When Father Mauricio Gaborit hears vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine break into Spanish or speak movingly about the poor, he says he is watching the flowering of seeds planted decades earlier in Kaine at a small Catholic mission in Honduras.
Gaborit, a member of the Society of Jesus -- the Jesuit order of priests -- met Kaine in 1976 when he was working in the village of El Progreso in Honduras. The Virginia senator was then a senior at Rockhurst High School, a Jesuit-run academy in Kansas City. The two met when Kaine spent a week in the northern Honduras village observing the work of Jesuit priests there.
Kaine "was deeply impressed by the level of poverty and lack of opportunities he saw among the people," said Gaborit, a native Honduran who now lives in a Jesuit community in St. Louis.
"Secondly, he was impressed with the dedication of the Jesuits, especially the American-born Jesuits."
Gaborit, now 67, became a long-distance mentor. The two corresponded in letters. While at Harvard Law School, Kaine wrote to Gaborit that he was "trying make sense of what to do in life."
In 1980, Kaine, then 22, decided to interrupt his law school studies and spend nearly a year working beside Gaborit and the other Jesuits in Honduras.
"I believe it had to do with the values he grew up with in his Jesuit education," Gaborit said. "That oriented him to be attentive to and responsive to the plight of the poor. There is the belief that even if a situation is dire, people can still make a difference."
Gaborit remembers Kaine's optimism in spite of the poverty he witnessed.
"When one reflects on those plights and situations, one has two courses of response," Gaborit said. "One has the course of going the road of despair, or going the road of optimism and confidence. He went the route of optimism. He saw himself optimistically helping people."
At the time, the Jesuits ran a small trade school for youngsters who had dropped out of school or whose families could not afford to send them to school.
Speaking on GLT's Sound Ideas, Gaborit said Kaine "would visit banana plantation villages and meet with people to find if there were any youngsters who wanted to study."
Kaine, whose father owned a small iron works business in Kansas City, taught religion classes and carpentry in a small shop the Jesuits operated. He then helped local students sell their goods.
His most important contribution, Gaborit said, was befriending his students and their families.
"Accompanying people in their life situation is as important as doing something to change that situation. Being with the kids, befriending them, talking with their families, it was a very simple, but powerful thing," Gaborit said.
"And this is very much in Jesuit tradition,"Gaborit added. "God appears to us in the plight of the less fortunate. You don't have to talk about God in an explicit way, but in addressing human suffering, the human situation and the human predicament, we are addressing and speaking about God."
Kaine helped Honduran students learn English and they helped him master Spanish, something that was on display in his convention acceptance speech last month and more recently on the campaign trail.
"I believe the reason why at times he speaks in Spanish [is that] he wants to be a voice for the voiceless," Gaborit said. "Being trained in the Jesuit tradition, we understand ourselves only in terms of our relationship to those less fortunate."
Gaborit said the Jesuit motto of being a "person for others" has resonated through Kaine's career.
"Trying to be a person for others, you can pursue your own call in life but that call links you with the less fortunate. As you pursue your own goals, you see always on the horizon the plight of the less fortunate, the plight of the marginalized. I saw that working in him."
In his early career after law school, Kaine specialized in fair housing law, representing clients who were poor or disabled. He settled with his wife in her home state of Virginia and litigated a landmark case involving red-lining -- the deliberate denial of equal services based on race or ethnicity -- against Nationwide Mutual Insurance in Richmond. He was elected Richmond's mayor, Virginia's lieutenant governor and governor, and currently serves as the state's U.S. senator.
"Here is a man full of enthusiasm who wants to give back some of what he was so bountifully given," Gaborit said.
Some Catholic priests and bishops have criticized Kaine for representing a platform that upholds a woman's right to choose abortion, although Kaine has said he is personally opposed to abortion and federal funding for abortion.
One Washington, D.C. priest said he would not allow Kaine to receive communion in his parish --a signal that some Catholic clergy do not consider Kaine to be in good standing within his church.
Gaborit called abortion "one issue among 50,000 issues." He said Kaine's faithfulness to Catholicism should be judged on the way he has chosen to live his life.
"We are not followers of law, but of Jesus Christ and the gospels. It allows for diversity," Gaborit said. "The fact that he is respectful of other people's positions ... able to respect other people's soul- searching decisions is a plus."
Asked if he believes Kaine is in good standing within the Catholic Church, Gaborit replied, "Most certainly. We are in communion with the church when we are communion with God."
Gaborit noted that there are portions in both the Democratic and Republican platforms which the official hierarchy of the Catholic Church opposes.
"No one can be 110 percent right on everything," Gaborit said. "But at end of the day, you look at which candidate has respect for the lives others, has the listening, the ability to be a true leader who inspires unity in a divided situation and inspires people to be good rather than be hateful. I would go toward the candidate that inspires good and unity, and not one who inspires hatred."
Though he spends much of his time in St. Louis, Gaboit still makes frequent visits to Latin America. He is working on a research project about children who arrive in the U.S. without documents for the University of Central America in San Salvador, where he chairs the psychology department.