn’t show what I would consider to be compunction or sorrow or grief or anything like that,” Tacheny told officers in 2002, as reported by The Texas Monthly. “I felt at the time rather appalled by what had come about. But that wasn’t my job to judge him.”
In 2003, Father Joseph O’Brien told investigators Feit had admitted to him shortly after the murder that he had killed Garza.
The story in The Texas Monthly came out in 2005, but local politics kept Feit from being put on trial for over a decade.
To understand the clerical abuse crisis, and the omertà that plagues the Church, think of John Feit: The Church knew he was guilty of murder, hid him away to escape justice, “treated” him in a facility where even the other patients knew what he had done, and then let him free on the world.
The cult of silence was so strong, that men who left the priesthood – even left the Church – still wouldn’t tell the authorities what they knew about this murderer. After decades of silence, one did (and then one more).
But most did not.
Note the date: 1960. Before Vatican II. Before the sexual revolution. Before all the usual “explanations” of why things “went bad.”
Some might even point out that Feit got married after leaving the priesthood and had children and grandchildren. He even volunteered at the St. Vincent de Paul center in Phoenix and was never again suspected of a sexual offense.
None of which will ever bring back Irene Garza.
Follow Charles Collins on X: @CharlesinRome
