Patrick Michael Rice was an Irishhuman rights activist and former Catholic priest and religious who became a resident of Argentina. He was a campaigner on behalf of the families of the "disappeared", the victims of that nation's dirty war during the 1970s. He himself was kidnapped and tortured as a part of that activity by the Argentine government.
Life
Rice was born in Fermoy, County Cork, to a farming family. He joined the Divine Word Missionaries, studied philosophy and theology at St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, and was ordained in 1970, at which point he was posted to Argentina. Soon afterwards he left the Divine Word Missionaries, and, in 1972, entered the Little Brothers of the Gospel of Charles de Foucauld, a religious congregation of men and women dedicated to sharing the lives of the poorest of the earth. His first post of assignment was in the Santa Fe Province. He later continued his work in Buenos Aires, initially in the town of La Boca, later in Villa Soldati. In the years following, Rice ran extensive human rights education programmes and helped form a union movement all the while working as a labourer priest. He also began on what he would later be highly regarded for, namely his investigation of the "disappeared". Through his social work in these Villas miseria he successfully gained the trust and respect of the residents of these areas, the cooperatives, and the Catholic mission. It was through his work in a chapel in these villas that he met a young Capuchin friar, Carlos Armando Bustos, and also a group of lay members, amongst which was the young catechist Fátima Cabrera. Rice was kidnapped on 11 October 1976 in La Plata by security forces of the dictatorship as part of the National Reorganization Process. He was hooded and taken to the Naval School of Mechanics, where he was tortured brutally and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights took charge of his case. After pressures from the Irish government and his religious Order, he was finally freed, but was deported from the country. Soon he was living in London. He returned to Argentina, however, in 1984 to live permanently. By that time, many of his friends, like Bustos, had been killed or disappeared. In 1981 he co-founded and served as secretary for the Federación Latinoamericana de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos, which represented the families of the imprisoned and disappeared. After leaving both the Little Brothers and the priesthood in 1985, Rice married Fátima Cabrera, who had been arrested and tortured at the same time as he had been. Together they had three children. He continued his work as a human rights advocate with the Little Brothers, becoming a member of their Secular Fraternity. He also served as secretary for the Movimiento Ecuménico de los Derechos Humanos, working the Protestant clergy of the country. In 2010, while returning to Argentina from a visit to his family in Ireland, Rice was changing planes in Miami, Florida, in the United States, when he suffered a sudden cardiac arrest and died instantly. His body was returned to Argentina for burial.
Legacy
In December 2010, the chapel of the prison where Rice had been held and tortured, by then closed, was converted into an ecumenical prayer space named Espacio Patrick Rice. The idea to use the room where Catholic military chaplains had blessed the actions of the death squads which had operated that prison had come from Rice himself.
