Good-Bye good men and women

Good-Bye good men and women

Many Irish people grew up with ‘Africa’ magazine as the only glossy publication in the house. It used to be said that the spittle-wetted cover of ‘The Sacred Heart Messenger’ was used in times of scarcity as a source of alternative lipstick but it was no competitor to ‘Africa’ or to ‘The Far East’ for coverage of exotic places and happenings. The latter magazine is the publication of the Columban Fathers. Africa did not seem quite as far off as the ‘Far’ east and though we were not familiar with fellow Africans or with their various cultures, we felt allied to them somehow through the work and stories of our missionaries and through our regular penny-drops into the mite-box at school. ‘Darkest’ Africa was a whole new world and we were to the forefront in developing it.

Legions of Irish sisters, priests and brothers offered their lives in the service of the ‘missions’ up to and during the middle decades of the last century. It was an option for every educated and serious young Catholic at the time. Little Ireland was taking on the world, determined to share its faith and its enthusiasm for spreading that faith. We even took on the conversion of colossal China, through the early work of the Columban Fathers, while they were still known as ‘The Maynooth Mission to China’.

I took a walk today through the demesne of the Saint Patrick’s Missionary Society, as the Kiltegan priests are formally known. Its Irish headquarters or mother-house is located in a very beautiful, secluded rural setting in County Wicklow, near the eponymous village of Kiltegan. My guide told me that it was once the home of a very rich Member of Parliament. It later passed into the hands of a wealthy tea-merchant from Newry, John Hughes, who donated it to the fledgling Society. It is currently a busy complex of buildings from which the Society is administered and to which some elderly missionaries return.

My mission to Kiltegan was to bring some visitors from Africa; two Nigerian priests who had trained or worked alongside the now ailing Missionary Father whom we proposed to visit. His illness has made him obviously weak yet he was strong enough to engage us in a long discussion on the state of the church and the world, to listen to the latest news from Nigeria and to guide us around the complex.

We began in the dining area where a table had been thoughtfully marked ‘Reserved’ for us. The buildings in this area are light-filled, airy and spacious but the apparatus of institutional life somehow invades. We drank soup from metal soup-dishes and scraped butter from our individually wrapped butter-pieces onto our spuds. Memories of past institutions and of washed-up canteen-food flooded in.

Afterwards we took a walk to the community graveyard. It is a simple area with rows of military-style, small crosses marking the graves of fallen comrades. I joked about graveyards being full of ‘indispensable’ people but I could not dispel the chill that pervades cemeteries, even on a summer afternoon. My guide wanted to introduce me to each of the characters interred in their same-size plots and to the life-stories that brought their paths to cross in far-flung places. Silently I wondered what it must be like to walk a graveyard that awaits you or to be living on borrowed time. It used to be said that an unexpected shiver was the result of someone walking on your prospective grave. I shivered for my friend as we passed the next available plot.

Along the way we met other people whom we knew or with whom we had mutual acquaintances. Ireland is a land of connectedness and it is that inter-relationship of peoples that is most comforting to return to. My friend knew that he would not be returning to the active life that he once knew or to the culture in which he had immersed himself in Africa. Even parting with him after a short stay became poignant. There was an inevitable air of finality about our leave-taking. How do you say goodbye to a man who is slowly saying goodbye to the world?

There is the added sadness for these men in the student-empty seminary buildings that once buzzed with activity and idealistic young life. The centre of activity has moved continent now and the Society has taken the decision to admit African students. A few have been ordained already and there are many in the training process. The spirit has blown ‘where it wills’ and the Irish valleys bear no vocational fruit these days. The harvest is elsewhere and the labourers are no longer overwhelmingly European. Irish missionaries, with the influence and goodwill that they generated for us across the globe are a disappearing brand. The loss is our