For Kaine, a Faith in Service

"If he would have said, 'No, thanks, I don't need it,' " Kaine said, "then he would have denied the man to ability to do the most essential thing about being a human being, which is to give to somebody else. . . . That is the thing that makes life noble, just the simple notion that we all have something to offer no matter what the circumstances.

"That one sentence that Patricio said to me is the thing that I have come back to most often in the last 25 years as I try to figure out what to do and what I ought to be doing."

The meeting in the hut humbled him, teaching him to measure success in the life he went back to by how much he helped others.

"I made a decision when I came back from Honduras," Kaine said, "that I am not going to focus on making as much money as I can make. I am going to focus on doing things where I can serve people."

Patricio, 72, who first arrived in Honduras in 1967, is still there, walking the same mountain paths to remote villages that he walked with Kaine.

Patricio said that over the years, the Jesuits have had quite a few young Americans come to work at the mission, and for many of them it is a difficult time because they are too worried "about their health or the fact that there's no Coca-Cola or toilet paper."

He said Kaine was different.

"What I remember about him is that he was always the same," Patricio said recently while on a trip back to the United States for his annual physical. "He was very rational. He was kind to people. He was open to people."

He said that Kaine's time in a Third World setting forced him at a young age to confront life's big questions.

"When you live here among the people, you ask basic questions like why is man on Earth and what are we doing here and how are we treating each other," Patricio said. "The poor have something that we educated people don't have. They have a certain type of human wisdom, a type of wisdom that comes with being someone who has suffered, who has been looked down on and put down all his life. . . . My impression is he asked himself these questions, and that changed his way of thinking and what he wanted to do with his life."

Kaine said that while at the University of Missouri and Harvard Law School he attended Mass sporadically.

"I had a lot of things," Kaine said, "but my faith wasn't very strong. It wasn't the kind of bedrock that I could rely on in my life. So I really learned from the people to have a faith that would be a bedrock I could rely on."