A Life Of Service To The Filipino People

By: Father Donal O'Hanlon SSC

My First Holy Communion at the age of seven was one of the most important experiences of my life. After coming home from the church that day, my mother sent me out to the farm to call the workmen for lunch. I felt Jesus physically present to me. I stopped and told him that I would always do his will. My father noticed my prayerlife and encouraged me to be a priest. I responded negatively. He died when I was 11 years old. His death had a profound influence on me. The most traumatic experience of my life was the sudden death of my mother five years later. At that time the call to priesthood was so insistent that I made a decision to be a priest and never questioned it. My first three years as a seminarian for my home Diocese of Cloyne were spent in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, Ireland’s national seminary. Then I decided to join the Columbans and spent the next five years at their seminary in Dalgan Park where I was ordained a priest by Bishop Patrick Cleary on 21 December 1959. Bishop Cleary had been a professor in Maynooth but joined the Columbans in 1918, the year the Society was formally established. He later became Bishop of Nancheng, China, but was expelled in 1952.

Now the real adventure started – mission work. After a long land and sea voyage I finally arrived in Ozamis City, Philippines, in November 1960 and started the tedious and essential work of learning a new culture and language. The course lasted for six months but in a very real sense continued throughout the remaining five years of my first term on mission.

In 1967 I became parish priest of Dimataling, a remote rural area, four hours by sea from Pagadian City. At the time there were no roads leading to it. It had 40,000 Catholics with 72 villages and two priests. This is where I believe I made the greatest contribution to pastoral work in the Philippines.

I set out to maximize lay participation. I asked for two male leaders from each of the three strongest Catholic communities to sit down for a week with me while we brainstormed on what pastoral programs we should adopt. We prayed for guidance and decided to start a Sunday Prayer Service, Katilingbanong Pag-ampo, in each community. The experiment was successful. After six months we requested 60 male leaders from 30 communities to attend a seminar where they were trained to conduct the Katilingbanong Pag-ampo. This was mainly successful. Finally the program was expanded to include all 72 communities.

But empowering people demands much training in skills and all the male leaders were invited for a five-day training seminar. This became an annual event. Then the parish was divided into six zones and I spent a full day each month with the leaders of each zone. Then two female leaders and two youth leaders were chosen by each community. Each group, male, female and youth, had their own individual monthly meeting at zone level. The women took care of the catechetical instruction in the local public schools and the youth developed their own programs. Each community was called a Basic Christian Community. Four years into the program, the Redemptorists were invited to give a parish mission which was successful because of the presence of trained leaders in each village. Bishop Jesus Y. Varela, then auxiliary of the Archdiocese of Zamboanga, visited and administered the sacrament of confirmation to 4,000 in the six zones.

A very important event, the first Mindanao-Sulu Pastoral Conference, took place in Davao in 1972, called by Archbishop Lino R. Gonzaga of Zamboanga, attended by all the bishops and selected priests and lay people. At this time a Passionist Father had also developed Basic Christian Communities (BCCs) in the then Prelature of Marbel and the Maryknoll Missionaries a highly developed program in the Prelature of Tagum. The BCC Program was adopted by the First Mindanao-Sulu Pastoral Conference as a basic pastoral plan for the whole of Mindanao-Sulu. I had the joy of adapting the same program in two subsequent parishes, Aurora, Diocese of Pagadian (1972-1977) and Margosatubig, Prelature of Ipil (1984-1988).

From 1978 to 1982 I worked at the Filipino Chaplaincy in London, England. This was a period of great turmoil as about 300 Filipinos were picked up for deportation. After an intensive campaign in the media only a few were actually sent home. Also, a constant stream of Filipinos left abusive employers and came to the chaplaincy for protection. Eventually as many as 4,000 escaped. The status of most of these was subsequently regularized under Prime Minister Tony Blair. For this magnificent achievement, credit is mainly due to Columban Father Aodh O’Halpin and Sr Margaret Healy, a St Louis Sister, both working with KALAYAAN, Campaign for Foreign Domestic Workers. Father Aodh worked in Mindanao for many years and his older brother Father Colm, also a Columban, is buried in Kabankalan City, Negros Occidental.

Working in Mission Awareness from 1989 to 2007 in the Columban Northern District of the Philippines was a time of great joy for me. Based in Manila, I made friends in Catholic schools and parishes from Aparri in the north to Maasin, Dumaguete and Iloilo in the south. It gave me much satisfaction to see Misyon subscriptions grow to the present 36,000 or so nationwide. Working with Columban Sister Patria N. Daomilas, a native of Misamis Occidental and totally committed to Misyon as a vehicle of mission awareness, was a great source of inspiration.

During this period I was instrumental in setting up two powerful apostolic groups. One was ‘Inter- Congregational and Lay Mission Awareness’ (ICALMA), a dedicated group of priests, sisters and lay people who worked with me for five years in Manila giving seminars to teachers, mainly in public and private schools with no Church affiliation. The topic that ran longest was ‘Life in a Broken World’. The group stopped when most of the facilitators were assigned to positions which didn’t leave them free to volunteer.

Since 1992 Columban Companions in Mission (CCIM), has been another group of dedicated lay people who have made a substantial commitment to mission. They have supervised and managed the sale of Misyon in more than 150 churches in Manila and surrounding dioceses over the past ten years where Columban priests spoke on Mission Awareness and Misyon. They also developed an outreach program to the poor that includes the supervision of the education of 30 slum children and catechetical instruction of abandoned and sexually abused children of Virlanie Foundation, Inc (VFI). Monthly visitation of prisoners in Muntinlupa, the National Penitentiary, has been a regular part of their work. Ten vocations to a full-time commitment have come from the group – two priests, four sisters and four Columban Lay Missionaries.

From the very beginning of my priestly ministry in the Philippines, preferential preference for the poor has been basic to my priesthood. This blossomed through the BCCs in three parishes and through the outreach programs of the CICMs in Manila and through my personal contacts over 47 years. The development of talents, leading to more skills and better opportunities of getting employment, has always been my way of acting but there are times when it is difficult to refuse a handout when faced with sheer and utter misery.

The years from 1960 to 2008 have been for me a period of great joy and total commitment to the Filipino people. If given the chance to live my life over again, I would not change anything. I want to acknowledge all the people along the way who have made my life of service to the Filipino people possible and fruitful.