Father McGoldrick is a member of the Anglo-Irish Province of the Discalced Carmelite, based inIreland. The Irish-Scottish and Nigerian regions of the province have a website at: www.ocd.ie . We thank them for the use of this article.
…when I’m gone, gone farther away,
To the land where you can no longer hold my hand
By Angelica Escarsa
Angie has been living in Ireland for more than four years now as a Columban lay missionary. Last year she lost two of her loved ones and here she shares with us how she and her family grieved and let go.
2002 was a traumatic year for our family. In August 2001 I was on retreat in Cork, Ireland, where I had gone with the Columban Lay Missionary Program (CLMP) in 1999. I was discerning about the future, as my three-year term was coming to an end. I was about to sleep when my sister Mercy phoned from home in Zambales. She cried as she told me that our sister, Deborah, had lupus. This rare disease is incurable and even led to the death of Ferdinand Marcos, former president of our country.
By Fr Donal O’Dea SSC
My vocation journey was in many ways prosaic and began during my high school years, 1940 to 1945. There was a surge of vocations to the priesthood in Ireland at that time, especially for the missions. You certainly weren’t fighting against the current – and jobs were scarce!
Religious Background
Family-wise, we had strong ties with the clergy and religious. Two of my father’s brothers were priests in our Diocese of Killaloe. A sister of my mother was a nun, working at that time in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland. Her brother had spent a year as a seminarian in the Columbans, a classmate of the late Father Aedan McGrath (Misyon cover story, Jan-Feb 1999.) We also got Far East, the Irish Columban magazine.
By Kris Mina
Malate Church and parish community is in the heart of Manila. It is aware of the growing catastrophe being caused by the destruction of the environment all over the Philippines and all over the world. Part of its response is to set up the farming community called Center for Ecozoic Living and Learning (CELL), an hour’s drive from Manila. There in Cavite, Kris and Roberto Mina have done something wonderful to our eyes – they have created a beautiful world which the parishioners and diverse visitors are invited to experience and learn from. Below, Kris tells us about this extraordinary experiment in promoting God’s Kingdom in a novel and vital way.
We are into organic farming, but we do more than just farming. Our family lives and works in an ecological spirituality center, my husband Roberto and I being staff members. We are on land not our own, with an area of 1.2 hectares, a quarter of which is devoted to receiving visitors who stay for a day or overnight. They usually ask at the beginning of their stay, “Where is the farm?” They look for vast rice fields and rows of vegetables and cash crops, and we have nothing much of that. The kind of farming we do is PERMACULTURE, which encourages food to be grown and forest, animals and flowers.
Based on an article by Declan Fahy The Irish Times
Sierra Leone is a part of the world where children have suffered the worst forms of child exploitation, now a global issue. It had an estimated 6,000 child combatants during the war. A further 5,000 were used as forced labor in rebel camps. The war was fought from 1991 between government forces and armed groups, including the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC)
By Fr Declan McNaughton MSSC
I came from a fairly typical Irish Catholic background and was educated at schools run by nuns, the Christian Brothers as well as a parochial school. When I first became interested in the priesthood in my early teens, it was in my own diocese that I was interested in serving. However, we received the Columban magazine, the Far East, so it was natural that I should begin to read the articles written by Columbans telling about the situations that they were working in. What impressed me was the lack of priests in all of these countries, the plight of the people who were not able to receive the Sacraments regularly and thus was born my missionary vocation.
By Fr Donal Halliden MSSC
On a late summer day in August 1940, while driving my mother to town, my eldest brother, William, already an ordained Columban, suddenly said, “If Donal wants to go to Dalgan he might as well go this year.” Dalgan was the major seminary of the Columbans in Ireland. I was still in high school but I had passed the matriculation examination of the National University of Ireland and on this basis I would be accepted in Dalgan.
Five Vocations in a Family
If my mother was surprised, she did not show it but I do remember her saying, “Anyone who wants to serve the Church cannot be selfish.” My father still had to be consulted and he readily gave his consent even though I was the fourth of his five sons wishing to enter the priesthood, three of us as Columbans and the fourth as a secular for our diocese. A fifth vocation was to come to the family later when our younger sister, Maureen, entered the local convent of the Sisters of Mercy.
By Christina Noble
Christina Noble was a street child in the city of Dublin, Ireland. Her father was alcoholic and she suffered unspeakably. But it is one of the mysteries of life that she has risen from the ashes of her childhood and given her life to helping street children in Vietnam. Vietnam, like the Philippines, has thousands of street children and homeless children. The editor of the Korean version of Misyon, Fr Malachy Smyth, a Columban missionary in Korea, has interviewed Christina and has allowed us to share that interview with you our readers of Misyon.
Edited by Sean Hogan
Father Aedan McGrath, died on December 25th 2000, aged 94, had been a Columban priest for 71 years and was imprisoned by the Chinese for nearly three years in 1951. In his later life he did wonderful work in the Philippines going around all the islands even in his nineties and strengthening the Legion of Mary which was his first love. He also organized many lay missionaries called Incolae who went from the Philippines to Oceania. Up to his mid-nineties he was still playing a good game of golf. (Ed)
He joined the Columban Fathers and was ordained in 1929. Six months later he was sent to Hanyang in China. “I was there just in time for the flood. The Yangtze and the Han Rivers met and overflowed. Millions of people drowned. For six months, there was 16 feet of water in the house where I was staying. We had to live upstairs.”
Following a couple of years around Hanyang, he was sent to T’sein Kiang, where he lived with the Buddhist family. “There were three generations: a grandfather, three sons and twenty grandchildren. They had pickle factory. Life was simple.”
He had 24 missions spread out over a wide area. “I spent three days in each mission, staying in a straw hut. I brought my own blanket. There were no roads or buses. I walked.”
By Niall O’ Brien mssc
Fr. Eddie Allen died at the Columban Headquarters in Batang, Himamaylan on Saturday the 3rd of March at 8:30 in the morning after a long illness in bed. He was 94 years old age and had worked in the Philippines for the last fifty years. I am sad that I was not in Negros and able to attend his funeral, as I was in Ireland getting a medical check up.
There is a little mystery about Eddie. He never learned to drive or at least he never drove here in the Philippines; he never built any churches or organized schools; he lived quite life in the Convento, going out when called but he was ever into initiating any evangelizing projects or social projects. Yet, he was the most popular and sought after Columban priest in Negros. I don’t think the word popular is the right word. He was not interested in popularity, maybe I sold say the “love”. The most loved Columban priest.
