"Lt. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine is off and running for governor, but before the Richmond Democrat officially does that he and his wife are spending their 25th wedding anniversary in Honduras.

Kaine and his wife, Anne Holton, leave Friday for a long-planned, six-day visit to a part of the world where Kaine volunteered his time and talents decades ago as a student and as a teacher.

Republicans are not the only party with a claim on faith and morals and values, as Kaine will try to point out time and again next year as he squares off against Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore, the sole GOP candidate for governor.

Different values?

Kilgore is licking his chops to paint Kaine as “out of touch” on what the attorney general likes to call Virginia values.

He lit into Democrats this year who opposed the death penalty.

Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry “voted against the death penalty time and time again - even for terrorists,” Kilgore told a cheering crowd of 100 Republicans in Charlottesville four days before the election. Fifth District Rep. Virgil H. Goode Jr., R-Rocky Mount, piled on the out-of-touch theme by calling his opponent, Nelson County Democrat Al Weed, and Kerry “wishy-washy and squirrelly” on the death penalty.

Kaine, who opposes capital punishment on moral and religious grounds, plans to discuss issues from a background of deep belief in faith and values and has Catholic and other moral leaders on his side on capital punishment.

Democrats see fighting poverty and offering educational opportunities as firmly tied to real moral values and also believe that voters tend to understand when a candidate opposes the death penalty on moral and religious grounds, even if they hold a different position.

Missionary work

Kaine’s early grounding in faith and values took him to Central America and keeps drawing him back.

During law school, Kaine took a one-year leave of absence to work with Catholic missionaries as the principal of a vocational school that taught carpentry and welding skills to teenagers in El Progreso, Honduras.

“This was the last school that these kids would go to” as students finishing the sixth and seventh grades, he said.

Kaine, 46, said his trip just prior to Thanksgiving “will be more to go back and charge up the batteries, connect with that experience that helped me.”

He first visited Honduras in 1974 during his sophomore year at a Jesuit high school in Kansas City “and when I got back from that week, I thought I’d like to go back.”

The future Harvard Law School graduate wrote to Jesuit missionaries and “said I’d like to go back for a year and work there. They said, ‘We’re going to need a guy to run this school,’” Kaine recalled.

He worked to build the school of 15 carpentry students into a larger facility with 50 students that also taught skills to adults at night.Aside from parenting, the year he spent working with students at the Instituto Tecnico Loyola vocational school was the most valuable and values-shaping experience of his life, Kaine said.

One of the Jesuit priests, Jim O’Leary, became a mentor and moral guide for Kaine, one of three men who helped greatly shape his life along with his own father and Anne Holton’s father, former Virginia Gov. A. Linwood Holton, he said. They kept in close touch until O’Leary died two years ago.

This school was in “a very destitute part of the country,” Kaine said, and he developed lifelong interests in promoting education and economic opportunity.

During his stay in 1980 and 1981, Honduras was a military dictatorship that has since embraced democracy, he said. “I want to see how the school is going and spend a couple of days there.”

In addition to visiting El Progresso, Kaine said he and his wife, a Richmond juvenile court judge, plan to spend a few days resting and relaxing in the rain forest.

After charging his batteries, the lieutenant governor returns to Virginia fully prepared to apply what he considers strong faith and values on the state’s political battleground.

One wonders if Republican leaders will go as far as calling Kaine, or Catholic bishops and Jesuit priests for that matter, squishy or squirrelly for moral opposition to the execution of inmates in a state and nation in which DNA keeps governors saying “oops” for having innocent men on death row." (Bob Gibson, The Daily Progress, November 14, 2004)

Contact Bob Gibson at (434) 978-7243 or bgibson@dailyprogress.com.