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Nuestra Señorade los Remedios, Our Lady of Remedies

On the Feast of St Joseph the Worker, 1 May, Columban Fr Leo Distor was installed as Parish Priest of Our Lady of Remedies Parish, Malate, Manila, where the Columbans have worked since 1929 having taken the parish at the invitation of Irish-born Archbishop Michael O’Doherty of Manila at a time when the Philippines was desperately short of priests.

Fr Leo Distor

The parish of Malate, one of the oldest in the Philippines, was established in the sixteenth century by Augustinian friars. Fr Leo Distor, who has worked in the formation of Columban seminarians in Chicago and in Quezon City, is from Marbel, Mindanao, where he was ordained in 1996. He is the first Filipino parish priest of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios.

The Maynooth Mission to China was given the go-ahead by the bishops of Ireland on 10 October 1916. Two years later it became the Society of St Columban. The first group of priests went from Ireland to China in 1920. The two considered as co-founders were diocesan priests, Fr Edward Galvin, ordained in 1909, and Fr John Blowick, ordained in in 1913. Father Galvin had already spent some years in China with other Irish diocesan priests while Father Blowick was a professor of theology at St Patrick’s, Maynooth, the national seminary in Ireland.

The fact that the vast majority of those who joined the fledgling movement were either seminarians in Maynooth or had graduated from there was the reason for the name ‘Maynooth Mission to China’. For many years that, or ‘Maynooth Mission’ was the name by which the Columbans were best known in Ireland.

It took some persuasion on the part of Archbishop O’Doherty to get Columbans to come to the Philippines, as we had been founded to work in China. But God had other plans.

Malate Church

In Peace by Peace in this issue you can read an extract from the writings of a previous Columban Parish Priest of Malate, Fr John Henaghan from Ireland, killed by the Japanese during the Battle of Manila in February 1945.

Under the title ‘Our Lady of Remedies’ Mary is the patroness of childbirth. May she obtain abundant blessings for the new parish priest and the parishioners of Malate as a new reality is born among them.

Fr John Leydon blesses pets in Malate Church on the Feast of St Francis of Assisi