Catherine Reilly speaks with different Irish-born missionaries who have helped contribute to Ireland’s long tradition of helping the impoverished abroad
IRELAND HAS a storied history of engaging in missionary work, and new chapters are constantly being written.
Over 1,700 Irish-born missionaries are working in 83 countries worldwide, according to the Irish Missionary Union (IMU), while more than 20 missionary congregations have a presence here.
Indeed, the majority of religious orders in Ireland engage in some form of missionary activity even when it’s not their raison d’être.
Most recently, RTÉ’s libel of former missionary priest Fr Kevin Reynolds reminded the Irish public of the concept of missionaries in incongruous fashion.
But mostly, missionaries continue their work beyond the spectrum of Ireland’s news agenda and outside the mainstream public consciousness.
The Missionary Society of St Columban (or Columbans, as they are popularly known) is one of the most well-known missionary orders.
Founded in Ireland in the early 20th century, Columban priests work in Philippines, China, Peru, Chile, Pakistan and South Korea, among other countries.
According to Michael O’Sullivan at the Columbans’ Irish office, over 100 Irish Columban priests are currently on missions and their work is focused on the three tenets of justice, ecology and dialogue.
He has recently returned from Lima, Peru where he witnessed first-hand the Columbans’ work in a city where a sizable proportion of its over seven million people live in shantytowns and where the congregation has been assisting local community groups respond to poverty, domestic violence environmentalism.
“In all cases our approach is to be a catalyst for local people to come together,” he underlines.
In Manila in the Philippines, he says the Columbans helped establish a grameen bank through which impoverished local people could more easily access finance.
The Columban representative says some may have a notion that missions are an exercise in religious conversion, but that this is not so.
The Columban missionaries take the view that “we are all brothers and sisters”, he says, and want to create a “fairer society” for whatever religious and ethnic groups inhabit it.
O’Sullivan adds that, more generally, a challenge facing missionary organisations is how to build “structures and paths” for the increasing numbers of people interested in becoming lay missionaries.
Lay people presently comprise around 90 of the over 1,700 Irish missionaries currently working around the world, according to the IMU.
SR (DR) MIRIAM Duggan has been accorded a most impressive signature – the ‘Mother Teresa of Africa’ – and the medical missionary was recently honoured for her work combating HIV/Aids in Africa at University College Cork’s (UCC) Alumni Achievement Awards.
Sr Duggan belongs to the Franciscan Missionary Sisters for Africa and is head of the congregation. Recalling her decision to enter, she says she was “attracted to go and work in Africa” and felt “a certain desire to help people”.
Her congregation requested that she undertake medical studies and Sr Duggan graduated from UCC in the disciple, specialising in obstetrics and gynaecology – “a very useful speciality” to have in Africa.
She was sent to Uganda in 1969 and worked at St Francis’ Hospital in Kampala for some 30 years. By the mid-1980s, as “Aids was devastating Uganda” and the hospital “couldn’t cope with all the cases coming in”, Sr Duggan and other activists united to emphasise behavioural change.
The ‘Education for Life’ programme and Youth Alive organisations devised by Sr Duggan have encouraged young people to abstain from sex before marriage and remain faithful in marriage to avoid contracting HIV.
The programme, which is credited as having helped reduce HIV infection rates in Uganda and was adopted by other African countries, was not devised or delivered in a “judgemental way”, underlines the nun, but was about “getting people to look at” their life choices.
In tandem with the position of the Catholic Church on condoms – which remains substantially unchanged today – the programme did not endorse the use of condoms to reduce the risk of HIV/Aids.
According to Sr Duggan’s argument, use of condoms introduces a HIV risk reduction of about 80 per cent whereas abstinence and faithfulness by both partners would completely rule out transmission of HIV.
Back in Ireland, Sr Duggan says the public have continued to support missionary activities, even in these tough economic times. “People have been so generous even in this recession... it keeps us going in a big way. ”
And the medical nun has a simple, no nonsense message on missionary activity: “As a missionary, you go out to empower – to do yourself out of a job. That is what mission is about.”
Spiritans are pioneers in Africa
The Spiritans – formerly the Holy Ghost Fathers – are widely considered pioneers of modern-day missionary work in Africa. Irish members are well remembered as having been at the forefront of humanitarian efforts in south-eastern Nigeria when starvation threatened the native population during the Biafran War in the late 1960s.
Today, about 100 members of the Spiritans’ Irish Province are on overseas mission. These individuals have varied briefs including working with minorities in Pakistan and lobbying in Brussels, for example.
A new direction was taken by the Irish Province during its recent 150th anniversary with the introduction of a mechanism for people to volunteer with an overseas Spiritan mission. Six volunteers have completed training with lay missionary association Viatores Christi and the first two volunteers – one a recent graduate of the Kimmage Development Studies Centre, the other a retired academic with a grown-up family – will undertake development work in Ghana and teaching at the inter-congregational seminary in the Zimbabwe capital Harare, respectively.
Vincentian links with the Far East
THE VINCENTIANS in Ireland have a small number of missionaries in Africa and Asia.
According to Fr Brian Moore, provincial of the community in Ireland, there are two members in Kenya – in parish and seminary ministries – and a member in China focusing on development work with local communities.
The latter destination would not be traditionally associated with Irish missionaries, but according to Fr Moore, the Irish congregation of Vincentians has long established links with the eastern Asia country.
Indeed, in the late 1940s, members came under pressure from the then hard-line communist regime due to their missionary activities.
Fr Moore is a missionary veteran, having spent 16 years in Nigeria in Akwa lbon and Benue states. ”One misses the energy and worship,” he reflects. “The church in Nigeria is very much the people’s church.”
The congregation also has a lay missionary section that has engaged with vulnerable communities in Ethiopia and Nigeria.
