By Fr Patrick Colgan

Fr Pat Colgan, from Northern Ireland, was based in Fiji before being elected to the General Council of the Missionary Society of St Columban. The Council members live in Hong Kong.

Offertory Procession

A Kachin Dance

St Columban’s Day 2014 came early in the hills of Kachin State. Over 2,000 people had already started boarding trains for the three-day journey to Yangon, the capital of Myanmar, for the upcoming national  500th anniversary celebrations of the arrival of the  Catholic faith (initially through Portuguese traders) due to be the held the following weekend. So it was decided to have the local diocesan Jubilee celebration, an ordination to the diaconate, and St Columban’s Day – the saint is patron of Myitkyina Diocese -  all on 15 November.

About 3,000 representatives from many parishes gathered in the early morning at Edin, the large piece of land containing St Luke’s Catechists’ School, founded by Australian Columban Fr Bernard Way, for Mass at 730am. We were led by a loud Kachin marching band to the grotto prepared for the outdoor celebration.

Pat with 2 sisters of Kachin Bishop Paul Grawng

What followed was a mixture of the Roman ordination rite, a Kachin gong ceremony, a colorful offertory dance and some presentations after Communion, including an unusual and poignant item from a group of young men, some in traditional dress and some in paramilitary fatigues, with symbols depicting the Kachin dream of having a homeland under local administration. This potentially risky gesture, given the precarious stage of ongoing negotiations between the Myanmar government and Kachin independence groups, occasioned both loud cheers and quieter tears. (Three days later, the Burmese army dropped a bomb on a KIA training camp in nearby Laiza., killing 23.).

1st Prize to Edin !

After the brief presentaitons, the words of thanks and the bishop’s final blessing, all went either to a dining room, or received a lunch box, with rice (boiled and glutinous ‘sticky’ varieties), pork (ten pigs had been either bought or donated for slaughter), some curries, and for the chief guests – Columbans and Kachin elders - fermented rice wine, poured from bamboo stalks. A number of the elders had been  students of St Columban’s College, before it was nationalised by the military  in the early 1960s, and attributed their careers, in politics, the civil service and for their people’s independence struggle, to the good English taught them by the ‘Irish Fathers’!

Jubilee Celebrations, Banmaw (Bhamo), 2012
The Diocese of Banmaw (Bhamo) was separated from the Diocese of Myitkyina in 2006. Both constitute the area where the Columbans first went in 1936. Thhis video was one of many made on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Columbans.

Edin team with Bishop Francis Daw Tang (left)

We then waited excitedly for the start of the St Columban’s Cup Football final in the Edin ground, the prizes for which we had donated this year.  17 teams had been whittled down to a final between Edin (the hosts) and Yuzana sub-parish. Edin made an impressive outing, winning 3-0, and received their cash prize along with the winners of the badminton, volleyball and caneball competitions. Caneball, known as ‘Chinlone’, is the traditional sport of Myanmar/Burma. These sports tournaments are seen by the diocese as an important plank in their drug rehabilitation and youth ministries. The production and use of pium is unfortunately a major problem in Kachin State, exacerbated by both poverty and the ongoing political conflict.

Men playing caneball in Myanmar [Wikipedia, Thomas Schoch]

It seemed very fitting that two anniversaries, the 1,400th since the death of St Columban in 615, and the 500th year of the presence of the Catholic faith in Myanmar, were celebrated together, in the year when we in the Missionary Society of StColumban missionaries are preparing to reopen our mission among the Kachins. The Columban Sisters returned there some years ago. In my few words at a welcoming ceremony that evening for two newly ordained Korean Columban priests, Fr Carlo Jung and Fr Jehoon Lee, on a short visit to the place where they will be taking up their assignment later this year, I shared that although the Society does not have the big number of young priests that it had before, we are happy to send, ‘from our poverty’, what we have to the Kachin people, knowing that it will once again be a blessing for them and for us . I hope that the four Columban priests resting gently in the nearby cemetery will smile at that, and will guide our new team, Columban lay missionaries and priests, to many more good St Columban’s Days among these determined but gentle people.