Inducted in 2011
Humanitarian
Founder, Working Boys Center, Quito, Ecuador

Induction Video

John James Halligan was born in the Bronx in 1930 to Joseph Halligan, a police lieutenant, and Mary Rose Torpy Halligan who worked at home and cared for their children: Mary Rose, Kathleen, Margaret Mary, Joseph, Jr., Peter, Theresa, Patricia and John.  Growing up on Hoe Avenue near St. Chrysostom Church, John also lived with his widowed grandmother, Mary Rose Torpy, whose husband, Peter, had been a policeman as well.  Her son, Peter Torpy, Jr. — one of John's uncles — was a member of the Prep class of 1913 and would go on to enter the Society of Jesus as would his nephew after him. 

Service to the Church and to the New York City Police Department seems to have been woven into the fabric of the devout Halligan family.  John's brother Joseph would join the force. Two of his sisters, Mary Rose and Kathleen would become Sisters of Notre Dame, and another sister, Margaret Mary, would enter the convent as well. Finally, there was John's brother, Peter, who chose both: first joining the police department and serving as a patrolman before becoming a Maryknoll priest and heading overseas to work among the poor and underserved in Peru.

Graduating from his parish grammar school, the young Bronxite was mightily impressed by the winding elms and wide grassy fields when he first arrived at the Fordham Prep in the fall of 1943. According Halligan, he was so happy during his first few days at Rose Hill, that any trepidation he had had about entering high school were quickly banished.  In his own words: “The Prep was a friendly place, and we all knew each other. The whole place was ours, and we belonged.”  

That feeling of security and community must certainly have impressed Halligan, for in a sense, he has spent most of his life giving others a place all their own, a place where they too can feel that they “belong.”

For Halligan, the Prep was a time for making long-lasting friendships, as well as for building upon his Catholic background and maturing in his faith.  He often credited the Prep with helping him move from a vague notion of his vocation to a solid commitment to joining the priesthood. Just after graduating from the Prep in 1947 — where his his classmates had voted him “Most Unpredictable” and “Most Carefree” — John Halligan would enter the Society of Jesus and matriculate at Fordham University.

As a scholastic, then-Mr. Halligan was first assigned to teach English and Latin across the Hudson at St. Peter's Prep from 1954 to 1959.  Then, during his tertianship, he was sent to work in South America, where he expected to work in remote areas far from the larger cities.  At least for a time, he was sent to work with the poor in the Chimborazo province of Ecuador.

In 1964, however, his superior asked him to travel north to the city of Quito to study and report back about the street children of the capital city. He found that many of them, some of whom were boys as young as five years old, were shining shoes so that they could bring money home to help their families. In the poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Quito, some of these children provided as much as 85% of their family income. To support them, Halligan founded el Centro del Muchacho Trabajador, the Working Boy’s Center, which provided basic services for los limpiabotas, the shoeshine boys.

The Center was originally housed in the attic of el Colegio Gonzaga , Gonzaga Jesuit High School, next door to the historic Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús, a church which the Jesuits started building in 1605 and is now regarded as a South American baroque masterpiece. Father began by offering the boys a warm lunch. Eleven showed up to eat the first day, and by the six-month mark, 250 boys were eating lunch at the Center daily. There were two rules: the boys had to wash their hands before eating and each had to deposit a few coins in a personal savings account that Halligan himself would carefully maintain.

Originally, only a few hundred boys received support from Fr. Halligan and his volunteer staff, but with the help of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and generous lay donors, the Center grew at an amazing pace. During the decades that followed, the Center would come to help not just the shoeshine boys themselves, but thousands upon thousands of full families raise themselves out of poverty.

The Center came to be known as a familia de familias, providing three meals daily, facilities for bathing, education, and medical and dental care to working boys and all members of their families at three sites in Quito. The overarching message would be the importance of education, hard work and self-sufficiency. The children — boys and girls alike — of all the families served by the Center would be required to attend preschool, grammar school, and technical school. Halligan also saw to the creation of adult education classes for the children's mothers and fathers.   As part of the training program, Father would eventually build a strip mall near the main campus housing a restaurant, bakery, beauty shop and small-goods store — not so much as a money-making venture, but rather, as site where members of the Center could get training and experience in customer service and business administration.

For graduates of the Center's technical education programs, Halligan would arrange loans, either to start small business or to secure housing.  Families would learn to manage a budgets and finance their own dwellings. As they have from the time the Center started, even the smallest children were expected to put away some money for the future, so that when they graduated, they would have enough money to purchase the tools they would need to pursue a chosen trade.

In 1997, 2005 and 2007, the Center was recognized as the best technical school in Ecuador, and in 2009, the Ecuadorian Ministry of Education awarded Halligan its Medal of Honor.

As Father saw it, the mission of el Centro del Muchacho Trabajador went far beyond technical training and child care. Its mission was also about changing hearts — Christ was always at the center of the Center.  Many members would attend Mass daily.

In 2010, Halligan was awarded the $1.2 million Opus Prize, a faith-based humanitarian award, for his work at the Working Boys’ Center.  The Opus Prize is awarded by the Opus Foundation, a private, independent nonprofit group that seeks to honor "entrepreneurship, transformational leadership, faith lived each day, service to others, and respect for the dignity of the human person."  Most significantly, Opus Prize recipients exemplify the adage, "Give a person a fish, and you have fed him for a day Teach a person to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime."

Starting in 2009, groups of boys from Fordham Prep began visiting their fellow Prepster and his Working Boys’ Center over the summer. For years, the boys, as well as their faculty chaperones, were been awed by Fr. Halligan’s profound humility in the face of the great work he has accomplished in Quito — an extraordinary example of what it truly means to be a man for others.

In the 1947 Ramkin, John Halligan’s classmates had written of him: “If anything should be taken seriously, Johnny simply hasn’t come across it yet.” His lightness of spirit always gave that impression, but it is clear that something extraordinary and extraordinarily holy was not far below that placid surface.

Fr. John James Halligan passed away on December 16, 2022 at the age of 92. 

Reflecting on his time with Fr. Halligan, Prep faculty member Pierre Chavez, who has several times conducted contingents of 21st-century Prep boys down to Quito, would remark: "I can honestly say that I have lived and worked in the presence of a saint."