Father Chris Ponnet, a Catholic priest and social justice activist in Los Angeles, was arrested dozens of times while protesting in the streets against war and the death penalty. He ministered to stricken and isolated hospital patients during the Covid pandemic. With papal approval, he blessed same-sex couples.
In a career driven by a reverence for humanity and that drew attention for his work far beyond the pulpit, he also participated yearly in an interfaith burial ceremony in Los Angeles County for forgotten or unclaimed bodies — sometimes totaling more than 1,000.
“The key piece is that we believe in the dignity of each person,” Father Ponnet (pronounced pon-NET) told Angelus News, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles’s multimedia platform, in 2023. “That includes while they’re in the womb, and while they’re alive as well as when they die.”
Speaking in broader terms about burying the marginalized, Father Ponnet told The New York Times Magazine in 2015 that he had become a kind of “spiritual detective,” as he prepared eulogies for undocumented immigrants, homeless people, AIDS patients, victims of gang shootings, and newborns who died before being named.
He contacted family members when possible, searched written records and even wallets for hints of a biography, like a military ID card or photographs of children. If a person died in the lonely despair of drug addiction, he said, he tried to find something more generous to say. Perhaps, he suggested, they had worked as a carpenter or loved horses as a child.
“A person’s last moment,” he told The Times, “doesn’t summarize their whole life.”
Father Ponnet died on Oct. 7 at 68 during emergency heart surgery at a hospital in Arcadia, Calif., his sister Elizabeth Castro said.
For the last 30 years, he was the pastor of the St. Camillus Center for Spiritual Care in Los Angeles. During that period, he also served as the director of spiritual care at the nearby Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center, heading an interfaith team of chaplains at one of the state’s largest hospitals.
Father Ponnet “was a fierce advocate for justice, a relentless voice for those society tried to silence,” the St. Camillus Center said in an Instagram post after his death.
With his glasses and beard, often wearing a hat to cover his balding head and carrying as many as five phones, Father Chris, as he was widely known, was a familiar figure throughout Southern California in churches and hospitals and on the streets.
He sometimes wore his advocacy on a T-shirt with “abortion,” “death penalty” and “euthanasia” written in white, each bordered with a red circle and a line through it, signifying his opposition.
Days before he died, Father Ponnet posted on Instagram an admonishment from Pope Leo XIV: “Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion but says I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life.”
A member of Catholics Against the Death Penalty Southern California, he worked for years to try to abolish capital punishment in the state. It remains legal, though it has not been enforced there since 2006. Father Ponnet did not give up his activism and was photographed in 2017 in Anaheim, Calif., carrying a wooden cross that bore the message, “Replace the Death Penalty.”
“He was always on the streets, always out there,” the actor Mike Farrell, who is president of Death Penalty Focus, a group that is against capital punishment, said in an interview. “You name the issue, and he was there.”
According to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Father Ponnet was arrested more than 30 times for civil disobedience, ranging from protests against nuclear testing to decrying human rights violations, including the killing of Jesuit priests, by El Salvador’s U.S.-backed military during a civil war there from 1979 to 1992.
In 2011, while protesting the 10th year of the war in Afghanistan, Father Ponnet was photographed while wearing his priestly vestments, hands behind his back, flanked by police officers who had arrested him and others for blockading a street in downtown Los Angeles.
In 1991, as the pacifist director of the Catholic Peace Coalition, Father Ponnet began fasting to condemn a televised event during the Persian Gulf War called “Hollywood’s Welcome Home Desert Storm Parade,” which featured tanks, military jets and other weaponry and was planned in collaboration with the Department of Defense.
He told The Los Angeles Times that he welcomed the returning troops but was unwilling to “applaud the weapons that killed children and other people,” comparing the cavalcade to May Day parades in the former Soviet Union.
“The flaunting of these weapons in front of our faces shows a world vision that is pretty dead,” he said. “And deadly.”
In 2016, during the second Obama administration, he and 20 other clergy and lay religious leaders were arrested while protesting raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement that targeted mothers and children who had arrived from Central America, fleeing violence and seeking asylum.
More recently, in August in Los Angeles, Father Ponnet protested against the Trump administration’s ICE raids. He told The Tablet, a Catholic journal published in London, “I don’t know their hearts and their souls, but their behavior and policy are consistently evil.”
During the Covid pandemic that broke out in 2020, Father Ponnet joined other chaplains who ministered, while wearing face shields, masks and gowns, to patients at the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center. At times, they were the only permitted visitors.
Distraught patients asked important spiritual questions, he told Angelus News, most often, “Why is God allowing this to happen? Is there something global, and God is punishing the world?”
As chaplain of the Los Angeles Diocese’s Catholic Ministry With Lesbian and Gay Persons, Father Ponnet did not attend same-sex weddings to avoid suggesting that the church sanctioned the unions. With Pope Francis’s approval beginning in December 2023, he and other priests offered blessings to couples.
“We’re not blessing the relationship,” he told NPR in 2024. “We’re blessing the individuals in front of us. And I appreciate the pain that that causes, and I don’t know how to get around that.”
Christopher Dennis Ponnet was born on Jan. 14, 1957, in Monterey Park, Calif., east of Los Angeles. He grew up in nearby Temple City, the youngest of eight children of Frank Ponnet, a mail carrier, and Mary Louise (Breen) Ponnet, a registered nurse.
He was about 4 when his father died. The assistance the family received from a local priest, the Boy Scouts and elsewhere, his sister Ms. Castro said, deeply affected Chris. He attended Catholic schools, entered St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, Calif., and was ordained in 1983.
“When you’re getting help, you feel like you also have to do the same thing for other people that need help,” Ms. Castro said.
In addition to his sister Elizabeth, Father Ponnet is survived by another sister, Mary Boles, and by a brother, Jim Ponnet.
“There was a kind of innocence about him that was touching, indelible,” Mr. Farrell said. “Some people who work in the streets, they develop a kind of crust. It’s self-protection. But he was just an openhearted human being to the degree you don’t often see.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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