Dear Old Rebel: A Priest's Battle for Social Justice

Gerald J. Stortz is an assistant professor of history at the University
of St. Jerome’s College in Waterloo.

Steele, a retired member of the Scarboro Foreign Mission Society, has
spent almost his entire priestly career in China and Latin America. This
memoir is an outgrowth of the award-winning documentary Padre Pablo,
which centred on Father Steele’s efforts to bring the cooperative
gospel of Nova Scotia’s Coady Institute to the Dominican Republic.

Dear Old Rebel is extremely well written, thanks to the efforts of
ghostwriter Patrick O’Donohue. The accounts of Steele’s attempts to
escape the Japanese in World War II China have all the suspense and
adventure of an Indiana Jones movie. The reader becomes both frustrated
and fascinated by the politics, secular and clerical, against which this
priest had to battle.

The book covers Steele’s childhood, recounting how he grew up in a
dysfunctional family headed by an alcoholic father (Steele himself was
to become an alcoholic). While this evokes our sympathy, the book’s
rampant name-dropping does not. Nevertheless, there is much valuable
information here for readers who want to know more about the Third
World. Be forewarned, however, that it is the sad account of a lonely,
embittered man shunned by both his family and his order.