Roy Bourgeois (born January 27, 1938 in Lutcher, Louisiana) is an American activist, a former Catholic priest, and the founder of the human rights group School of the Americas Watch (SOA Watch). He is the 1994 recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award and the 2011 recipient of the American Peace Award and also has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Ordained to the priesthood in 1972 in the Roman Catholic Church's Maryknoll society of apostolic life's Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers (The Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America), Bourgeois was canonically dismissed forty years later, on October 4, 2012, from both the Maryknolls and the priesthood, because of his participation on August 9, 2008, in what was, according to the Roman Catholic Church, considered an invalid ordination of a woman and "a simulated Mass" in Lexington, Kentucky. Early life Bourgeois was born in Lutcher, Louisiana. He grew up in a Catholic working-class family, and attended the University of Southwestern Louisiana and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in geology. After graduation, Bourgeois entered the United States Navy and served as an officer for four years. He spent two years at sea, one year at a station in Europe, and two tours of duty during one year in Vietnam, during the first of which he was injured and received the Purple Heart. After military service, he entered the Maryknoll Society in 1966; then entered the seminary of the Catholic missionary society of Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, Glen Ellyn, (Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America), and was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1972. Career 1972–1975 Fr. Bourgeois began the work of his priesthood in La Paz, Bolivia aiding the poor. In 1975 he was accused of, and was arrested for, attempting to overthrow Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer, a 1958 graduate of the School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, in Columbus, Georgia. Bourgeois was eventually deported from Bolivia and returned to the United States. 1980 Fr. Bourgeois moved to a Catholic Worker house in Chicago where he continued his work with the poor. He became an outspoken critic of US foreign policy in Latin America after four American churchwomen were (three of them nuns, and two of them personal friends of Bourgeois) were brutally raped and murdered by a death squad consisting of soldiers from the Salvadoran National Guard, some of whom had been trained at the SOA/WHINSEC. 1989